“Students know little to nothing about local and state government,” Brendan Cushing says in this week’s podcast. For example, the students his GenVote@UAlbany team surveyed didn’t know who the mayor of Albany was, or how a bill becomes law. Cushing termed this “rather frightening.” He thinks party polarization has turned students off, and also the lack of civics classes in public schools has left students uneducated. Cushing believes, too, that youth are largely ignored by politicians, which he concedes may be because so few vote — leading to a vicious cycle. UAlbany has about 24,000 undergraduates, and just 57 voted in the 2018 elections, he said