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Democrats want to turn internet hype for Harris into actual votes
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Eve Levenson’s job looked very different just over a month ago.
The 24-year-old is the National Youth Engagement Director for Vice President Harris’s presidential campaign, a role she’s had since the beginning of the year when President Biden was seeking re-election. Her task has been the same throughout: get young voters to the polls this fall.
But as she addressed a room of Gen Z organizers last week at a coffee shop in Chicago, wearing a handful of friendship bracelets that said, ‘Kamala,’ ‘political girlie,’ and ‘voting era,’ there’s a new playing field.
“It's been so great to see the attention and the energy online,” Levenson said. “We're really focused on how do we make sure that we maintain that energy and how do we then harness that energy?”
That’s a goal shared by many young organizers also working to rally youth support after a boost in enthusiasm for Harris among voters under 30 – the same demographic that supported Biden four years ago but soured on him over the past year.
But making that support stick is a daunting task given how recently Harris launched her campaign and how historically unreliable young voters are in consistently turning out to vote – despite notable increases over the past decade.
Levenson can already point to promising signs for the campaign’s organizing push. She has built a program for the Harris campaign to tap into, launching a nationwide student organizing program last spring that will start back up as students return to campus this fall.
“We've seen such a great influx of folks coming into our campaign,” she said. “We've seen more sign-ups for our student program in the last few weeks than we had seen in the entirety of the time before. We've seen more folks signing up for our events. We’ve seen more folks applying for those jobs. But we need to keep up the energy, and we need that to continue.”
On top of a rise in the polls among this age group, Harris has benefited from a surge of viral moments online. Her campaign is running with it, adopting some of the memes into their online organizing and getting more active on social media, particularly TikTok, where they’ve seen a massive increase in engagement – though the campaign still trails the Trump campaign in overall followers.
It’s also not just likes, shares and polls. Just days after the DNC ended, the campaign reported $540 million in fundraising since Harris announced her run. Notably, a third of the donations from this past week alone were from first-time contributors and a fifth of that from young voters.
It’s all wrapped up into a collective boost of enthusiasm that was felt among attendees at the convention last week.
As Minnesota Governor and Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz took the stage at the DNC’s youth council meeting, the crowd of largely young people erupted in cheers and chants of “coach.”
Walz didn’t mince words when explaining the power young voters could have, especially in battleground states where the margins may be incredibly tight.
“It's going to be won in the trenches,” he said. “It's going to be won by your demographic for the most part. If we can turn you out and get you to vote, that's how it's going to be done. And it'll be you who elected the first woman president of the United States.”
That excitement is something Blake Robinson, a 21-year-old delegate from Georgia, said he could feel as he got ready to head over to the convention center hours before Harris accepted the presidential nomination.
“What we wanted out of the Democratic Party was energy,” he said. “We wanted some semblance of youthfulness and vigor and energy. And now, I don't know if you've been in the convention hall, but there is not a single dull moment in that hall.”
But splits remain within the party and potentially within this voting bloc.
Organizers aligned with the ‘Uncommitted’ movement, which started during the Democratic primaries to protest President Biden’s response to the Israel-Hamas war, took issue with the DNC’s decision not to allow a Palestinian American to speak at the convention.
And while the war is not the top issue overall that young voters care about according to previous national polls, it remains a concern, particularly among some progressive, Arab American and Muslim voters – groups that typically side with Democrats.
To Robinson, the DNC needed to show voters they wanted to hear from all factions of their party. Organizers had pushed for a Palestinian American to speak at the convention.
“We know how much this issue impacts young people,” he explained. “Giving a Palestinian-American a place on this stage is going to be important. We need to make sure that we're including everyone in our speaking lineup. And we need to make sure that people see that we care about everyone and all sides of conflicts and all sides of this issue.”
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