Consider This from NPR - What Young Voters Want in 2024

Episode Date: November 26, 2023

Next year Gen Z and Millennials will make up nearly half of the electorate. What exactly that will mean in the 2024 election is an open question.Host Scott Detrow talks with NPR political reporter Elena Moore about the different ways new voters approach politics than older voters.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

If you were on TikTok this summer, you saw a lot of Barbie content. Memes were overdubbed with audio like this. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Ken. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Ken. Lots of pink, like this guy in a bright pink Jeep. And I'm bad like the Barbie.

I'm a doll, but I still want to party. Get it, folks. We're going like the Barbie. I'm a doll, but I still want to party. Yeah, folks, we're going to the booth. Only this Jeep was pulling up in front of the U.S. Capitol, and this guy was Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey. Now, Booker's account isn't all memes. There are a lot of sincere selfie videos, too. We are dealing with this existential crisis of climate change, this haze here. So what is going on here? Well, Congress skews old and TikTok users

skew young. And a number of Democratic lawmakers have decided that they need to reach these users and their votes. It's not just Democrats. I think other Republican politicians are soon going to join TikTok probably in the next six months as they're seeing young voters flock to our campaign. Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has attacked TikTok as digital fentanyl for Americans. But unlike most politicians in the Republican Party, he's active on the app. And if the Republican Party wants to actually win elections and actually win the trust of the public, we're going to have to reach young voters. Whether Ramaswamy can reach those voters remains to be seen, but he's right that younger voters could be a pivotal demographic in 2024. Consider this. Next year, Gen Z and millennials will make up nearly half of the electorate. We'll look at the issues they're voting on and how they

could shape next year's election. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Sunday, November 26th. It's Consider This from NPR. Younger voters, Gen Z and millennials, are becoming a bigger and bigger part of the political process. What exactly that will mean in 2024 is an open question. But NPR has a new reporter looking for answers to that question. Elena Moore will be covering new voters as part of our elections team. And she joins us now. Hey, Elena.

Hello. I'm so excited to be here. So I paused reading that because I thought, do we still consider millennials young voters? And I say this as a proud elder millennial, geriatric millennial, willennial, if you will. Am I still a younger voter? Like, who are younger voters? Who are we talking about here? I feel like you brought me here just for me to tell you that you're young. I appreciate it.

Thank you. A younger voter can be many people. A younger voter could be you. It could be me. It could be Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is famously a millennial. It could be Gen Z-er Olivia Rodrigo, the pop star. So for the millennial generation, that's anyone from 1981 to 1996. So it's a big group and it's a growing group. Regardless of what generation we're talking about, the view, the stereotype of young voters

for a very long time has been passionate, loud, don't always vote, not a reliable voting bloc. In the end, they're probably going to underperform on election day. Is that the case with the young voters we're talking about right now? I mean, not really. If you look at the last few major elections, young voters have really surprised people. Go back to even 2020, we're in the midst of the pandemic and young voters show up. It was one of the highest turnouts for young voters since like the 1970s when they lowered the voting age to 18. And not only did they show up in high numbers, but they overwhelmingly

voted for now President Biden over Trump. And then two years later in the midterms, usually when the party of the president who's in the White House, that election season, that party doesn't do as well in the midterms. And younger voters showed up and they actually overwhelmingly still voted for Democrats. It wasn't the highest ever. The highest is in 2018, but it was the second highest. So in the last like 10 years or so, young voters have really exploded onto the scene and showed people like sent this message of we're here, we're loud, and we have political opinions and we're not necessarily going anywhere. Millennials and Gen Z are actually going to keep growing as a portion of the electorate. Next year in 2024, they're going to make up about half.

And then over the next 10 years or so, it's going to surpass 50%. We are talking about Gen Z and millennials here as collectively young voters. But many megabytes of internet content have been devoted to the fact that there are wide cultural differences between those two generations. I'm thinking about millennial voters who came of age in the 2000, the 2004, the 2008 presidential elections. And I feel like party identity was a big part of political engagement for millennials of that age. This is the era that red state and blue state was invented as a terminology and took hold. But listening to your reporting over the last few years, it has been very clear that Gen Z voters don't really see themselves that way. They might be very passionate about an issue, but they do not call themselves Democrats or Republicans. What's going on there?

Yeah, you're completely right. I mean, zooming back for a second, you just explained the, like, principal political events that happened for millennials. But if you're a Gen Z-er and you were born in the late 90s, you were a child during 9-11. You might not have even been born yet. The first presidential election you could vote in or had a phone for or remember very clearly is 2016. It's a completely different playing field for these people. They grew up in a time of like very intense political division. And instead of having candidates that they really rallied around, it was issues. And I think about during these tragic mass shootings that happened over the last decade, young people kind of stepped up and became voices

on gun violence. Young people stepped up and became voices on climate. And even more recently, after the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs decision that overturned the constitutional right for an abortion, young people rallied around abortion rights and showed up for Democrats because of abortion. So I would say that this generation values issues over party, and we're seeing that in data. I mean, in the most recent Harvard Youth Poll, they found that actually only about a third of young people actually identify with Democrats, despite overwhelmingly voting for Biden, despite overwhelmingly voting for Democratic congressional candidates. Really, only a third actually call themselves Democrats. Which is one of the many reasons why there's a lot of Democratic angst

right now about whether Gen Z voters in particular show up for President Biden next year when he runs for reelection. I mean, how are young voters feeling about the president right now? Honestly, like every time I go out and I talk to young people, it's like clockwork that President Biden's age comes up. It's either as a joke, it's a quip, or it's like serious concern. And that's not to say they didn't vote for him. And Scott, you know this, you were out covering President Biden when he was running. He would say a lot, don't compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. And that's supposed to mean, who would you rather vote for, me or former President Trump? And for a lot of young people, they looked at that and said, okay, yeah, we're going to vote for Biden. But there are a lot of issues that this generation

is passionate about that some advocates say haven't been fulfilled yet. And let's talk about a big one of them. Over the past two months, Biden's decision to support Israel in its war against Hamas, despite many, we've seen the polls, we've seen the protests, many young progressive voters being deeply opposed to Israel's military intervention, calling for a ceasefire. How big of a problem is it for Biden right now that so many people that he needs to vote for him next year are so mad at him? I mean, this is definitely a huge thing. I was out covering a demonstration organized by pro

Palestinian groups. And this was something I heard a lot. People are angry and they're hurt and they feel like they gave their support to this candidate who has let them down. And I talked to some people who say that this support of Israel is the last straw for them. I talked to other people who don't go as far as that. One woman, Prachi Javar, she's 23 years old. And again, she did not say she's not supporting Biden in 2024. But she said when she thinks about him running for reelection, it's very grim. Gen Z cares so much about human rights as a movement, and to have our commander-in-chief not actually follow through with that and not support that is really disheartening. And you know what she's saying? She might not be alone in that. In a recent NPR-PBS

NewsHour Marist poll, we found that 50% of Gen Z and millennials actually sympathize more with the Palestinian people over the Israelis. And that's the most of any generation. What are the other big questions that you have, the big storylines you're looking at as you approach this new beat? I should even say before I even get into that, that no generation, but especially not millennials and Gen Z are a monolith. This is a generation that has many different perspectives, more conservative, more progressive people from all around the country. And so we'll never be able to fully summarize how these groups are feeling. But when I look from a broader sense, the big thing that sticks out to me is I want to

know what issue becomes the issue of this generation heading into 2024. In 2022, it was abortion. But by the time young people vote next year, I don't know if abortion will be the top issue. It's been a bit since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It's unclear if that's going to be at the forefront of their minds in the same way it was during the 2022 midterms when it had only been a few months. So the biggest question I have about your reporting is this trend line you've talked about, about the tension between voters who vote on issues but don't identify with parties. How does that work in an election that is very likely at this point in time to be an election that's a question of whether Donald Trump returns to the White House. Yeah, I think that young voters are wrestling with that already. I talked to one young woman named Sarah Evangelista, and she is 29 and

is a Jewish American and identifies as a Democrat. And we were talking about a range of things, but she told me she had kind of come to terms with the fact that even though she's a Democrat and has issues with her party and candidates within it, she knows that no candidate is perfect. She compared picking a candidate to picking out lunch. As I look at a younger generation, they want someone who checks every single box for them. They want this satisfaction of getting like a sweet green salad. The ingredients are perfect and it is exactly what I want. And I know that that is not the case.

There is not often a candidate or an elected official who gets it right with you 100% of the time. But they need to be reflective of your values most of the time. Guacamole greens for president. I'm going with a harvest bowl. Elena Moore, our political reporter, covering new voters in the 2024 election. Thanks so much. Glad to do it.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.