The long road which we’ve come to know as the campaign trail is reaching its final stretch and it can’t come soon enough. As the ads fill every commercial break and continue a practice of mudslinging back and forth from candidate to candidate, there happens to have been a debate this week which may have told us more about the political nominees than their ads can.

Linda McMahon and Richard Blumenthal, just to name a few, have repeatedly shown the state and, much to their dismay, our neighboring states, they are both fully versed in the art of creating a negative ad campaign. Drawing upon character flaws is nothing new in the world of politics, but this year it’s been taken to a new level.

As a voting body in this state, we need to pay close attention to who we are voting for and why we are voting for them. If your opinion has changed several times during this campaign season, ask yourself why this has happened. Was there something substantive that made you change your opinion or was it the latest slander you saw last night during late night talk shows?

Everyone should want to be an informed voter, but only the individual can control that. Paying attention to the debates is only scraping the surface as to what you can do to better educate yourself on the candidates. While these programs will bring up many issues, some will be neglected and some may not pertain to you at all.

Not every choice makes sense for every voter, but that’s what makes voting a very personal thing. What issues matter to you should influence who you are voting for. As a CCSU student, who will make your future better? The decisions we are making now will affect generations to come and yet many take that very lightly.

There’s been a trend of record-low voter turnouts at the polls, but yet we’re in the middle of several economic and political crises in this state. The need for a large voter turnout is at an all-time high. Just because many have become apathetic to their local and state elections, doesn’t mean that everyone has to or should.

Part of the problem is a lack of pressure from the media to force the candidates to talk about the issues and to stop just trying to make the other look bad. If the general public isn’t exposed to the issues on the front pages and you have to look deep into a paper or website to find out what they’ve said, then these issues aren’t going to take center stage. What used to be a system of checks and balances between the truth and what has been said is no longer in place. The debates would matter much more than they do now and the facts would be brought to light by investigative journalists.

That said, there is still a lot to vote for this November. As students, we have different priorities than the rest of the voting public. It’s important to pay attention to this final month of campaigning, as negative attack ads will flash by on TV screens all across the street. It’ll be even more important to find out if those ads hold the weight they claim to.