By John Della Volpe
Welcome to Gen Z’s world. We have now entered the era of young Americans’ active, enthusiastic, and enlightened political participation that will shape America for decades. In just one week in April, Gen Z was celebrated by the left in Wisconsin and demonized by the right in Tennessee as America’s youth extended their political engagement well beyond organized protests and voting in even-year federal election cycles.
My Big Three Takeaways
Born in the late 1990s through the early part of the last decade, Gen Z is seasoned by growing up on the front lines of democracy under assault. The political values and world view of a generation are being shaped during a time when one-third of women lost reproductive rights, the number of gun deaths among U.S. kids doubled, growing numbers of African Americans fear the police, their LGBTQ friends are under attack, our climate is in crisis, books are banned, and history is being whitewashed.
Despite disturbing levels of depression and suicide, America’s youth are not retreating. They seek and win elected office, vote in numbers that few expected, and transform obstacles into opportunities. Every month, it seems, they are adding muscle to a burgeoning political machine capable of winning local elections in any state where they fear the rights of the vulnerable are under attack.
#1: The Wisconsin blueprint for organizing
Earlier this month, Wisconsin conservatives provoked thousands of college students and suburban millennials when they stood for Daniel Kelly in a race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court against Democratically-backed Janet Protasiewicz. The result of nominating Mr. Kelly, who opposes abortion, was a brutal double-digit political defeat for the right, who lost their 4-3 conservative majority on their State Supreme Court. Concerns about Mr. Kelly’s opposition to same-sex marriage and his support for Donald Trump’s election conspiracies proved secondary to abortion rights and reinforced the notion that Kelly was a radical Republican political operative who happened to be running to become a justice.
“Young voters were the issue,” the state’s former Republican governor Scott Walker rightly declared before leveling an attack on an entire generation, swearing young voters needed to be “turned around” from years of “radical indoctrination.”
Empowered to determine their future, students campaigning for a “pro-choice, Pro-tasiewicz” victory blanketed every University of Wisconsin campus with non-partisan voter guides, cheeky stickers, and “My Body My Vote” posters. Aided by rigorously targeted digital ads, social media influencers sharing the spectacle of stilt walkers, and students parading in judge’s robes – college voter turnout nearly matched the November 2022 general election when razor-thin margins separated Democrats and Republicans for the U.S. Senate and Governor’s seat. Reports from Project 72 WI, an organization launched to educate students about the Wisconsin Supreme Court Race, suggests Ms. Protasiewicz received no less than 75 percent of the vote in targeted precincts.
“By Election Day we had a team of 13 overseeing 100 part-time student fellows doing work on fifteen campuses. We knocked on every available college dorm door – two or three times in many cases,” according to Brianna Koerth, a leader of Project 72 WI who has been organizing the student vote in Wisconsin since 2016.
#2: Tennessee’s blueprint for empowering youth
Within days of the Republican repudiation in one of 2024’s most crucial battleground states, conservative lawmakers in Tennessee retaliated against their youngest two colleagues by expelling them from the democratically elected House for protesting the lack of action following the heinous Covenant School shooting. Conservative commentators on Fox News responded to the ouster of the two young Black men proclaiming Generation Z has been going to “Communist camp for the last 12 years.” Republicans, meanwhile, were accused of threatening to withhold millions in state aid to Shelby County if Representative Justin Pearson was reinstated (NB, he was, and they did not).
The way gun violence-, climate change-, and reproductive rights-activists sparked young voters to be difference-makers in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections – the Wisconsin Supreme Court election and the Tennessee expulsion will make young Americans even more powerful moving forward. Suddenly, the results of last summer’s deep-red Kansas election, where the attempt to limit abortion rights was soundly defeated, seem less like an outlier. Whether or not the patriarchy determined to “make America great again” grasp it or not, their more progressive sons and daughters, who can be found in every state in the nation, are fighting back and building coalitions that blunt the recessive tendencies of those struggling to retain their grip on our institutions.
#3: Motivations moving forward
Despite specious claims about today’s colleges serving as “indoctrination factories,” data from a comprehensive survey I completed last May unequivocally showed high school-aged Zoomers share the same concerns about America’s future as those who are college-age and older. Access to clean air and water, reducing gun violence and mass shootings, and guaranteeing every child has access to quality education were paramount. These are the concerns of a generation, and they should be the concerns of political parties seeking to win their hearts and minds.
“Ignore young voters at your peril.” That’s the data-driven direction I’ve given Democrats and Republicans for years, but never more often than in the MAGA era. Instead of listening to the voices and understanding the values of America’s emerging generation, MAGA Republicans seem to use Gen Z as pawns, if not enemies, in a high-stakes and dangerous culture war. Increasingly though, the culture warriors like the ones active last week in Wisconsin claiming the “woke left” has an “unending thirst to trans our children” are meeting resistance from a highly networked generation focused on the future and building political capacity. A generation has learned to organize their peers online due to Covid-19 lockdowns and is now matching these skills with time-tested grassroots techniques, fundraising prowess, compelling messages, and an unending fire to defend their values.
The Bottom Line
Like Newton’s Third Law, every action by older, mostly white conservatives is now swiftly met with an equal and opposite reaction from younger, diverse, and well-educated youth. This was not always the case. This is why the conservative establishment is coordinating their messaging around re-educating a generation (talk about Communism) – and it’s why Gen Z is going to make every election for president, congress, state, or local office a referendum on their values. Bet on it.
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