Commentary August 28, 2024

Kamala’s Gen Z problem

Daniel A. Cox

Business Insider

In the 48 hours after Kamala Harris announced her run for president on July 21, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote on vote.org — 83% of whom were under 35. The groundswell of support from young people, NPR correspondent Tamara Keith recently said, indicates “the kind of enthusiasm they haven’t experienced since Obama.” But can the Harris campaign harness the energy of young voters in the same way Obama did 16 years ago all the way to victory?

Back in 2008, the Obama campaign made an unprecedented effort to target young voters. During the Democratic primary, it organized 175 student chapters in Iowa, which led to a burst of youth participation in the caucuses. In critical swing states like Pennsylvania and Nevada, young voters were more likely to report being contacted by the Obama campaign than older voters were. The precision campaigning combined with Obama’s hopeful and inclusive message helped lead him to a landslide victory. In fall 2008, 70% of young voters had a favorable view of Obama, and two-thirds of voters under 30 went on to vote for him. Now, the Democrats’ newly anointed nominee is looking to borrow from the same playbook.

The problem is it’s not 2008 anymore, and Harris’ task is undoubtedly more difficult. While young voters are more excited about Harris than they were about Joe Biden, a recent Pew Research Center poll found that less than half of young voters have a favorable view of Harris, and her campaign has far less time than usual to convince them to check the box next to her name this fall. After looking at the data and speaking with Gen Z voters from across the political spectrum, it’s clear that time is not the only hurdle that Harris faces.

Young voters share one fundamental attribute: They are irregular voters. They’re just starting to develop political interests and priorities that will inform their level of participation and political identity — and those are heavily shaped by the unique climate in which they come of age. The young voters that Harris (and Trump) are reaching out to today are far different from those who were showing up to Obama rallies in 2008.

For one, today’s young voters are less connected to either political party. A collapse in public trust over the past few decades has coincided with the emergence of an ascendant independent streak among young adults. More than half of Gen Zers consider themselves politically independent, according to Gallup — a 5 percentage-point increase over how millennials identified in 2012. And nearly four in 10 young adults have a negative view of both political parties, a record high.

The earnestness that characterized the way young adults viewed their country in the early 2000s has been replaced by an implacable negativity. In 2024, only 21% of young adults said they were “extremely proud” to be an American, a 34-point drop from roughly a decade earlier. Young adults have also expressed more cynicism about American exceptionalism. In 2021, 70% of people 65 or older said that more countries in the world would be much better off if they adopted American values. Only 43% of adults under 30 felt the same.

The issues that fire up young voters are increasingly out of step with the interests of an older, more moderate electorate.

For many of their formative years, Gen Z has been fed a steady diet of political cynicism. Research has shown that beginning around 2012, news outlets increasingly used language denoting negative emotions, such as anger, fear, disgust, and sadness, in headlines. Researchers speculated that the feedback on engagement that news outlets received from social-media platforms incentivized more negative headlines.

Hunter, a 25-year-old Republican in Michigan, told me he does not trust either candidate. “Trump is not an honest person at all, but I do think we have a clearer picture of who he is because he did have a term as a president and a lot of his dirty laundry has already been aired out,” he said. “I’m suspicious of Kamala Harris, given how she’s trying to reframe things.”

Hunter said he “begrudgingly” plans to vote for Trump. (The young voters in this article are being referred to by their first names so they can speak openly about their political views.)

On the left, a 2021 Pew study identified a new group called the “outside left,” described as young, discontented Democrats. They are very liberal, secular, and dislike Republicans, but they also have little patience with the Democratic Party. The rise of this faction has complicated Democratic electoral politics. Young progressives exert far more influence over Democrats, the media, and left-leaning nonprofits than they once did. David Shor, a political analyst, argued in an interview with Politico that college-educated young liberals were pushing Democrats “to use overly ideological language, to not show enough messaging or policy restraint and, from a symbolic perspective, to use words that regular voters literally don’t understand.”

For instance, Gen Z is the first generation to fully embrace the use of gender-neutral labels and concepts like “intersectionality” that older generations aren’t as familiar with. Young, college-educated activists were also the most vocal in pushing Democrats to defund the police. But on this issue, they were outliers — a 2021 survey found that while 63% of young people favored “cutting some funding from police departments in your community and shifting it to social services,” less than half (37%) of all Americans agreed.

Where Obama faced little pressure from young voters to support progressive causes such as same-sex marriage in 2008, Harris has faced fierce criticism from young progressives on a number of issues — the climate crisis and US support of Israel chief among them. Her record as a prosecutor has also drawn criticism from young activists.