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 became more politically motivated after Vice President Kamala Harris entered the presidential campaign following President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw.
“Kamala Harris is truly an icon for us. He is the American dream,” said Carolyn Salvador Avila, national chair of the American College of Democrats. At the age of 20, Salvador is the youngest representative of Nevada.
His brother, Julian Salvador Avila, 16, can’t vote yet, but he’s helping out in other ways. “I’d love to be able to vote, but the most I can do right now is help Harris and Walz, educate people so they know what they can do for Latinos, young people, everybody.” Julian is president of the Spring Valley High School Democrats of America in Nevada.
According to Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, known as CIRCLE, 40 million millennials (those born between 1997 and 2012) are eligible to vote this year, up 8 million from the previous election. About 45% are people of color, and of those, 8.8 million, or 22%, are Latino.
“The youth vote will be very important in this election,” said Antonio Arellano, who heads NextGen, an organization that registers young people to vote. He said young Latinos are focused on issues such as abortion rights, immigration, the climate crisis and the economy.
Arellano said he’s seen more enthusiasm since Harris ran: After Biden announced his exit, NextGen saw a 200% increase in people volunteering to encourage others to vote, Arellano said.
According to the Son Equis survey, Compared to Biden, Harris’s biggest support among Latinos came with the youngest voters: He has 60% support among young Hispanics, compared to 43% for Biden.
In recent focus groups for Voto Latino, a progressive civic activism organization that focuses 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 leaves the party. race, group president Maria Teresa Kumar This was reported by the Associated Press agency.
According to Vanessa Cruz Nichols, a political scientist at Indiana University, Harris still faces the challenge of promoting herself and letting people know where she stands on issues. “He will have to work aggressively to appeal to voters, especially young Latino voters who are more undecided or more willing to either run for office or vote for a third-party candidate.” Cruz Nichols told AP about it.
Santiago Mayer, who founded Voters of Tomorrow, a progressive organization aimed at politically mobilizing Gen Z voters, said he’s seen young voters “everywhere” excited about Harris’ campaign.
Enthusiasm has been so great in the past three weeks that “the biggest problem we’re facing right now is we’re over-enthusiastic,” Mayer said. “In the last three weeks we’ve had more applications to join our branch network than we’ve had all year.”
“I think we’re clearly seeing young people slowly becoming more interested and engaged in politics — and it’s still mostly survival because young people are very clear that the issues we’re facing are life-or-death issues of guns. climate change,” said Mayer, who is of Mexican heritage.
The main challenge is adapting to the different types of information Latinos consume on social media, “because we have a very fragmented information ecosystem,” with some relying on TikTok or other traditional media.
Mayer said Tomorrow’s Voters plans to make 20 million phone calls, text messages and in-person contacts leading up to the Nov. 5 election, with one million of those meetings dedicated to reproductive rights and abortion, “because it’s something young people care about. about up to,” he said.
According to Armando Ibarra, chairman of the Young Republicans of Miami, young Latinos are motivated by a variety of issues to support former President Donald Trump, saying that young people are “disillusioned and among the most affected by the results of the current administration. inflation and cost of living – they want change,” he said.
Ibarra said many were inspired by Trump’s “energy” and his defiance of the shooting and assassination attempt.
“We are preparing young people to vote in the elections. Here, we’ve seen a big change in South Florida from a decade ago, when the Democrats had a big advantage. And today, no, they don’t have that advantage,” Ibarra said.
Ibarra said they hold events and communicate directly with youth through email, text messages and social media. “We also engage them to be part of political change, to be part of making laws, to influence society,” he said.
Both Republican and Democratic Party campaigns have increased the presence of social media influencers popular with young people. Carlos Eduardo Espina, the Latino influencer and law school graduate whose tutorials on immigration have earned him 14 million YouTube followers, addressed a crowd at the Democratic convention last week.
Preeghory Patiño, 22, goes door-to-door in Orange County, Florida for Mi Vecino, a progressive group focused on mobilization and voter education. He noted that after Biden resigned and Harris became the Democratic standard-bearer, “I felt a lot of support from people for Kamala Harris.”
“Every time I knock on doors and ask what they think of her running, many, many, many say they support her,” she said, adding: “Women support her a little bit more because they say, ‘Wow, she’s the first woman president of the United States. may be.”
For this election, Mi Vecino is focused on reminding voters of Florida’s 4th Amendment. would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, ieIn the newsletter in November.
“We are mainly the future”
Since 2016, young people have broken voting records: About 50% of them In the 2020 presidential elections, those between the ages of 18 and 29 voted, increasing by 11 points compared to 2016, as one of the highest indicators of youth voter participation. Youth voter turnout in 2022 it was the second highest in midterm elections in the last 30 years.
And 68% of those young people supported Democratic candidates in 2022. And it has been seen on the ballot, in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, in the governorship and other positions.
“Young people strongly supported Democratic candidates in state elections,” CIRCLE director Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg told NPR about the midterm elections. “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 are hoping they can mobilize an important voting bloc — and they’re making it clear they must.
Patinho said it is very important for young people to vote, “because we are basically the future of this country.”