People know of the gubernatorial race between the “nerd” and the politician. We regularly hear that Snyder is leading the polls. And that’s just about it. It really isn’t clear what it is they plan on doing to fix Michigan’s woes.

More so, it seems no one really cares either way. It’s like the election is meaningless. Perhaps that is why zoology junior Sarah Allan isn’t fully in the know.

“I haven’t really looked into any of the (gubernatorial) candidates,” Allan said. “My dad wants me to vote for one of the candidates, but I don’t remember who it is.”

It might help if the candidates took time to share their views with us. Besides the debate that stemmed from an unexpected visit from Bernero at a town hall meeting Snyder was conducting, there hasn’t been much effort by either candidate to connect with the public.

During the 2008 election, it seemed like people were constantly watching the news, researching candidates, paying attention to the electoral debates, the CBS interviews, the Facebook polls and whatever else had to do with the presidential election.

Granted, Michigan’s election might not affect the entire country, but it has an effect on the state we live in. In that sense, this election is as important as the presidential election because, at a fundamental level, this state is falling apart. And as students, we stand to inherit it all. We need to vote.

Apparently, there needs to be something akin to the grass roots movement that was so effective in attracting students for the 2008 election.
If nothing else, that election proved young voters are capable of caring about who is in office.

Thankfully, MSU has put forth its own effort, with ASMSU’s iVote campaign and the combined efforts from the Asian Pacific American Student Organization, or APASO, and the Asian and Pacific Islander American, or APIA, registering students to vote in the past few weeks.

Good for us. But perhaps things would go even better if a candidate dropped by to talk to us.

Snyder campaigns as the Ann Arbor businessman and Bernero as the mayor of Lansing. It would be great strategy if they stopped at MSU or the University of Michigan, yet that hasn’t happened.

If President Barack Obama can make an effort to drop by while campaigning for president, the gubernatorial candidates can too.

Perhaps it is this apathy toward us that feeds our general numbness, but no one should be numb to what happens to the state of Michigan next.

It’s been that way for too long.