[[link removed]]

GENZ AND KAMALA HARRIS: IS THE MEET-CUTE ENOUGH?  
[[link removed]]


 

Lauren Gambino
October 12, 2024
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ They call themselves ‘the coconut army’ and are out in droves
to reach young people aged 18-29. Can they turn activism into votes? _


,

 

It was the height of “brat summer
[[link removed]]”.
Kamala Harris was a “femininomenon
[[link removed]]”,
electrifying a high-stakes presidential race that many of the
country’s youngest voters had been dreading: a rematch between the
two oldest candidates in American history.

Chartreuse-blocked memes and coconut emojis filled
[[link removed]] social
media feeds. The tidal wave of young “Kamalove
[[link removed]]”
sparked a rush of small-dollar donations and volunteer sign-ups for
her days-old campaign. For an extremely online generation of young
Democrats, the vibes were _so_ good.

On the ground in St Louis, a cadre of young progressives were
gathering for an entirely different election – one with virtually no
bearing on the balance of power in Washington, but one they believed
mattered deeply. There in Missouri’s first congressional district,
representative Cori Bush was fighting for her political survival
[[link removed]].

Many of the twentysomethings had traveled from out of state,
sacrificing summer jobs and sleeping on yoga mats to campaign for Bush
in the sticky August heat. “We just stopped our lives and went to St
Louis,” said John Paul Mejia, a 22-year-old student and climate
activist.

Mejia was there as part of Protect Our Power (Pop), a youth coalition
that came together earlier this year for what he described as a
“David-and-Goliath” mission to defend leftwing members of Congress
against a well-funded effort
[[link removed]] to
unseat them.

To them, Bush, the nurse turned racial justice activist, was one of
the few elected leaders who shared their sense of urgency
[[link removed]] about
everything from the country’s affordability crisis to safeguarding
abortion access.

As a newly elected member of Congress, Bush had slept on the steps of
the US Capitol to protest against the expiration of a federal eviction
moratorium. The action paid off: the Biden administration extended the
pause. In warning about the threat to reproductive rights,
Bush testified
[[link removed]] before a
House panel that she had had an abortion at 18 after becoming pregnant
by rape. In 2023, she emerged as one of the strongest critics of
Israel’s war in Gaza, a stance that reflected a groundswell
of youth dissent
[[link removed]] but
ultimately imperiled her congressional career.

“There’s pretty much nobody else, even members of Congress who are
closer to our age, in some instances, who actually represent what our
generation cares about,” Vincent Vertuccio, a 21-year-old college
student and an activist with Pop, said of the progressive Squad
members. “If we lose these people, even one or two, it’s a direct
diminishment of our power.”

On the morning of the election, as the group made a final push to get
out the vote, news broke
[[link removed]] that
Harris, to their delight, had chosen the progressive midwestern
governor
[[link removed]] Tim
Walz as her running mate. From the trenches of a hard-fought campaign,
they spared a moment to celebrate what felt like a win.

That night, Bush lost
[[link removed]] her
re-election bid in a primary contest decided by fewer
[[link removed]] than
7,000 votes.

The defeat stung. Pop had run a scrappy campaign: its volunteers
collectively placed 120,000 phone calls and knocked on more than
20,000 doors. But they were up against a torrent of outside spending,
primarily by pro-Israel groups, that transformed the race into one of
the most
[[link removed]] expensive
House primaries in US history.

“People are feeling the issues really hard, but I don’t think that
they’re feeling people fighting for them equally as hard,” Mejia
reflected afterward. “That worries me, especially at a time when
we’re also facing a crisis of democracy.”

GenZ poised to play decisive role?

In interviews with dozens of activists, organizers and candidates
working to build youth political power on the left, a portrait emerged
of a generation fed up with the status quo in Washington but eager to
flex its electoral might this cycle. Many are genuinely enthusiastic
[[link removed]] about
the prospect of a Harris presidency. Others hope she will be a xxxxxx
against Republican extremism, if not the transformational figure they
crave.

With the presidential candidates offering sharply contrasting visions
for the economy, abortion, climate change, foreign policy and
democracy itself, there is an understanding among young liberals that
the outcome could have profound, generational implications for the
country – and the planet.

“We are going to be the margin of victory,” said Marianna Pecora,
the 20-year-old communications director of Voters of Tomorrow
[[link removed]], a gen Z-led group working to
mobilize first-time voters and students. As the race moves into its
final stretch, her closing pitch is direct: “Don’t let this
election happen to you.”

Approximately 41 million members of gen Z will be eligible to vote
[[link removed]] in
November, including millions who were too young to vote in the 2020
election. Their participation could be decisive: the presidential
contest is deadlocked, probably hinging on tens of thousands of votes
in a handful of swing states, and the battle for control of Congress
is as close as ever.

Yet no generation is a political monolith, and gen Z –
the left-leaning
[[link removed]],
racially diverse cohort born between the late 1990s and early 2010s
– is no exception. Millions of young adults identify
as conservative
[[link removed]], and a
widening youth gender gap has emerged as a central
[[link removed]] political
fault line.

Still, experts say this generation face an unprecedented set of
challenges – from the economic to the existential – that have
eroded their faith in American institutions
[[link removed]] and
fueled a deepening sense of “fatalism”
[[link removed]] about
their own futures and the fate of the country. “We weren’t part of
the structures and the systems that created this massive situation but
now it’s really on us to fix it,” said Vertuccio, who has a tattoo
that reads, “organizing works”.

Gen Z has lived through tumultuous times, from the worst recession
since the Great Depression, which saw millions of American families
lose their homes, jobs and savings with almost no consequence for
those who caused it, to a pandemic that closed their schools and their
polarized communities.

They’ve experienced political whiplash when the country that twice
elected Barack Obama chose Trump as his successor. In 2020, they
turned out in force
[[link removed]] to
defeat Donald Trump, only to witness the 45th president refuse to
concede and his far-right allies attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s
victory by force.

A growing body of research suggests
[[link removed]] that
rising economic inequality, climate change and technological
advancements are taking a toll on young people’s mental health,
leading to high levels of anxiety
[[link removed]] and loneliness
[[link removed]].
A recent NBC News poll 
[[link removed]]of
gen Z adults found that nearly half expect life for their generation
to be “worse than previous generations”.

“There’s a feeling of vulnerability and isolation – that
there’s no one really representing their interests, particularly
politically,” said Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on
American Life at the American Enterprise Institute
[[link removed]] (AEI). “Where you have a
lot of young women becoming more active in politics because of that,
particularly progressive women, a lot of men are just withdrawing
completely, whether it’s dating, politics or work.”

Surveys indicate that both young men and young women favor Harris over
Trump. But the youth gender gap is striking. In a youth poll
[[link removed]] released
by Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, Harris led Trump
by 47 percentage points among young women, compared with 17 percentage
points among young men.

The gulf-wide – and growing – divide reflects a dynamic that is
shaping the 2024 election and could have lasting implications for both
political parties: young women have become more liberal
[[link removed]],
as young men drift away
[[link removed]] from
the Democratic party.

There is virtually no doubt that Harris will win more young voters
than Trump in November, but the margin will matter greatly.

For decades, Democrats have dominated the youth vote, with voters aged
18 to 29 favoring Biden by 24 percentage points in 2020, according
to Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic
Learning and Engagement (Circle)
[[link removed]]. While young people
have historically voted at lower rates than older adults, that trend
may be starting to change.
[[link removed]]

Youth voter turnout rose to 50% in 2020, probably a modern record
[[link removed]] and
a remarkable 11-point increase
[[link removed]] from the 2016
presidential election, according to a Circle analysis. Young voters of
color, it found, played a particularly “instrumental
[[link removed]]” role in Biden’s
victories in closely contested battlegrounds such as Georgia,
Pennsylvania and Arizona.

Two years later, young people again voted at high levels
[[link removed]] during the
congressional midterms. Their fury over the supreme court’s decision
to overturn Roe v Wade was credited
[[link removed]] with
helping Democrats defy historical expectations.

Young voters are once again poised to play a potentially decisive role
this election, said Melissa Deckman, CEO of Public Religion Research
Institute (PRRI) and author of the forthcoming book The Politics of
Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy
[[link removed]].

“When there’s an issue that gen Z is passionate about,” she
said, “they’re willing to engage, despite – or maybe because of
– the fact that institutions aren’t necessarily addressing their
concerns.”

From youth activism to youth votes

For a segment of gen Z, youth activism has practically become a rite
of passage.

Rather than despair, many young people mobilized in response to the
election of Trump, to school shootings that killed classmates, to the
climate crisis, which they believe too many of their leaders still
ignore, episodes of police brutality captured on video, the rising
tide of post-pandemic book bans and anti-LGBTQ+ laws, a bloody Middle
East war playing out in real time on their phones, and the loss of
federal abortion protections that has left young women with fewer
rights than their grandmothers.

“Perhaps the most important, consistent finding over 25 years of
analyzing young voters – the most significant predictor of youth
participation – is that young people participate when they can see a
tangible difference in the process,” said John Della Volpe, director
of polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and the author
of Fight: How Gen Z Is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save
America [[link removed]].

This generation of activists, the first born after the release of the
smartphone, blends traditional methods of activism – like old-school
marches and campus protests – with modern digital strategies such as
TikTok trolls
[[link removed]] and internet
memes
[[link removed]].
But even more, what makes their activism unique, researchers say, is
the way they have translated youth protest into youth voter
participation.

“When the oldest members of gen Z turned voting age, they carried
those values forward and voted at rates that previous generations have
not even touched,” Della Volpe said.

Despite their low confidence in American institutions, Della Volpe
said gen Z, including young men
[[link removed]], tend to
be pro-government
[[link removed]].
As a cohort, they are more likely than older Americans to say that the
federal government should – and must – do more to address the
country’s problems.

Some young people, like Ben Braver, a 22-year-old public school
teacher near Tampa, Florida, aren’t waiting for their elected elders
to act.

Braver, who shares earnest explainer videos
[[link removed]] on TikTok making the case for
progressive policies, is running for a seat in the Florida state
senate. He decided to challenge his Republican opponent, the incumbent
state senator, after he voted
[[link removed]] for Florida’s
six-week abortion ban
[[link removed].] that
took effect earlier this year.

“We can’t afford to wait until 2040, when we’re already the
majority. We have to start now,” Braver said. “We need people
writing policy that they’ll have to live under.”

Building power in a right-leaning structure

Santiago Mayer emigrated from Mexico to the US as a teenager in 2017,
arriving in the heady months after Trump took office.

At his new high school in southern California, he was shocked to learn
that many of his classmates were mostly tuned out. Trump, who ran for
president on a fiercely anti-immigrant platform, had just implemented
a travel ban targeting predominantly Muslim countries and was pushing
Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“If young people had voted in 2016, we might have been able to avoid
the Trump administration,” Mayer, now 22, observed.

At the time, the teen turned to “pre-Elon” Twitter. His unfiltered
anti-Trump musings gathered a following and in 2019, his handle,
Voters of Tomorrow, graduated from a Twitter account to an official
political engagement organization “for gen Z, by gen Z” – just
in time to help drive Trump from office. “They pissed off the wrong
generation,” emerged as a rallying cry.

Mayer’s team became enthusiastic boosters of the Biden
administration. They worked to translate the president’s sprawling,
sometimes wonky, achievements on climate, gun control and student loan
debt for a generation increasingly turns to social media
[[link removed]] for
its news.

But over the course of Biden’s term, many young people grew
disenchanted with the 81-year-old president, harboring reservations
about his foreign policy
[[link removed]] and age
[[link removed]].

“Young people want to vote for someone who’s going to shake the
system,” Link Lauren, a young, right-leaning TikTok influencer who
worked on Robert F Kennedy’s independent presidential campaign, said
in an interview this summer. “They want disruption.”

Early polls showed Trump performing far better
[[link removed]] with
this voting bloc than he had in 2020 and, in some
[[link removed]] cases,
drawing even with – or doing better than – Biden. The numbers sent
shockwaves through the Democratic party. Was gen Z turning Maga?

Analysts and organizers, Mayer included, were skeptical. Gen Z, after
all, was more socially liberal
[[link removed]], less
religious
[[link removed]],
more educated and more likely to identify as LGBTQ+
[[link removed]] than
previous generations. Rather, they saw the numbers as a pulse check:
young people were frustrated by the state of the post-pandemic
economy, by the slow pace of change in Washington and, yes, by the
prospect of a contest between the same (very) old candidates who had
dominated much of gen Z’s political memory.

Mayer identified a deeper tension: a left-leaning generation was
trying to build power within a political system that seemed to
structurally
[[link removed]] bend
rightward.

With Biden as president, there had been an expectation that he would
guard against Republican threats to the environment, abortion access,
voting rights and gun control. But then the most conservative supreme
court in history stepped in and eroded those protections while raising
the possibility that other rights could be next.

Gerrymandering has made the US House less competitive
[[link removed]],
harder to govern and more polarized
[[link removed]] while
an arcane Senate rule known as the filibuster stands in the way of
most major legislation. Beyond Washington, the country is increasingly
cracked into red states and blue states with dramatically different
laws governing abortion access, LGBTQ+ protections and union
membership.

“When you see kids gunned down in schools, then the supreme court
says domestic abusers can have guns and your abortion rights are gone,
it creates a sense of hopelessness,” Mayer said. “It feels like
the government is working against you.”

The coconut army

The mood among young Democrats
[[link removed]] changed entirely on
21 July, when the octogenarian president exited the race and threw his
support behind Harris, who, at 59, seemed positively youthful by
comparison.

Marion Smart, a 21-year-old student organizer with Voters of
Tomorrow’s Georgia chapter, was preparing to welcome hundreds of
liberal students and activists to the group’s Year of Youth summit
in Atlanta when it happened.

Summit-goers descended on Atlanta’s Loudermilk center days later,
chugging boxes of coconut water as they dashed between a panel on
running for office as a member of gen Z and a training led by a panda
head-wearing digital organizer
[[link removed]].

Harris’s nascent campaign sent an envoy, Eve Levenson, the national
youth engagement director, and the vice-president herself took time in
the whirlwind of her elevation to record a pre-taped message, in which
she vowed to work for their vote.

In response, they pledged to turn out the youth vote. “We’re all
part of the coconut army and we’re gonna take this election by
storm,” Smart said.

Ashleigh Ewald, the group’s Georgia state director, felt the
political ground shift immediately. She had toiled for months on
college campuses around the state, trying to convince her discontented
peers to get involved in the November election. Now they were seeking
her out, asking how they could help.

“Because of Kamala Harris
[[link removed]], that pessimism
turned into enthusiasm,” the 22-year-old said.

Gen z voters have flocked to the vice-president, helping to drive up
her popularity
[[link removed]].But
Harris’s ground-breaking candidacy – she would be the first woman
to serve as president of the United States – has particularly
energized young women. After she entered the race, youth voter
registration among young women rose sharply – a trend one Democratic
data analyst dubbed the “Harris effect.”
[[link removed]]

Nearly six in 10 women under age 30 view her potential presidency as a
“very important
[[link removed]]”
milestone in American political history, according to a national
survey by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life. The sentiment is
notably more pronounced for younger women than it is for older women
and significantly more than for younger men.

Leaving a “contingency planning” workshop for a potential Trump
victory, Amini Bonane said the session had been a sobering reminder of
the stakes this election. It was part of the reason Bonane, a
29-year-old community organizer who came to the US as a refugee from
the Democratic Republic of Congo, decided to run for a seat on the
city council [[link removed]] in her home town of
Fairfax, Virginia. With Harris as the nominee, she has felt a surge of
energy in her own race.

“I’m just so excited and – hello! – I’ll be on the same
ballot as,” she paused, shaking her hands in excitement, “possibly
the first Black woman Potus. That is just so motivating for me.”

Courting genZ

The online hype that followed Harris’s sudden emergence was not only
good for the vibes. It helped reset the entire political narrative
around her, propelling the once-unpopular vice president into what her
campaign playfully coined its “Kamala era”.

Conservative media outlets had long amplified Harris’s quirky
[[link removed]] turns
of phrase –derided as “word salads” – and her laugh
[[link removed]] to
portray her as unserious. Young supporters reinterpreted those same
clips as charming and authentic – a powerful currency in
contemporary politics.

Harris’s campaign has nodded back, embracing the viral trends on her
gen Z-run TikTok, @kamalahq. It eclipses Trump’s personal account,
@realdonaldtrump, in engagement, though he has substantially more
followers. During a youth voter drive last month, Harris said young
voters were part of the reason she was so optimistic about the future.

“Your generation is killing it,” she said on a call with gen Z
organizers. “You’re brilliant. You care. You’re impatient in
every incredible, good way.”

To offset Harris’s steep advantage with young women, Trump has
been heavily courting
[[link removed]] gen
Z’s “bro
[[link removed]]”
vote with amped up displays of masculinity. He has turned up at
Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts and a college fraternity house
[[link removed]].
Wrestler Hulk Hogan tore off his shirt during a speech at the
Republican convention in which he praised Trump as a “gladiator
[[link removed]]”.

The former president has appeared on shows with the controversial
YouTuber Logan Paul
[[link removed]] and
video game streamer Adin Ross
[[link removed]],
both of whom attract sizable followings of gen Z men. The Nelk Boys, a
group of online content creators and pranksters, are helping too,
by spearheading [[link removed]] a voter registration
initiative on Trump’s behalf. His team is also relying on Turning
Point Action, the political advocacy wing of the far-right youth
organization Turning Point USA, to drive out young conservatives.

The Harris campaign and allied youth groups, meanwhile,
are aggressively targeting
[[link removed]] college
students – nearly two-thirds of whom voted in 2020
[[link removed]]. As part of the
push, Harris and Walz launched
[[link removed]] a
homecoming tour of historically Black colleges and universities,
aiming to reach young Black students across the battleground states.

Democratic organizers say Harris has made concerted policy appeals to
young people, particularly on housing and abortion, which she
highlighted in a recent appearance on the Call Her Daddy
[[link removed]] podcast
that is popular with gen Z women.Harris has also staked out support
for eliminating the filibuster 
[[link removed]]to
codify abortion rightsas well as legalizing recreational marijuana
[[link removed]].

Still, her pivot to the ideological center since becoming the
Democratic nominee has left some young progressives disappointed
[[link removed]].
On the campaign trail, Harris frequently promotes her support for
fracking [[link removed]] – a
reversal from her 2019 presidential run when she embraced a ban. She
has also adopted an increasingly hardline approach to illegal
immigration
[[link removed]] and
resisted calls to endorse an arms embargo on Israel, whose devastating
campaign in Gaza has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians.

“Young people right now, our generation in general, are very, very
clear-eyed on the fact that Donald Trump cannot return to the White
House in November,” said Mejia, the progressive activist with Pop.
“The question presented to the Democratic party is: how much does it
want to invite young people into its coalition in order to defeat
Donald Trump?”

‘Something our generation hasn’t seen yet’

In the weeks since Harris entered the presidential race, she has
steadily recaptured lost ground, multiplying Biden’s lead among
young voters.

The Harvard Youth Poll
[[link removed]] showed
Harris with a commanding 32-point lead over Trump among likely voters
aged 18 to 29. Young Democrats expressed a heightened commitment to
voting this November, with significantly more “definitely”
planning to cast a ballot compared with their Republican counterparts.
Yet the overall share of young Americans who said they definitely
planned to cast a ballot this year was 56%, down slightly from 63% at
this point in 2020
[[link removed]].

“Young people are right to be cynical and I don’t expect one
candidate to change that,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the
president of NextGen America [[link removed]], one of the
largest youth-voting groups in the country. “That happens over time
by government responding.”

But the first step is electing leaders who listen to young people,
Tzintzún Ramirez said, arguing that Harris was the only presidential
candidate offering solutions to their concerns on the economy and
abortion rights [[link removed]].
There are signs young people increasingly agree. A recent New York
Times and Siena College
[[link removed]] poll
found that voters under age 30 were significantly more likely than
older voters to believe that Harris “cares about people like you”
and to see her as a representative of “change”. They were also
more inclined to view Harris as a “strong leader” and to describe
her as “fun”.

Though the glow of “brat summer” has faded with the season,
organizers say they have been able to convert that energy into lasting
on-the-ground efforts to help turn out the vote. Over the next few
weeks, youth voter engagement groups will be out in force, knocking on
doors, registering students, and making pledges – and plans
[[link removed]] – to vote. In true gen Z
fashion, youth organizers are also using memes and friendship
bracelets
[[link removed]] to
drive young people to the polls.

In the days ahead, Pecora of Voters of Tomorrow will cast her first
vote for president, a mail-in ballot for Harris. It will be counted in
California, hardly a presidential battleground but, poignantly, the
vice-president’s home state.

Pecora was just 13 in 2016, when Hillary Clinton conceded the election
to Trump. She was in high school, taking classes by Zoom, during the
depths of the coronavirus pandemic when Biden won four years later.
Then came the nightmarish Capitol riot on January 6, when Trump’s
supporters tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. “There has
yet to be a presidential cycle in my lifetime when democracy wasn’t
on the line,” she said.

Yet the 20-year-old is allowing herself to be hopeful, even as her
team pours over numbers that tell the same story – that the race
will be nail-bitingly close. Voters of Tomorrow says its on track to
reach its ambitious goal
[[link removed]] of 15 million
direct contacts in hopes, Pecora said, of electing a leader who
recognizes the “power and agency” of young people.

“We see an option that tells us that politics can be something
different,” she said. “It can be more hopeful, more productive,
more caring and empathetic and loving. And that’s something that our
generation hasn’t really seen yet.”

* GenZ
[[link removed]]
* Kamala Harris
[[link removed]]
* elections
[[link removed]]
* youth vote
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]