Just before Joe Biden dropped out of the Presidential race, polls showed a head-spinning turn in the youth electorate. Since the Obama years, voters under the age of thirty had been a solid, enthusiastic part of the Democratic coalition. But in early July, according to Pew Research, registered voters in that age group were identifying more with the G.O.P.—and by a double-digit margin. Though some commentators tried to brush it off—“Sample noise?” an analyst at ABC News wondered—it echoed other polls and piqued liberal fears that the youth had taken a hard, Trumpian turn.
In the past year, I’ve interviewed dozens of young voters across the country. I kept asking myself: Was Trump doing something right, or was Biden doing something very, very wrong? Three weeks into Kamala Harris’s campaign, we seem to have our answer. The news for the Democrats is full-blast, coconut-tree thrills. While Biden had idled behind Trump in surveys and vibes, Harris quickly caught up and even overtook the former President. Young people, including in battleground states, are now choosing Harris over Trump by as many as twenty-four points. Harris has inspired endless memes and TikTok tributes, and a flood of donations—three hundred and ten million dollars in July, and thirty-six million dollars within a day of the announcement that the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, would be her running mate. A hundred and seventy thousand people signed up to volunteer for her campaign in her first week as the presumptive nominee. I was amazed by how quickly that iconic photo of Trump, pumping his fist in Butler, Pennsylvania, after the attempt on his life, faded from our screens.
Whatever forbearance young Democrats and anti-Trumpers had mustered when it came to Biden is now transforming into a mix of relief and genuine zeal. “Harris is able to connect with culture young people care about,” Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the president of NextGen, one of the largest youth-voting groups, told me. “She has a much more coherent message that goes straight to Trump. Biden’s message was more conflict-averse.” John Della Volpe, of Harvard’s Institute of Politics, which conducts an influential youth poll, told me that this moment feels similar to the founding of March for Our Lives, in 2018, after the high-school massacre in Parkland, Florida. “Overnight, there seems to be someone who’s listening,” he said. “It’s provided this unique combination of hopefulness I saw with younger people in 2007 and 2008 around Obama, with the urgency and fight that was so powerful post-Parkland.”
I called two progressive swing-state organizers, both in their twenties, to hear more about the Harris effect. Mary-Pat Hector, the head of Rise, in Atlanta, a national nonprofit that mobilizes young voters, was getting used to a new level of energy among her staff. “It was very difficult the past few months, prior to Biden’s announcement,” she said. “Our students were chasing down voters. Now voters are chasing organizers down, trying to get involved.” Rise’s political-action fund endorsed Harris immediately after she declared her intention to become the nominee. Hector, who is Black and went to a historically Black college, believes that Harris’s commitment to economic issues such as health-care access and student-debt forgiveness, combined with her identity as a Black and Asian woman, will continue to attract young voters—in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and other battleground states where Rise has a presence. “She represents the progress that is what this country stands for,” Hector told me. “She also represents the constituency itself—we are one of the most diverse generations.”
Read more in the full article here at The New Yorker.
