The NPR Politics Podcast - How Young Activists Are Working With America's Oldest President

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Many young progressive groups were openly hostile to Joe Biden's primary campaign, but they rallied to support him once he secured the nomination. Now, his administration regularly meets with young organizers—who are hoping to increase their representation in the halls of power.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political correspondent Juana Summers, and White House correspondent Scott Detrow.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Alyssa from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I've just dropped my daughter off at school for the first time in 11 months, and I'm feeling a lot of mixed emotions. This podcast was recorded at 1.30 p.m. on Thursday, February 25th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will be forever grateful to all of our amazing educators throughout the nation and the world. All right, here's the show. And when you experience the silence in your home for more than 20 minutes, those mixed emotions will fade away. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith, I cover the White House. I'm Juana Summers, I cover politics. And I'm Scott Detrow,

I also cover the White House. Juana, you have been spending time over the last few weeks talking to young activists about the Biden administration. And this is not necessarily, you know, the easiest relationship. And I'm wondering what you were looking for and what you found. Yeah. So, Tam, one of the things that I had heard and seen is that the Biden transition team ahead of the inauguration had started having these somewhat regular meetings with these organizers from youth-led movements. And just to be clear who we are talking about here, we are talking about millennials and Gen Z folks who came out in droves to support then-candidate Biden. And these are largely left-leaning or progressive groups. They've been having conversations, many of them under the purview

of Cedric Richmond, the Biden advisor who leads the Office of Public Engagement at the White House. And they've been having these conversations for months. And my sources were telling me that they do feel like at this point that they have an open line to the White House. And we wanted to know what those conversations sound like and what policy might result from them after a primary in which, to put it bluntly, Joe Biden was not the favorite candidate of a lot of young folks in this country. When you talk about young people turning out in droves for President Biden, Scott, that is not what you saw covering the primary, right? Yeah, no, he's his base early in the primary. And this is something the Biden campaign was

proud of. They scorned the idea of other candidates playing to Twitter as the shorthand that the Biden campaign really framed it as. They thought that older, more moderate voters were the people who turn out more reliably. And you know what? That's a formula that won them big from Super Tuesday on. And not only were younger, more progressive activist types supporting other candidates, particularly Bernie Sanders, they were really actively opposing a lot of the things Biden was doing. You know, the storyline I paid the most attention to was what was happening with climate change and the Sunrise Movement, which is, you know, really high profile group, mostly made up of younger

activist types who want to see huge changes to policy. They endorsed Bernie Sanders. They said that Joe Biden's climate plan was an F. They thought it was drastically ineffective. But the interesting story is once Biden did lock down the nomination, at a little bit of the prodding of Bernie Sanders, but also getting to the fact that Joe Biden is a pragmatic person and that that goes both ways, his camp worked really hard to try and bring groups like this into the fold. And when Biden had those task forces made up with Biden appointees and appointees from Bernie Sanders, Sunrise was in the room and they felt like they were listened to and they felt like they really could see areas where Biden adjusted and changed his climate policy to be more to their liking, and they ended up campaigning for him. So, Wana, in terms of policy, what are these young activists looking for now that Biden is in the White House? Yeah, so we are talking about the concerns of a lot of different groups with a lot of different priorities, but let me give you a couple of big examples.

The first thing that I think all of these groups probably agree on is that they want to see the access that they now have to the administration turn into power. And so they're kind of pursuing this inside-outside strategy. I'm Greisa Martinez, who's the executive director of United We Dream, which is a group that's pushing the administration on a number of immigration related issues, put it this way. And what we know and what I've learned as an organizer is that access does not equal power. That just because you have the meetings or you're on the cause, that those are important components of being able to advance your strategy, but they're not power. So, you know, we continue to

organize. And another issue where you're really seeing this play out kind of in real time is over the issue of student debt. There was a lot of frustration when President Biden spoke at that CNN town hall, and he said pretty bluntly that he does not plan to eliminate up to $50,000 of student loan debt per borrower, something that has been a huge priority of not just a lot of these young organizers, but also a lot of liberal Democrats. That came up in a lot of my conversations, and particularly with Sarah Odello, who is the executive director of the Alliance for Youth Action. On policy, I think it's the executive orders that like rapid rollout of executive orders was really great. But I think right now, what's really important is that young people feel

the impact of a new presidency, that they feel economically that they have cash in their pockets, that that student debt is no longer looming over them, that college is free, that their families have access to the vaccine, right? We need to like people to have an actually feel the impact of a Biden presidency. And that hasn't happened yet. And then the kind of other big parcel where there's a lot of urgency is around the nation's gun laws. Last week, we saw that senior administration officials, including Susan Rice, who heads up the Domestic Policy Council, held a meeting with a lot of groups, not just young groups, but groups that are interested in changing the nation's gun laws. And the White House gave this meeting pretty high profile,

because they actually gave us a readout and told us what it was about. And they said that this was an example of Biden's commitment to making communities across the country safer. Fast forward to a couple of days after that meeting and March for Our Lives actually came out with a list of demands that they're making for the Biden administration, including that Biden dedicate at least one billion dollars in funding to combat gun violence and to appoint a senior staffer as a director of gun violence prevention. And Tam, could I just add one thing to the political context here? Because I think it is a really important story that the Biden White House is engaging groups like this so much. But I think there is the Biden's team, certainly when he was running for president, and I think it's still the case now, does see some political value.

And when he does push back on some of these these shorthand demands, right, like cancel all student debt or cancel higher amounts of student debt and also particularly defund the police. You know, time and time again, as Republicans try to paint Joe Biden as a radical, which was like the go to line during the campaign and seems to continue to be in Congress. He can say, yeah, but I don't support defunding police. You have heard me say it bluntly over and over again that I don't. So there's certainly some political value on him knocking back some of the higher profile demands, even if you look at all of the policies he's trying to enact, a ton of progressive groups' wish lists are in there. All right, well, we are going to take a quick break.

And when we get back, a bit more about what these groups are hoping to accomplish besides having a seat at the table. He was one of the most consequential architects of the civil rights movement. But you may never have heard of him. For our Black History Month special series, Bayard Rustin, who made nonviolence part of the fight for civil rights and organized the March on Washington. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR. And we're back. And Juana, we know that these young activists have been invited to plenty of Zooms with White House officials. But beyond policy, sort of what are they hoping to see come out of this? Yeah, there is another part to what they're asking for other than kind of these

big, bold policy ideas. And it remains to be seen how much of that agenda can make its way into legislation. They're also talking, frankly, about jobs. A number of these groups are a part of this youth and government coalition that has called on biden to make meaningful space for young people in government they've called on biden to establish an office of young americans within the white house and to appoint a director of youth engagement who would sit on the domestic policy council and the reason why they say that this is so important is because when young people are in meaningful roles, they can actually have an impact on policies through their lived experience. One example that kept coming up when I talked to these organizers is the fact that in

previous rounds of stimulus payments related to the coronavirus, adult dependents were not able to have access to the stimulus funds. And these young organizers really feel like that's because no one who's actually had the experience of being an adult dependent was involved in those conversations. So they didn't realize that those are people who, while they may be dependents of their parents, they have families, they are providing, they are providing for households, they are contributing meaningfully, not just kids who are living at home with mom and dad. So they feel like that's one clear result. And there's also one thing, Tam, that kind of caught my eye, that kind of speaks to this demand. And that's the fact that earlier this month, when the White House announced its COVID health equity task force, there's

actually a high school senior who's on it. His name is Vincent Tronzo. And he was active in the Biden campaign as a co-chair of high school students for Biden. He Tronzo. And he was active in the Biden campaign as a co-chair of high school students for Biden. He lives in Florida. And he's one of the dozen or so people who's on that health equity task force that's focused on health and social inequities in a pandemic that we know has disproportionately impacted black and brown people and had a lot of impacts on young people too. Fascinating. I mean, you know, part of the way that you often think about politics is that, you know, activism agitating from the outside is for the young. And then, you know, then there's the older people on the inside doing the policy.

And what you're describing is the young people saying, no, no, no, we don't want to just be on the outside here. I think that's true, but I don't think they're necessarily silos, right? And I think one thing that Juana's story really gets at really well is how important the policy, the actual results are to these groups and how they are not going to feel bad about, you know, as one example, blasting the Biden administration for not following through on its promises. And I think you're going to see this with immigration more and more in the coming months, as a lot of those lingering Trump policies still stay in place. But I think there's also some crossover, like, for example, with the climate activists. They were so thrilled that Gina McCarthy was named

as the climate point person on the domestic side. This is somebody who is an establishment politician who has been around a very long time. But when it comes to policy is on the same page with so many of the young activists that they were they feel like Gina McCarthy, even though she's been in multiple administrations, is their advocate in the room. So that's one example that it's it's not necessarily one or the other on this and that it really comes down to results. we go, I want to pull back a little bit. And I wanted to get your thoughts on how this movement either differs or is similar to previous youth movements. You know, going back to 2008, there was so much excitement around candidate Barack Obama. He had all of this support among young people. It's not clear that that translated beyond the campaign. And, you know, of course, obviously, there's like the 1960s. And there are all these other eras of like, really energetic youth activism. How does this fit in, you think? So I actually put a kind of similar question to some of the older folks. And by older,

I'm talking about people who are in their 30s, who maybe even cast their first ballot the first time that President Obama. 30s. I know. Let's not age ourselves here. Okay, sorry. But I did put this question to them. I wanted to know, was this different from President Obama's first term? Because like you, I remember the focus on young people and how enraptured young people were by Obama when he ran. And some of them made the point to me that they believe that at least now, and keeping in mind

that we are still only in the first month or so of the Biden administration, they feel like they have a more meaningful seat at the table. They feel like they have more access when it comes to policymaking. And they feel like that there's they feel like there's more of an opportunity for the things that they care about these kind of big, bold ideas that we've been talking about to actually become force of law. Now, we've all covered Washington for a long time. Indeed, we've seen the polarization on Capitol Hill. So I'm not sure if some of these proposals necessarily have the legs to make it given the fractures of our politics, the slim majorities that Democrats hold. But at least these young people, they see an opening here. And I think it's going to be

really remarkable to see how President Biden's relationships with these activists mature over the duration of his term. Because one point that kept coming up is the fact that there are a lot of elections coming up for key Senate seats. If Democrats want to hold on to those majorities, they're going to need these young people to turn out again, and not just when the presidency is on the line and Donald Trump is on the ballot. Right. And Barack Obama was always frustrated. And, you know, if anyone made it all the way through his new book, which I think might not be many people at the moment, but, you know, he kind of returns to this frustration that that youth coalition did not show up in the midterms. And that's a reason that

that is why Democrats lost their House and Senate majorities over his time in office. So I'm really curious, you know, a year and a half from now, are activist groups feeling like, okay, we've gotten a little bit done, but there's more to do and we need to win more seats? Or is it a frustration of all of the things we talked about haven't happened yet. So why should we care and engage and vote? This is going to be fascinating to watch. But that is a wrap for today. And we will be back tomorrow with our weekly roundup. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Juana Summers. I cover politics. And I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House too.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.