President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump have officially clinched the Democratic and Republican nominations respectively, setting up a 2020 rematch that has many young voters feeling frustrated and like not much has changed (at least when it comes to electoral options) since the last time they were asked to vote for president. That could spell trouble for the prospect of high youth voter turnout in 2024.
But new data commissioned by Run For Something, a political action committee that supports young progressives running for state and local office, sheds light on a new narrative: 61% of young Democrats in battleground states say they are more likely to turn out if there’s also a young, progressive candidate running down-ballot. The statistic is part of research conducted by John Della Volpe, who runs the market research firm SocialSphere and wrote the book FIGHT: How Gen Z Is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America. Notably, 50% of non-white voters under 30 said they would be more likely to vote (as compared to 42% of white voters in the same age range).
“These are folks who might not show up right now because they're not particularly pumped about the president or feel like their vote is maybe not that important, but who, if given a local candidate who can really reach out to them, have a conversation with them, connect on the things they care about, we’ll get them to show up,” Run For Something cofounder and co-executive director Amanda Litman told Teen Vogue.
Litman calls this the “reverse coattails” effect. The traditional “coattails effect” holds that candidates at the top of the ballot generate momentum and help down-ballot candidates from the same party win races. Litman’s theory flips that dynamic on its head, suggesting that state and local candidates could excite voters so much that they boost turnout, which ends up benefitting candidates at the top of the ticket. According to a Run For Something analysis of data from 2016 to 2020, down-ballot candidates contributed “between a .4% and 2.3% bump in top-of-the-ticket vote share.”
“What we found in particular looking at 2020 was that local candidates can increase turnout for the entire ticket,” Litman said, citing the analysis. “If you start to add that up, it can really make a difference in the overall margin of victory in any given state,” she said.
“We've heard anecdotally from organizations that work with young voters — especially in places like Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and others — that they find local politics to be a really strong gateway for getting young people engaged,” she continued “They feel like what's happening in Washington is totally disconnected from their lives, their day-to-day experience, but locally, they can really talk about housing, about streets and transit, they can talk about abortion care, they can talk about community health, they can talk even about things like child care, which is the thing that especially folks [who] are a little bit older, in their later 20s, are experiencing, or elder care, people with aging parents. It's specific and tangible and the candidates can really get to know the voters personally.”
Della Volpe said it’s, “been pretty clear this cycle that younger people are less likely to believe that politics can solve the major challenges facing the country than they were four years ago.”
“What I'm taking away from this poll, this question, is that despite what others might think, despite some distance that young people have with the Democratic Party, I don't see any indication that the generation is abandoning their progressive values,” he said. “Nor are they abandoning their views that we need a more robust government to solve the many challenges facing them, their generation, and the country. And there’s inherently more trust in local elected officials to create the tangible change that they can see on the ground.” He listed education policy, housing policy, zoning laws, and reproductive health laws as examples of local issues that state and city legislators can most directly impact.
Litman agrees, especially when it comes to housing, which has become a major electoral issue for young voters, who are struggling to buy or rent a home given the high cost of living. She said the same could be true of climate policy.
Yassamin Ansari, who is stepping down as vice mayor of Phoenix to run for Congress, spent years working on climate policy at the United Nations and with nonprofits before running for office. Ansari, who was supported by Run For Something, brought that experience to elected office and, as a city council member, helped champion Phoenix’s first climate action plan.
“We got to work immediately on our first ever climate action plan and we worked hand in hand with the city staff in our environmental programs department to make many of the goals within that plan much more ambitious than they originally were,” Ansari said, citing heat mitigation efforts and transportation electrification, especially for communities in “historically underserved areas of the district.”
“I was very proactive in making sure that we tried to save as many lives as possible over the summer months by bringing out cooling buses for our shelter residents. We set up a lot of cooling centers. And even today, in my final two weeks, I'm working on a heat safety ordinance for workers to protect anyone who works at our airports or on city-funded construction sites from heat illness and otherwise,” she said.
Ansari said she’s hired young constituents who got involved with her office through her work on sustainability, abortion, and LGBTQ+ pride. “I think there are a lot of policies that people have been excited about,” Ansari said. “When Roe v Wade was overturned. I wanted to find any route possible in the city where we could take action. We’re preempted in a lot of ways by our Republican-controlled state legislature, but we worked with Planned Parenthood and other organizations to pass an ordinance in the city that essentially directed our police department to give any calls related to abortion the lowest level of priority. And I think that was one that young people in the district especially were really motivated by.”
“I truly believe that having a young, progressive candidate lower down on the ticket, really does help,” she said.
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