Ben Wessel, former executive director of NextGen America, the nation’s largest political group focused on organizing young people, said Democrats will have to do a better job of building bridges to skeptical youth, not just show up in get-out-the-vote drives.
“Democrats need to ask, how do we get GOP-leaning young people to vote for Democrats and how do we get young Black folks motivated to vote?” he says. He believes Democrats should highlight the sharp differences between the two parties on social policies such as abortion, LGBTQ rights and gun regulations.
The Harvard poll also found that a growing number of young people see both parties as more focused on the interests of the elite than on “people like you.” They feel this way most strongly about Republicans, but Democrats are also vulnerable to this critique.
That’s why, looking past the midterms, the biggest risk to Democrats may be that too many disaffected young voters will turn to third-party candidates, as they did in 2016 to the detriment of Hillary Clinton. Democrats were lucky in 2020 that no effective third-party candidates ran and tempted young people to abandon Biden. They may not be so lucky in 2024.
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