This story was written by Teen Vogue's 2024 Student Correspondents, a team of college students and recent graduates covering the election cycle from key battleground states.
Hours after President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign team unveiled its rebranded Kamala HQ social accounts, which were painted Brat green. Within days of Biden endorsing Harris as his successor, the vice president released her first ad, set to Beyoncé’s “Freedom.” The song quickly became the de facto anthem of the Harris campaign and less than two weeks later, rap star Megan Thee Stallion opened the first rally in Atlanta.
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In August, Harris’s campaign rolled out camo hats that mimicked Chappell Roan’s “Midwest Princess” tour merch, shortly after Minnesota governor Tim Walz was added to the ticket. (Roan said she would vote for Harris but has not endorsed her.) During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, digital creators and young delegates were invited to capture Harris accepting the nomination. More recently, Harris was interviewed by Alex Cooper on an episode of Call Her Daddy, a comedic podcast popular for sex and dating advice, and appeared with Beyoncé herself at a Houston rally.
Throughout her campaign, Harris has been working to court Gen Z voters. Along the way, her 25 and under TikTok team has been crafting posts to make her go viral. But, is it working? A new Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll found that 53% of young adults, ages 18 to 29, have seen a Harris meme online in the last month, with 34% saying it “positively influenced” their opinion of the candidate. The poll found Harris currently has a 31% lead over Donald Trump among likely voters in this age group. Results of a recent Data for Progress survey were less favorable, with Harris leading former president Trump by nearly 20% among young voters, who responded via SMS and web panel.
Despite polls that show Gen Z voters supporting Harris over Trump, some young voters have continued to express reservations about a Harris presidency and say they still aren’t convinced she’s committed to their priorities.
Organizers tell Teen Vogue that young voters are most interested in Harris’s policies, not her marketing efforts. “Young people just want to know that they can afford rent [and] pay for school,” says Michelle Ming, political director of the youth-led immigrant advocacy network United We Dream Action. “They're not really looking for someone who is going to be the, like, ‘brat’ candidate, or whatever.”
In a mid-October statement, climate organization Sunrise Movement pointed to anticipatory swing state poll numbers as evidence that Harris has more work to do to get out the youth vote. “Harris is losing ground with young people,” the statement read. “To win this election, VP Harris must change course. The campaign urgently needs to work to energize and turn out millions of young voters.”
“Instead of splitting hairs for a small fraction of the undecided middle-aged, white, conservative voter base, she could be electrifying the Democratic base by talking about how she will take on big corporations, tackle the climate crisis, and end US military support for Israel’s assault on Gaza,” the statement continued.
Sunrise communications director Stevie O’Hanlon says, “The Harris campaign has generated a lot of momentum on the internet and reached people who were not reached by the Biden campaign.” Still, the climate organizer is among many activists who believe memes alone won’t make Gen Z vote for the Democratic nominee.
“Our young people have been burned before by politicians,” O’Hanlon says. “We've worked our hearts out to try and elect someone and then seen them walk back promises, make backroom deals, put the interests of big donors ahead of what our generation needs. Young people are rightfully skeptical of vague promises from politicians and want candidates to make clear commitments that we can hold them accountable to.”
Organizers in Pennsylvania and Georgia with “Ceasefire First, Votes Next” have echoed the sentiment that US military support of Israel is a major concern among young voters. Halah Ahmad, spokesperson for Listen to Wisconsin, tells Teen Vogue, that they have been working “to conduct pledge campaigns calling for action toward an anti-genocide agenda as a condition for our votes.”
“Harris's campaign seems to be leaning toward conservative, pro-war voters, particularly given the actions and rhetoric of this Democratic administration to support escalating warfare by Israel, which can't be seen as wholly separate from Vice President Harris as the presumptive leader of the party,” Ahmad says.
In October, the Biden-Harris Department of Defense stated that the Pentagon approved sending an advanced anti-missile system and US troops to operate it to Israel. Israeli air strikes earlier this month on Beit Lahiya, a city in the north of the Gaza Strip, killed or left more than 87 people missing under debris, according to Gaza's Ministry of Health. The ministry says that more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 97,000 others injured since the conflict began in October 2023.
“Nobody in Palestine can wait. We have to act now,” Jewish Voice for Peace Action political director Beth Miller tells Teen Vogue. “Moving forward, we continue to be organizing to stop sending bombs to the Israeli government in order to save lives. And that is very clearly directed and connects to this election cycle because the truth is that if we want to defeat fascism in November, if Harris wants to win she needs to take very seriously the fact that they have to change their foreign policy on Palestine.”
United We Dream Action endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket in September but has continued to express disappointment in the way Harris frames conversations around immigration. More than 80 national, international, state, and local advocacy organizations, including United We Dream, alerted the Biden-Harris administration of their “strong opposition” to the Border Act of 2024. The bill, if brought back and passed in Congress, would make it more difficult for immigrants to gain asylum and will grant the Department of Homeland Security more money to hire agents at the US-Mexico border.
Immigrant youth and their allies with United We Dream Action have been texting young voters daily to gauge where they are with the presidential candidates and what they care about in this election. Despite critiques of Harris, they’ve learned Gen Z voters are “acutely aware of the incredible threat that Trump poses to our country if he's elected again,” Ming says. “They're holding these two very difficult truths at the same time."
“Part of the reason that a lot of young people that we talk to in our networks are not really buying any of the memeification of Kamala Harris is because they're really smart,” Ming says. “They know that when the campaign is trying to distract with a lot of flashy, surface-level, fun things, there's this underlying problem that they still need to work really hard to address with young voters, which is this fundamental lack of accountability for a lot of the issues that young people care about today.”
Sunrise Movement organizers say they have contacted more than 2 million young voters in swing states over the past two months. “What we hear is that there are many more young people who are deciding between voting for Harris or not voting at all than there are young people who are deciding between Harris and Trump,” O’Hanlon says.
Sunrise has not endorsed Harris, but it has been trying to motivate youth to defeat Trump. Multiple organizers were arrested at demonstrations in the past two months while trying to push Harris to issue a climate plan. O’Hanlon says her economic policy proposal is “a good start.”
If Harris does win on November 5, O'Hanlon says, “we’re going to be there on November 6 to hold President Harris accountable for delivering on the plan,” she says, “so that we can have the kind of mobilization of our government that we need to protect our generation and millions of people around the world.”
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