Young People Are Coming Out to Vote: The Campaign for VP Harris’s 2020 Campaign and Tim Walz’s Preliminary Address

In the beginning of the year, she was the national youth engagement director for VP Harris’s campaign, after he decided to run for president. She has to get young voters to go to the polls.

There is a new playing field for women in politics, as she showed last week when she spoke to a room of Gen Z organizers.

It’s been great to see the attention and energy online. “We’re really focused on how do we make sure that we maintain that energy and how do we then harness that energy?”

That’s a goal shared by many young organizers also working to rally youth support after a boost in enthusiasm for Harris among voters under 30 – the same demographic that supported Biden four years ago but soured on him over the past year.

But making that support stick is a daunting task given how recently Harris launched her campaign and how historically unreliable young voters are in consistently turning out to vote – despite notable increases over the past decade.

Levenson can already point to promising signs for the campaign’s organizing push. She has built a program for the Harris campaign to tap into, launching a nationwide student organizing program last spring that will start back up as students return to campus this fall.

She said that there has been a lot of people coming into the campaign. In the last few weeks, we have seen more sign-ups for our student program than in the prior period. More people are signing up for our events. We’ve seen more folks applying for those jobs. We need to keep up the energy.

On top of a rise in the polls among this age group, Harris has benefited from a surge of viral moments online. Her campaign is running with it, and has started using some of the memes into their online organizing, and has seen a massive increase in engagement, though it still trails the Trump campaign in overall followers.

As Minnesota Governor and Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz took the stage at the DNC’s youth council meeting, the crowd of largely young people erupted in cheers and chants of “coach.”

In states where the margins may be incredibly tight, the power young voters can have is explained by the fact that Walz didn’t spare words.

“It’s going to be won in the trenches,” he said. “It’s going to be won by your demographic for the most part. We will get you to vote if we can turn you out. And it’ll be you who elected the first woman president of the United States.”

That excitement is something Blake Robinson, a 21-year-old delegate from Georgia, said he could feel as he got ready to head over to the convention center hours before Harris accepted the presidential nomination.

He said that they wanted the Democratic Party to be energy efficient. We wanted youthfulness and energy. And now, I don’t know if you’ve been in the convention hall, but there is not a single dull moment in that hall.”

Organizers aligned with the ‘Uncommitted’ movement, which started during the Democratic primaries to protest President Biden’s response to the Israel-Hamas war, took issue with the DNC’s decision not to allow a Palestinian American to speak at the convention.

While the war is not the number one issue for young voters in a recent national polls, it is still a concern for some progressive and Muslim voters who usually side with the Democrats.

“We know how much this issue impacts young people,” he explained. “Giving a Palestinian-American a place on this stage is going to be important. We need to make sure that we’re including everyone in our speaking lineup. People need to know that we care about everyone and all sides of the issue.

This summer, Times Opinion organized a new project to follow a group of young, undecided voters through the election, and we kicked it off just before the Democratic National Convention with a wide-ranging discussion about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The group had very specific opinions about Mr. Trump. The Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol was searing for many of them, some of whom were teenagers at the time, and they held Mr. Trump responsible. They called him a liar and traitor. He might fight another election loss.

When we asked them to rate Mr. Trump on a scale of 0 to 10 with zero being very negative, Ms. Harris got mostly threes. Mr. Trump got mostly fours and fives, and topped out with a seven.

If Ms. Harris was losing the battle against Mr. Trump in our first discussion, I thought she had a chance to win the war. I think of Bill Clinton because the less well know and agent of change has the better chance to make a difference when the election is close.