Among the 4,700 party delegates attending the Democratic National Convention, many were young people attending their first major political gathering.
Some of them told Noticias Telemundo that they were more politically motivated after Vice President Kamala Harris entered the presidential campaign following President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out.
“Kamala Harris is really a symbol for us. She is the American dream,” said Carolyn Salvador Avila, national chair of the College Democrats of America. At 20, Salvador is Nevada’s youngest delegate.
Her brother, Julian Salvador Avila, 16, can’t vote yet, but he’s helping out in other ways. “I would love to be able to vote, but the most I can do now is help Harris and Walz, educating people so they know what they can do for Latino people, young people, everyone.” Julian is president of the High School Democrats of America Spring Valley, Nevada.
As many as 40 million Gen Zers (born from 1997 to 2012) are eligible to vote this year, 8 million more than in previous elections, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, known as CIRCLE. About 45% are people of color and of those, 8.8 million, or 22%, are Latino.
“The youth vote is going to be very important in this election,” said Antonio Arellano, who heads NextGen, an organization to register young people to vote. He said young Latinos are focusing on issues such as abortion rights, immigration, the climate crisis and the economy.
Arellano said he’s seen more enthusiasm now that Harris is the nominee: Since Biden announced he was dropping out of the race, NextGen has seen a 200% increase in people volunteering to encourage others to vote, Arellano said.
According to a recent Equis poll, Harris’ biggest gains in support among Latinos when compared to Biden was with youngest voters: She is at 60% support among young Hispanics, compared to 43% for Biden.
In recent focus groups for Voto Latino, a progressive civic engagement organization focused on young Latinos, more than half of young Hispanics who initially said they would vote for a third party said they would switch their vote to the Democratic Party after Biden dropped out of the race, the group’s president Maria Teresa Kumar told The Associated Press.
But Harris still faces the challenge of having to reintroduce herself and let people know where she stands on the issues, according to Indiana University political scientist Vanessa Cruz Nichols. “She will have to work aggressively to appeal to voters, especially young Latino voters who are even more nonpartisan, more willing to either sit out an election or vote for a third-party candidate,” Cruz Nichols told the AP.
Santiago Mayer, who founded Voters of Tomorrow, a progressive organization aimed at politically mobilizing Gen Z voters, said he’s seeing young voters “everywhere” excited about Harris’ campaign.
The enthusiasm has been so great in the last three weeks that “the biggest challenge we are facing right now is that we have too much interest,” Mayer said. “We have received more applications to join our chapter network in the last three weeks than we have received in the entire year.”
“I think we are clearly seeing young people slowly becoming more interested and involved in politics — and it is still mostly for survival reasons, because young people are very clear that the issues we face are life-or-death issues, just like guns and climate change,” said Mayer, who is of Mexican heritage.
A major challenge has been adapting to the different types of information that Latinos consume on social media, “because we have a very fragmented information ecosystem,” with some relying on TikTok or other traditional media.
Mayer said Voters of Tomorrow plans to make 20 million phone calls, text messages and in-person contacts before the Nov. 5 election, and a million of those meetings will be dedicated to reproductive rights and abortion, “because it’s something that young people care about so much,” she said.
For Armando Ibarra, chair of the Miami Young Republicans, it’s different issues that are motivating young Latinos to back former President Donald Trump, saying young people are “disillusioned with the results of the current administration and have been among those who have been most impacted by inflation and the cost of living — they want change,” he said.
Ibarra said many are also inspired by Trump’s “energy,” and the fact that he defied a bullet and an assassination attempt.
“We are going out to get young people to vote in the elections. Here we saw the big change in South Florida from the vote of a decade ago, where the Democrats had a big advantage. And today, no, they don’t have that advantage,” Ibarra said.
Ibarra said they’re holding events and communicating directly with young people via emails, text messages and social media. “We also involve them in being part of political change, in being part of passing laws, in being part of having an impact in the community,” he said.
Both the Republican and the Democratic party campaigns have elevated the presence of social media influencers who are popular among young people. Carlos Eduardo Espina, a Latino influencer and law school graduate whose tutorials on immigration-related issues have earned him 14 million YouTuber followers, addressed the crowd at last week’s Democratic convention.
Preeghory Patiño, 22, goes door to door in Orange County, Florida, for Mi Vecino, a progressive group focused on mobilization and voter education. He has noticed that since Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic standard-bearer, “I have felt a lot of support from people for Kamala Harris.”
“Every time we knock on doors and ask what they think about her running, many, many, many people have shown up saying they support her,” he said, adding women “are a little bit more supportive of her, because they say, ‘Wow, she could be the first female president here in the United States.’”
For this election, Mi Vecino is focused on reminding voters that Florida’s Amendment 4, which would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution, is on the ballot in November.
‘We are basically the future’
Since 2016, young people have broken voting records: An estimated 50% of those ages 18 to 29 voted in the 2020 presidential election, an increase of 11 points from 2016, one of the highest rates of youth voter participation. In 2022, young voter turnout was the second highest in a midterm election in the past 30 years.
And of those young people, 68% supported Democratic candidates in 2022. And that was seen across the ballot, in seats for the House, the Senate, governorships and other positions.
“Young people strongly supported Democratic candidates in state elections,” Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of CIRCLE, told NPR about the midterms. “The result is that they [young people] kept the races very close, and in some cases we believe they determined the outcome of the race.”
Amid tight races in battleground states, campaigns and groups hope they can mobilize a crucial voting bloc — and make clear that they should.
The youth vote is very important, said Patiño, “since we are basically the future of this country.”
