The press release issued by Voters of Tomorrow, a political-advocacy group run by and for young people, was either perfectly pitched or a little too sly: “Gen Z and National Leaders to Kick Off Voters of Tomorrow Summit, Watergate Hotel’s Most Historic Event Ever.” Many of the teens and twentysomethings coming to the conference likely knew what shenanigans had occurred in Room 214, which is now reservable as the “Scandal Suite” at a nightly premium. But, given that those events preceded their births by a few decades, I wouldn’t have begrudged them for needing to Google. It was sweaty sandal weather in Washington, D.C., last summer, the night before the summit, when I met the core planning team to do a walk-through with the staff of the hotel. Voters of Tomorrow’s special-projects director, Raghav Joshi, then a rising sophomore at N.Y.U., was the point person for everything logistical—“the designated freak-out guy,” he told me.
In the hotel basement, we peeked into a few empty ballrooms, then cut through an industrial kitchen to learn the entrance and exit routes for V.I.P.s. “The Capitol Police will close this off,” Joshi said, pointing to a doorway. He made a determined face behind his dark bangs and glasses and scribbled some notes. After the tour, we joined a dozen other V.O.T. staffers in a sort of junior situation room down the hall, where a flurry of last-minute preparations was under way: lunch orders, tweaks to the schedule, drafts of social-media posts. Screens and coffee cups were everywhere. Eve Levenson, a V.O.T. board member whose advanced age—she graduated from college in 2022—put her in a mothering role, reminded the room to “breathe, act, and hydrate.” Everyone paused their brisk, “West Wing”-style chatter to introduce themselves to me: name, title, firm handshake, lots of eye contact. It didn’t seem like anyone had slept. Santiago Mayer, the group’s founder and executive director, was giving orders—“Can you tweet the thing I just sent you?”—in a stressed but affable way. “You’re staying here with me,” he told Jack Lobel, V.O.T.’s press secretary, who was nineteen. The chief of staff was Bayly Hoehne, fifteen and still in high school.
About two hundred lanyard wearers, many of them college-age Democrats barrelling toward careers in politics, filled a banquet hall the next morning. The lineup of speakers would have been impressive for any political event, let alone one dreamt up and executed by teen-agers. V.O.T. had booked several congressional Democrats, of fairly recent, mostly progressive vintage, including Jamaal Bowman, from New York, and Summer Lee, from Pittsburgh, as well as Maxwell Frost, an Orlando March for Our Lives activist who became the first Gen Z member of Congress last year. Then came the heavies: Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House, and Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary. Vice-President Kamala Harris, for whom V.O.T. has a particular fondness (“#Kamalove”), sent a letter in absentia. “You give me such hope for the future of our country,” she wrote. “Over the past four years, Voters of Tomorrow has dedicated itself to elevating the voices of young leaders—the conscience guiding our Nation.”
The conference was technically nonpartisan, but, as an attendee from the University of Maryland told me, “Newt Gingrich isn’t speaking tonight. There’s a clear ideology.” Later, V.O.T. and fourteen other youth-voter groups would officially partner with the Biden-Harris reëlection campaign, with the goal of mobilizing some five hundred thousand volunteers to make more than a hundred and fifty-five million “direct voter contacts.”
I had watched Mayer, the V.O.T. founder, rehearse his opening remarks, workshopping pauses and enunciation with a Democratic strategist who was among the group’s inner circle of a dozen or so “adult advisers.” Mayer was resistant to practicing aloud. “I hate it when you all team up on me,” he told the adviser, smiling. “I’ve done this before. There were ten thousand people at the A.F.T. convention!” (He had spoken at a meeting of the national teachers’ union in 2022.) Mayer is tall and earnest; he has round cheeks and frizzy brown hair, and loves a good troll. He emigrated from Mexico City, in 2017, and his speech carries the nimble cadence and “Y”-“J” blur of his native Spanish. In edits, he shortened “Meatball Ron DeSantis” to “Meatball Ron,” and found the right spot for “They pissed off the wrong generation,” a tweet of his that had gone viral. “God, I love that line,” Mayer said. He worried that Lobel, the press secretary, would get mad at his inclusion of “bullshit,” but kept it in anyway.
The next morning, Mayer was onstage, in a dark suit, introducing Pelosi, whom he called an “intergenerational ally” and “still my Speaker.” The crowd went crazy. Pelosi was eighty-three, and, although she couldn’t be accused of the same level of infirmity as Mitch McConnell, she had held elected office for twice as long as many people in the room had been alive. Joe Biden is eighty-one; Donald Trump is seventy-eight; half of the House and nearly three-quarters of the Senate was born before 1965. If the summit-goers had any misgivings about our gerontocracy, they were hiding it well. “Would it be better if Biden were thirty-five years old? A thousand per cent. But that’s who we have,” Hoehne, the high schooler and V.O.T.’s chief of staff, told me. I looked around at the attendees, in their suits and shift dresses. Some were leftist activists, but most appeared enthusiastic about the parade of Democrats onstage, and in the months to come would be counted on to spread that enthusiasm beyond the Party faithful. V.O.T. had big plans: to grow chapters in key states, broadcast the policies most relevant to young people, and send millions of text messages to potential voters.
When Jean-Pierre delivered her speech, boasting of Biden’s environmental record, Elise Joshi, a U.C. Berkeley graduate who leads the climate-focussed group Gen-Z for Change (and bears no relation to Raghav), stood up to interrupt her. “Excuse me,” Joshi said, taking a breath. “A million young people wrote to the Administration, pleading not to approve a disastrous oil-drilling project in Alaska, and we were ignored.” She wiped tears from her face; the V.O.T. staff members in the room looked mortified. Lobel switched from press secretary to crisis manager. He approached Joshi and tried to coax her back into her seat. Jean-Pierre listened and responded gamely—“I appreciate your courage”—then defended her boss. “He has taken more action on climate change than any other President,” she said.
In the three most recent national elections, voters under the age of thirty have preferred Democrats to Republicans by a margin of thirty points. Yet more than a third of young people see both parties in an unfavorable light. They stuck with the Democrats when it made sense, although on some issues, including climate change, they have felt significant dissatisfaction. Within a few months of the V.O.T. conference, the Administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza would threaten to drive more Zoomers away from Biden. So, too, would economic malaise: a sense that the President had failed to bring inflation, health-care costs, and rents under control. In multiple polls, startling numbers of young voters, especially men, were distancing themselves from the Democrats. Biden’s Gen Z advantage over Trump shrank to a single-digit margin.
For most of the short history of “the youth vote,” the assumption has been that it doesn’t really matter. In 1972, after the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, some twenty-five million additional Americans were enfranchised in time for the Presidential election. Senator George McGovern, the Democratic nominee, expected an advantage, a Times editorial observed, especially given his “appeal among youth activists.” But Richard Nixon crushed him, and, for many years afterward, young people didn’t gravitate toward a particular party—or vote much at all. Their allegiances could mostly be attributed to race and education level, as with the rest of the population. “It’s a fallacy that these things are baked into DNA,” John Della Volpe, who leads youth polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, told me.
It wasn’t until Barack Obama’s first run for President that young people became a distinctly Democratic bloc. The Internet was part of the reason: Obama used early-social-media blasts and voicey micro-fund-raising e-mails to draw them in. His own youthfulness (at an unimaginable forty-six years old) and Shepard Fairey cool, not to mention his opposition to the war in Iraq, resulted in sixty-six per cent of voters under the age of thirty choosing him over John McCain. In 2012, despite the rebellion of Occupy Wall Street, Obama held on to that youth support.
Yet, in the 2014 midterms, only twenty per cent of eligible young voters showed up. “We saw ups and downs in youth-voter turnout,” John Holbein, a professor at the University of Virginia and the co-author of “Making Young Voters,” told me. “People would get excited about it, and then it would taper off.” The parties began to realize that they needed a targeted strategy—not just to appeal to young people but to get them to actually cast a vote. Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund manager and onetime Presidential candidate, founded NextGen America to register voters up to age thirty-five and, through its electoral arm, campaign for Democrats and progressives. On the Republican side, Bill Montgomery, a Tea Party strategist, and Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist and, at the time, a teen-ager, formed Turning Point USA to organize conservative students and monitor “cultural Marxism” in education. Then came Donald Trump and, among the many unprecedented phenomena that accompanied him, a huge, steady turnout of young voters, mostly aligned against him. “From 2014 to 2018, we saw youth-voter participation double, which is incredible,” Abby Kiesa, the deputy director of Circle, a center at Tufts University that researches youth participation in politics, told me. “Things like that don’t happen.” A record fifty per cent of young voters went to the polls in 2020.
Mayer, of V.O.T., was a high-school student, in Cerritos, California, at the jarring start of Trump’s Presidency. As a recent immigrant from Mexico, he was alarmed by the President’s attacks on noncitizens. “I arrived right in the middle of the Muslim ban,” he told me. “I was talking about it in class. I was talking about it with friends. They were, like, ‘This is never gonna get through. He can’t do that. That’s illegal. The Supreme Court’s gonna strike it down. Of course the President can’t ban a religion from coming into the country.’ But he could!”
Like millions of other Americans, Mayer expressed himself, uncensored, on Twitter. “The asshole in the White House just shut down the issuance of green cards, he issued a xenophobic Muslim ban, and is on the verge of appointing two more judges to the SCOTUS,” he posted. When Trump denied that he’d been playing golf instead of responding to the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Mayer wrote, “There’s pictures you fucking idiotic corrupt ignoramous orange fascist dictator son of a bitch.” (There weren’t.)
Looking back, Mayer said, “There’s things that I would express differently now. Largely because of my job, I’m trying to be more adulty. But my feelings about most things haven’t changed.” His incessant tweets got him noticed by Democratic activists, who were perhaps heartened to learn that Mayer wasn’t a radical; he just wanted a functional government. “I did not support Bernie Sanders,” he told me.
He got involved with March for Our Lives after the massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, then interned with a California state legislator and “saw the impact of actually organizing.” The next year, he started Voters of Tomorrow, first as a Twitter account, then as “an actual thing,” but with a “zero-dollar, zero-cent budget,” he recalled. It would be like NextGen, but run entirely by young people, and would “advocate for what the majority of Gen Z believes.” He soon left for college, at Cal State Long Beach, and launched Prom at the Polls, an invitation for students who’d missed their proms because of the pandemic to get dressed up and post pictures while voting in 2020. Thousands of teens and twentysomethings—and middle-aged celebrities, including the cast of “Grey’s Anatomy”—took part.
That year, two-thirds of eligible voters cast ballots in the Presidential election, “the highest rate for any national election since 1900,” according to Pew Research. Young voters went for Democrats at Obama-like levels. This mattered in battleground states that will be critical again this year. For instance, in Michigan, in 2020, Biden won by a hundred and fifty-four thousand votes; among young people, his advantage over Trump, in exit polls, was a hundred and ninety-four thousand. Voter-registration drives and outreach at colleges proved essential in every state that the Democrats won.
Surprisingly, only half of young people today identify strongly as either red or blue. They are issue voters, not partisans. Morley Winograd, who has written widely on millennial politics, told me that what distinguishes Gen Z-ers from members of previous generations is their multiple, overlapping identities and commitments—a pluralism that has tilted them Democratic, at least so far. For Biden, he told me, “The question of how to turn them out must therefore consider the extent to which you’re willing to scare the shit out of them, to talk about what a next Trump Presidency could be like.”
But some first-time voters may have no recollection of Trump’s first term. Others, who feel disenchanted with stereotypically “woke” ideas, might be drawn to Trump and other conservatives. “Looking at Trump and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, I’m hearing about the church, the family. I’m hearing about how they’re going to incentivize having children and keeping families together,” James Hart, who was raised in a Black religious household in Detroit and now leads the Turning Point chapter at Tallahassee Community College, in Florida, told me. “From the Democratic side, I was hearing, ‘How can we be more inclusive to L.G.B.T.Q.+?’ ”
Hart is an outlier, generationally speaking, but polls suggest that the Democrats should emphasize health care and economic mobility over identity in order to stanch the outflow of young men: in 2020, among likely voters, men under thirty preferred Biden to Trump by twenty-six points; in the latest Harvard poll, they preferred him by only six points. The Party has leaned increasingly on its Zoomer envoys, including Mayer and the rest of V.O.T., to prove that it is listening to youth and delivering improvements—on jobs, health care, abortion, the environment, gun control.
Although V.O.T. is relatively new and small (it incorporated as a nonprofit in 2021 and now has a multimillion-dollar budget), its willingness to amplify the good news of Joe Biden and “play the inside game,” in Mayer’s words, has led to regular collaborations with members of Congress and the White House, and now the Biden-Harris campaign. “I genuinely believe that the Administration sees us as partners, not annoying kids,” Mayer said. A White House spokesperson told me that the Office of Public Engagement has been hosting biweekly meetings with “young leaders and organizations,” including Mayer and V.O.T., “to talk about the issues most relevant to young people and insure their voices are heard in the Biden Administration.” V.O.T. is widely seen as “the youth group most affiliated with the Biden camp,” Gabe Fleisher, the author of the “Wake Up to Politics” newsletter and a recent Georgetown graduate, told me.
For V.O.T., Gen Z is just the start. Mayer is already focussed on Generation Alpha: he is training a successor, Hoehne, who joined V.O.T. at fourteen as a volunteer “executive assistant” before becoming the chief of staff. “He sat me down one day and said, ‘Hey, within our org, I don’t want to be running this until I’m thirty,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I want you to be on calls with donors and lawyers so I can eventually pass you the torch.’ ”
In the fall, I visited Hoehne at her home in Torrington, Connecticut, a former mill town with a quiet Main Street, a growing immigrant population, and an opioid problem. Her brick house was hard to miss: a giant banner endorsing the local Democratic slate in an upcoming election stretched across the front lawn. (Torrington went for Obama, then for Trump.) Hoehne has blue eyes and corn-silk hair; she’s a foot shorter than Mayer, but confident and fast with her punch lines. “The fact that I have to act like I’m twenty-six in politics speaks to the problem,” she told me. “I code-switch.”
She had just started her junior year in high school, and classes commanded only some of her attention. She had persuaded her parents, high-school sweethearts who grew up in town, to let her move from public school to a private online program so that she’d have more time to work and travel for V.O.T. In her bedroom, there was a Taylor Swift concert poster and a fig-scented candle. Also: a plastic figurine of Kamala Harris in a gray suit, campaign signs (Biden-Harris, Jahana Hayes), programs from fund-raising dinners, a crocheted Bernie Sanders doll, and memoirs by Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Chris Murphy. C-SPAN played silently on a monitor. “I’m literally two different people,” she said. “One night, I’m hanging out with friends, and, at 4 A.M. the next day, my dad drives me to the airport to come to D.C.” Her best friend in Torrington, whose dad backs Trump, has no interest in politics. Her two younger sisters are busy with their own activities: dance practice, xylophone lessons.
One afternoon, Hoehne tuned in to a virtual algebra class while checking multiple e-mail accounts, the V.O.T. Slack (favorite channel: VOTaylor, for the Swifties in the group), and a Google Calendar displaying appointments in four different colors. She uses Beltway abbreviations such as “D Trip” (the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) and suffers bouts of anxiety when her commitments pile up. (“We worry because she knows so much,” her mom told me.) “I’m also sixteen years old,” Hoehne said. “I love the little girly things.” She showed me her closet. “This is the dress I wore to the governor’s inauguration. This is the suit I wore to see Biden.” A TJ Maxx price tag dangled from a recent acquisition.
Hoehne traces her interest in what she calls “the politics space” to 2012, when twenty kids were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, in Newtown, Connecticut, a short drive from her house. “I know so many survivors,” she told me. “It’s resonated with me my entire life.” In 2016, when she was eight, she followed her mom, the head of a grocery-workers’ union and an elected town official, to an event with Hillary Clinton. She learned that politics can be fun, but not all the time, “and you don’t experience that many wins.”
Like Mayer, Hoehne reacted not by scheming to burn it all down—in her view, the Trumpists and petroleum companies were taking care of that—but by trying to fireproof the system. She saw, in V.O.T., a chance to work with, and through, well-intentioned lawmakers and, in the process, strengthen the process itself, which was feeling wobblier than ever: Speaker drama, government shutdowns, officials whose sole purpose seemed to be the destruction of officialdom. V.O.T. tended to collect pragmatists with a (perhaps legitimate) fear of governmental collapse. “Other youth orgs are more anti-establishment than we are,” Hoehne said. “I get it. It’s definitely very frustrating, and sometimes I want to blow shit up. But, in order to make stuff happen, you have to start in the room where it’s happening.”
In 2022, members of V.O.T. reached out to teens and young adults 8.4 million times, urging them to vote via phone calls, text messages, e-mails, and in-person conversations. They conducted polling to gauge Gen Z policy goals, and recruited dozens of state and federal officials to become “youth vote champions” by signing a pledge to involve Zoomers in their 2024 campaigns. V.O.T. formed two dozen state chapters, and challenged Republican efforts to restrict the right to vote, which had spread to college campuses. When Texas A. & M., which has more than seventy thousand students, removed its only polling location for early voting, V.O.T. helped fund a charter bus to take students elsewhere. In Florida, Mayer and V.O.T. joined a lawsuit against a statute that prohibited noncitizens from helping to register voters. (Mayer himself is a green-card holder; he’ll be eligible to apply for citizenship in 2025.) V.O.T. and other groups also succeeded in pushing the Biden White House to establish an Office of Gun Violence Prevention. “It was one of those much more doable things,” Hoehne told me.
Before the 2020 election, the role of young political influencers was fairly modest. Now, Mayer explained, “all these young people with massive followings and political platforms are taken a lot more seriously.” Achieving influencer status can come down to capitalizing on viral moments, such as when Mitt Romney was revealed to have a secret Twitter account, with the username Pierre Delecto. Mayer recalled, “I changed my profile picture to Mitt Romney with a mustache and I got, like, twenty thousand followers out of people thinking I was actually him.” (Mayer’s account was suspended earlier this month after he “tweeted something about R.F.K.’s brain worms,” he told me. This referred to the independent Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, Jr.,’s testimony, in a deposition, that he was having memory problems “caused by a worm that got into my brain.”)
Marianna Pecora, V.O.T.’s director of communications, became Internet-famous herself in 2022, when she confronted Marjorie Taylor Greene on a Capitol sidewalk. As Pecora, then a freshman at George Washington University, walked alongside the representative, grilling her about gun laws, Greene appeared to kick her in the leg. Shaky smartphone footage of the encounter went viral on social media and was written up in the global press. “These foolish cowards want the government to take away guns,” Greene wrote in a quote-tweet of the video. (Her office denied the kick.) “I’m so sorry but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect members of Congress to not kick an 18-year-old citizen,” Pecora tweeted back.
Other V.O.T. staffers and partners run small media empires. Victor Shi, V.O.T.’s former strategy director and the youngest elected Biden delegate in 2020, co-hosted a popular interview podcast called “iGen Politics” while he was an undergraduate at U.C.L.A., and tweets to nearly three hundred thousand followers. (Politico called him “Biden’s Gen Z hype man.”) Olivia Julianna, a Democratic activist in Texas who earned a national profile after exposing a Web site that targeted people suspected of having or providing abortions, records snappy video explainers—“Why you should care about Florida (no seriously it’s really important)”; “Breaking News: the next SCOTUS case about reproductive healthcare”—that have been watched more than a billion times on TikTok and other platforms. The Biden-Harris campaign recently tapped Shi to work on its youth-engagement program, which appears to entail more of what he’s been doing, and gave Julianna and other “content creators” the equivalent of a White House press credential. It’s a smart, obvious ploy. The youth are better spokespeople for the campaign than the campaign itself.
In early October, I went to see Lobel, the V.O.T. press secretary, on the campus of Columbia University, where he was just beginning his sophomore year. It was a sunny day fit for a brochure, and students lounged around and read, or pretended to read, on a bright-green lawn. Lobel, who was dressed in shorts, pointed to Butler Library, a corner of which he unofficially maintained as his V.O.T. office. He was trying to get better about his schedule, but he’d had another late night, editing an op-ed by Shi, which would be published in Newsweek (“Democracy, Democrats, and Young People Will Save This Country”). Lobel had a second job, too, “doing comms” for Lynn Schulman, a centrist Democrat on the City Council. “I’m more of an establishment liberal. At least that’s what the Pew research says,” he told me.
A week later, Hamas attacked military and civilian sites in Israel, and Israel began its retributive campaign against Gaza. Columbia became a hot spot of protests and counter-protests, as students tried to work out the meaning of the war. I called Lobel to check in. “As a Jewish person, I struggle to think of anything that has impacted me as deeply as this has,” he told me. He had retreated to his parents’ house, north of Manhattan, to get some rest. “We have to grieve, and our friends with loved ones in the region who are Palestinian also have to grieve, and I think there’s a lot of division, especially on campus,” he said. He supported the Israeli state, and feared an increase in antisemitism. Shi tweeted from U.C.L.A., “I just saw & heard hundreds of students shouting ‘INTIFADA’ at a time when anti-semitism & hate are at all-time highs. It’s a scary time to be Jewish on campus.” Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, called progressive House members’ demand for an immediate ceasefire “repugnant” and “disgraceful.” V.O.T. posted a statement denouncing “hate and intimidation on our college campuses,” but did not comment directly on the war.
Foreign policy had not been a priority for the group, or for Gen Z in general. I’d gleaned this from interviews and polls and from the summit last year in D.C. In one session, each of the two dozen or so attendees was given a handful of fuzzy pompoms and instructed to divide them among a row of plastic cups labelled “civil rights,” “gun violence,” “economy,” etc. The more someone cared about an issue, the more pompoms she would drop in the corresponding cup. The “foreign policy” cup was nearly empty; it ranked last among the issues. It’s not that the group was unaware of Russia’s war on Ukraine or the trouble in Haiti and Myanmar. They were just preoccupied with what was in front of them: climate change, inflation, housing.
October 7th, and the ensuing war on Gaza, made foreign policy impossible to ignore. By spring, pro-Palestinian students at dozens of colleges across the U.S. had occupied buildings and held Passover Seders in tent encampments to urge divestment from arms manufacturers and Israeli corporations. Police officers used force to clear campus property and arrested some three thousand people; congressional Republicans subpoenaed university presidents in hearings that had the air of a witch hunt. Columbia expelled student activists and cancelled its main graduation ceremony. Lobel left campus when the libraries and dining halls were closed, and when many classes went online. “I don’t think the encampments were fun for anyone,” he told me. “No one likes to see their friends or peers or classmates get arrested.”
In polls, most young Americans expressed support for a ceasefire and criticized Biden’s approach to Israel. If the interruption of Jean-Pierre at the V.O.T. summit had symbolized the fractious nature of Gen Z’s Democratic consensus, the assault on Gaza provoked a moment of alignment—against the Democrats. Many youth organizations condemned Israel’s bombing campaign and took part in protests, both on the street and at the ballot box, in the spring primaries. Within the Arab American community, it felt as though “there were two camps,” Mohammed Nabulsi, a lawyer and an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, told me. “There’s a camp saying we have to leverage our ability not to vote to push for a ceasefire, and there’s the camp saying Biden has crossed a line he can’t come back from.” (Republican youth sided with Israel, but relished their peers’ growing discontent with the opposing party. Sarah Green, the leader of Turning Point USA at the University of Kansas, told me, “What I’m seeing on campus is, no one’s for Joe Biden.”)
Still, both V.O.T. and the Biden campaign seemed certain that all but the most fervent activists would fall in line. “Somebody does not necessarily need to agree with one hundred per cent of the policies to be on board and to be voting for us,” Levenson, the V.O.T. board member, who left that position and is now the national director for youth engagement at the Biden-Harris campaign, told me. She emphasized that Biden was amenable to change, including in the war on Gaza.
I wondered if the campaign wasn’t being overconfident. We were two seasons away from the election—an eternity in politics—but every day I was meeting young people who swore that they could vote for neither Biden nor Trump. “On other issues, we can make recommendations and suggestions to push people in a direction. On the issue of the genocide in Gaza, it is what it is. There’s less of a margin,” Eva Sadana, an activist with Sunrise Movement, the environmental organization, told me. I asked Anderson Clayton, the twenty-six-year-old chair of North Carolina’s Democratic Party, for her take. “Young people know what the future under Trump and under Biden looks like,” she told me. Come November, in other words, the choice would be clear.
In February, the V.O.T. gang was back in Washington, lobbying Congress ahead of the release of their second annual Gen Z Agenda, a policy report and legislative wish list. The world outlined in that document, based on polling and member input, was one of plenty, and to the left of the Democratic mainstream: labor rights, a federal jobs guarantee, justice for immigrants, universal health care, free college, clean energy, and peace in the Middle East, including a ceasefire in Gaza, which represented V.O.T.’s first policy proposal on the war. Though Mayer and Lobel identify as moderates, they deferred to V.O.T. data on the priorities of their generation. “The same thing activists are yelling on the streets, we’re telling the Administration behind closed doors,” Mayer told me.
As V.O.T. made last-minute edits to their report, Biden appeared on the Seth Meyers show, cracking a few well-scripted jokes about his age. “You gotta take a look at the other guy. He’s about as old as I am, but he can’t even remember his wife’s name.” Early polling wasn’t looking good for the President, but V.O.T. shook off this pessimism, citing, as an example, the Democratic sweep in Virginia’s legislative elections last fall, which revolved largely around reproductive rights. “I know girls that are a year younger than me who chose where they were applying to school based on what states had abortion access,” Pecora told me.
That evening, after making their rounds on the Hill, the V.O.T. group met for a “family dinner” at Founding Farmers, a noisy chain restaurant near Foggy Bottom. Hoehne glowed from her last lobbying visit of the day, with Representative Barbara Lee, of California. “It was the best moment of my life,” she said. Mayer came late, having gone home to ditch his suit after a meeting with Vice-President Harris. “Your business cards, by the way, were lifesavers,” he told Hoehne. (A FedEx order for his own had not come through.)
The group dug into a spread of burgers, mac and cheese, and fries, and gossiped about Marianne Williamson, who had blocked, then unblocked, then re-blocked Mayer on Twitter. Mayer checked his phone for news from Michigan. The returns from the primary were starting to come in. It was the first test of an effort by Arab American and pro-Palestine activists to vote against Biden, in a rebuke of his military and moral aid to Israel. “If these are the results with Dearborn, that’s pretty good,” Mayer reassured himself. “The vast majority of the ‘uncommitted’ votes are gonna be concentrated there.” By the end of the night, the tally of uncommitted votes would exceed a hundred thousand. (About a month later, Biden told Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, that he wanted “an immediate ceasefire.”)
Polls in April and May showed that young people were more split than expected: there was considerable support for Trump among teen-age and twentysomething men. On the issues, Gen Z was most concerned with inflation and the economy; Palestine ranked low in surveys, despite the encampments and the congressional hearings and tens of thousands of fatalities in Gaza and the West Bank. “A sliver of a sliver of the population is going to be moved by Gaza,” Lobel told me. “But, at the end of the day, a sliver is a meaningful part of our coalition, especially in the battleground states, especially in states like Michigan. We have to really campaign. We have to work hard to preserve our vote count.”
“I am so tired of being asked about bad polls,” Mayer told me. He complained of “outdated outreach models” that failed to capture youth perspectives, and was plainly skeptical of the notion that young people would abstain from voting or defect, in appreciable numbers, to the G.O.P. “As we approach November and the stakes become more and more real, people who would be at risk in a second Trump Administration will make the decision that reflects Gen Z,” he told me. “The same empathy that Gen Z has for Palestinians will guide their empathy toward L.G.B.T.Q.+ people, toward immigrants, toward women.”
The key to youth turnout, a V.O.T. ally told me, will be vibes. Most young people aren’t activists; they don’t pay attention to politics. What they need, to care, is a sense that voting is inevitable—and will actually affect their lives. It’s all about “making voting an integral part of the identity of being a young person,” Della Volpe, of Harvard, told me. Biden seems to have heard this advice. In recent months, he has attempted to prove the youthfulness of his agenda, if not his body. He paused the export of liquefied natural gas, placed restrictions on oil and gas leasing, and expanded student debt relief. He also moved to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug. His campaign’s army of influencers has intensified its touting of Biden’s accomplishments to date—the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Safer Communities Act, a strengthened Affordable Care Act—as if to say, Remember how bad it was under Trump? The Biden-Harris campaign started a TikTok account (Dark Brandon avatar. Bio: “Grows the economy.”), despite the President’s signing of a bill that could ban the app. Candidate Trump, who, as President, had also pursued a ban, later launched his own account.
In mid-June, V.O.T. sent me a CBS News/YouGov poll indicating that youth support for Biden was back up, at least temporarily—to sixty-one per cent, among likely voters under thirty. A couple of weeks earlier, Mayer had voted in his first Presidential election: in Mexico, by absentee ballot. The race was historic—the two leading candidates were women—though Mayer’s pick, Xóchitl Gálvez (“she is relatively centrist”), lost by a double-digit margin. Mayer won’t be able to vote in November, and neither will Hoehne, who, at sixteen, is too old to be fazed by political chaos, but too young to cast a ballot.
During the last Presidential transition, in January, 2021, Hoehne was thirteen. “I remember sitting in my room and watching the certification of the election,” she told me. “I remember when the cameras went black and everyone live-tweeting where they were. I stayed up till five the next morning. I was thinking, What the actual hell is going on?” Hoehne is an early riser and starts every day in a slight panic, wondering what she can do, concretely, to help the Democrats win. “I feel proud of myself if I can register ten people, if I get people to vote, get people to call ten people each,” she said. “I could point out twenty things I wish Biden would do right now, but for me to be upset is not productive. It’s more productive to get in as much as you can and change things from the inside out instead of screaming.”
