Will Generation Z actually come out and vote?
Tuesday’s midterms are among the most consequential elections in decades. As Democrats and Republicans fight for control, there’s one group with millions of eligible voters that both parties desperately want: Generation Z.
Pundits point out that this generation is on track to be better educated, more ethnically diverse and more liberal than others. That would seem to bode well for the Democratic party and spell doom for the Republicans. But both parties wonder: Will Gen Z actually go out and vote?
Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times staff writer Arit John
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Gustavo Arellano: 2022 is one of the most consequential midterm elections in decades. And as Democrats and Republicans fight for control, there's one group with millions of eligible voters that both parties desperately want: Generation Z.
Camila Herrera: This is my first time voting in a midterm election…
Xavier Danes: I've never voted before. Had the option, but never really had anyone that spoke to me.
Camila: I wish to vote for leaders that represent me and my ideas.
Gustavo: Political experts point out that this young generation is on track to be better educated, more ethnically diverse, and more liberal than other generations. So that seems to bode well for the Democratic Party and spells doom for the Republicans.
But as much as both parties want them, they also have a bigger question about Gen Z folks. Will they actually come out and vote?
Gustavo: I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to The Times, Essential News from the L.A. Times. It's Monday, Nov. 7, 2022.
Today, as part of our coverage of the midterm elections, which by the way happens tomorrow, we look at a very simple question. What exactly does Generation Z want?
Gustavo: My colleague Arit John covers national politics. Arit, welcome to The Times.
Arit John: Thanks for having me.
Gustavo: So my first election was, oh, what was it, 1980? No. See, I can’t even remember… 1998. Don't even ask me who I voted for or why, but I just remember I registered to decline to state, mostly voted Democrats. Most of my friends voted, but none of us were particularly enthusiastic. And I can definitely say though, that both parties didn't care about us at all. Like they weren't reaching out for our vote. But what about now? What about with Gen Z? Who are they and why are they so important politically?
Arit: So Gen Z is anyone born between 1997 and 2012, and they're basically the new “it generation” in politics. This is the first year that members of Gen Z are old enough to run for Congress, and we're likely to see at least one new Gen Z member of Congress next year. And as a voting bloc, we're seeing that Gen Z is more diverse than any generation before it. Just under half of Gen Z is made up of people of color compared to about 4 out of 10 millennials. They're more educated and their parents are more educated, and that plays a big role in the issues that they care about, especially when it comes to, like, student loan debt. And Gen Z matters because, I mean, basically every new generation brings with it fresh voters and new opportunities or challenges for each party. This year there'll be more than 8 million new Gen Z voters who've turned 18 since the last election, who could be voting for Democrats. They could be voting for Republicans, or they could just sit out the election entirely.
Gustavo: And that's a scenario I don't think either of the parties want. So you spoke to a couple of Gen Zers who are running for Congress, and they're the first of their generation to do so. Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Florida, and Karoline Leavitt, she's a Republican from New Hampshire. Let's start with Maxwell. Who is he and what's his story?
Arit: So Maxwell Frost, he just won a really competitive primary in Florida, in the Orlando area against nine candidates, including two former members of Congress.
Maxwell Frost: If you feel like this time is different, let me hear you make some noise. I said, if you feel like this time is different, let me hear you make some noise.
Arit: He started his political activism at the age of 15 after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. He's gone on to work for March For Our Lives, which is a gun control advocacy group.
Maxwell: Friends, I've been in this fight for a decade. My name is Maxwell Alejandro Frost. I'm a survivor of gun violence, an organizer, and now I'm running for Congress here in Orlando. Um, thank you. Thank you. [audience noise]
Maxwell: The leading cause of death for children is guns, not automobiles anymore. So our children are literally on the front lines of this issue and we lose a hundred people a day. So I look forward to being a strong advocate and champion to ensuring we live in a country where we don't have to fear going to church, going to school, uh, because of gun violence. We deserve the freedom to live
Arit: He ran on a very progressive message. Medicare for all. Ending gun violence. Green New Deal. And he won out in a really crowded field with much more experienced candidates, and that was a big surprise.
Maxwell: Look, we have to think about the context of this win. We are in Florida where this entire year, our state has been the victim of Gov. DeSantis. He is a dictator, someone who has been scapegoating the most vulnerable communities for every issue under the sun because he wants to run for president.
Arit: And during the campaign, he's been working as an Uber driver to try and make ends meet, and he's been trying to finish up his college degree, which he expects to complete while he's in office, assuming he wins.
Maxwell: Yes, there's a young face that is doing that work, but that's OK. We need a diversity of yes, race, yes, opinion, but also age.
Arit: And he really represents a lot of the trends that we're seeing in Gen Z. He is an Afro Latino candidate. He has been impacted by gun violence as many people in his generation have been.
Maxwell: I think this win shows the country: Don't count us out. Don't count out young people.
Arit: And since it's a very blue district, he's expected to sort of sail to Congress. But he still has to beat his opponent, Calvin Wimbish, who is 51, and he is retired from the Army.
Gustavo: And then Karoline Leavitt. What's she about?
Arit: Karoline Leavitt. She's running in New Hampshire's 1st District against Chris Pappas in a toss-up race.
Arit: It's going to be very competitive. You have Pappas, who's sort of been running as more of a moderate Democrat focused on, you know, this is what Democrats have done in office, but also I'm distancing myself from Biden when I need to. And then Karoline Leavett, she's 25. She was a former communications director for Elise Stefanik, the House Republican Conference chair. And she also is a veteran of the Trump campaign.
Karoline: My radical-in-disguise representative Chris Pappas has been voting in lock step with Nancy Pelosi and in just six months we've seen the disastrous effects of that agenda and spending uncontrolled spending that my generation is going to be having to pay for and foot that bill. That's why I'm standing up to fight.
Arit: And if she won, she would be the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
Karoline: I've been crisscrossing the state since I've been home, and the energy for conservative change in New Hampshire is absolutely real.
Arit: Policy-wise, she's very much a MAGA, America First candidate. She said in the past that she thinks that Trump won in 2020, but she also acknowledges that Biden is the president now, and that's part of why she's running. She's all about low taxes, less regulation. She also has taken up some of these Republican talking points, like Democrats are trying to quote “indoctrinate” children in schools. Um, she's accused Biden and Nancy Pelosi of ruining the economy.
Gustavo: I can see why the few Gen Zers running for Congress are getting so much national attention. It's D.C. after all, you know? It's prominent. But what about on the more local level? Are you seeing Gen Zers also run for local offices?
Arit: Yeah, we're seeing a lot of Gen Z candidates in state legislature races. I talked to two: Madeline Ryan Smith, who's a Democrat running to flip a rural Georgia district.
Madeline Ryan Smith: I decided to run about a year ago, and that was kind of not really in my plan. I was actually still a college student when I decided to run for office but I knew that our district needed some change. We need it desperately. We need it now. And we need it in a lot of different areas. And I do not believe that our current representation is up to the task. And I know that I am. So here we are.
Arit: And I talked to Elliott Engen, who's a Republican, or he would say a conservative, running in a district outside of Minneapolis.
Elliott Engen: I am 24. I turned 24 last week on Thursday, so I'm definitely on the younger side of things, but, um, yeah. It's been good to kind of go to doors and see how people react to that.
Arit: You know, talking to these candidates, I think it's clear that their age is sort of a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, there are people who are really excited at the idea of younger candidates getting into office. For Republicans, that's a chance to reach out to younger voters who tend to vote for Democrats. And for Democrats, younger candidates tend to be more progressive and they bring a new energy with. The problem they face is that they don't have the same level of experience as the candidates that they're running against.
Madeline: You know, you don't hear about young people running for office. It's just not something that we do. And I truly believe it's because we don't feel like we have a seat at the table. And I knew that my largest skeleton in my closet was the fact that I was young and I didn't really have any real experience. But if that's the worst thing people say about me, then you know, that's all right.
Arit: Madeline Ryan Smith is running against an incumbent who's decades older than her. And she's running as a woman. And you know, as a woman, I think there's the sense across all fields that you want to be taken seriously and you're concerned that you won't be because of the way you look or because of your age. There's a sense that you need to present yourself a certain way.
Madeline: I did not want my appearance as a young woman to be something that was sexualized, or something that was the first thing that people looked at, was just this young person who's pretty and doesn't really know anything, you know?
Arit: And Ryan Smith definitely talked to me about that. And the ways that she tries to present herself as sort of, these are just my ideas, these are my policies. Don't focus so much on my youth.
Gustavo: You mentioned earlier the two congressional Gen Z candidates, and one seems to be emblematic of the left side of the Democratic Party, and the other seems to be on the right, the more conservative side of the Republican Party. But how much does Gen Z fall under that two-party paradigm? In other words, if you're a liberal Gen Zer, are you automatically going to go Democrat?
Arit: So the thing about Gen Z is that they don't have the same loyalty to parties as past generations. They're more likely to want to register as independents or call themselves liberals or conservatives instead of Democrats or Republicans. At the same time, there's definitely a clear trend in how they voted. You look back at 2020 and 65% of Gen Z voters picked Biden over Trump. There's also a sense that Gen Z voters care more about specific issues and how parties are going to address them.
Arit: Madeline Ryan Smith, she talked about how Gen Z voters really care about housing costs because they’re not old enough or established enough to be homeowners the same way that older generations are.
Madeline: We care about certain things, and other things that involve politics kind of goes over our heads. So, you know, we care about things like minimum wage and affordable housing and cannabis legalization, for example. But we don't care as much about, you know, the housing market because none of us own houses or you know, how the economy is affecting our taxes or this, that and the other.
Arit: Elliott Engen talks about how some on the right are more likely to want to identify as conservative or libertarian. They were turned off by the Republican label during the Trump era, but still care about those more conservative values.
Elliott: I mean, at the core tenet of conservatism is believing that the individual is, um, is capable of doing great things and that politicians shouldn't always be having to tell that individual how to live their life.
Arit: And he's tried to, at least in his campaign, portray conservatism as just being about the policies versus what the national conversation has been about.
Elliott: So I think that, uh, being a young, uh, conservative, I tend to refrain away from the term Republican cause that can come with bad connotations. We have to start showing that we are compassionate, that our policies really just allow people to live their lives and strive to be whoever they want to be. So that's my job, uh, to go and prove that to voters, that we do have an optimistic outlook on the future of America.
Gustavo: After the break, the issues that are top of mind for Generation Z.
Gustavo: Arit, so what's bringing Gen Z out to the midterms?
Arit: Gen Z voters in polls really show that they care about a lot of these social justice issues, like same-sex marriage, racial equality, LGBTQ rights. They care about climate change and what the government is doing to prevent it. They care about gun control.
Xavier: It's issues such as disabled rights, the rights of people of color, rights of LGBT people, um, that is drawing me to voting…
Camila: I live in the L.A. County. Another one would be homelessness because it is rising and it's gonna get to a point where it's gonna become way too hard to manage, as we've seen in the last couple of years.
Arit: And then specifically as we head into this election, a lot of the issues that young voters care about are the issues that other voters care about. They care about inflation, the cost of goods. They care about just the sense that the economy is not working for them the way they'd like it to.
So the Harvard Institute of Politics does a regular poll of young voters, and in their spring 2022 poll, they found that 36% of young voters feel that being involved in politics doesn't have any tangible results for them. 42% said that they believe that voting doesn't make a difference. And more than half said that politics today are no longer able to meet the challenges that the country is facing. And 85% of young Americans said that they favor some action on student loan debt but even that's not universal. Only 38% said they favor total debt cancellation. And I got a chance to speak with Judith Browne Dianis, who is the executive director of the Advancement Project, which is a nonprofit that works on racial justice issues. And she said that the shift isn't surprising.
Judith Browne Dianis: The past few times that we've done these polls, racial discrimination and structural racism, like, ranks like, number one. But number one was inflation. And so that's not surprising. We're talking about young people, some of whom are adulting right now. And the things that they keyed in on inflation were like just the cost of daily goods and necessities and the cost of housing. Racism and discrimination were number two.
Arit: They did their own survey of Gen Z voters and found that, you know, among people of color, that systemic and structural racism used to be a top issue. But now that's been bumped down to number two, again, to being replaced with concerns about inflation.
Gustavo: You mentioned earlier that Gen Z voters supported Biden more than other generations, but how do they feel about his accomplishments so far?
Arit: I think the, the Gen Z vote in 2020 for Biden was more of an anti-Trump vote than a pro-Biden vote. Gallup found that Biden has a 39% approval rating with young voters and, you know, digging into that a little bit deeper, the Harvard poll found that there's a sense that the Biden administration hasn't been effective, hasn't been following through at some of their campaign promises, and maybe doesn't share their values.
Xavier: I hope for the best, but at the same time, I'm not delusional. Over the years I've seen kind of the flakiness of certain Democratic politicians. As you know, compared to certain Republican politicians who are not as much flaky as much as like comically evil, but um, the Biden administration is of course, you know, a disappointment, but I expected nothing less.
Arit: And I think that's why we've seen in the last few months, like the Biden administration, you know, released their plan on student debt relief. Just try to like really emphasize the accomplishments that they've had on infrastructure, on the Inflation Reduction Act, to try to just get this message across, not just to Gen Z, but to all generations, that they are actually fulfilling their campaign promises, and that if you do vote for Democrats, you will get something in return.
Gustavo: There's so many issues, obviously for the midterms, but one of the biggest ones from this past summer was the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. How is that influencing Gen Z voters?
Arit: That's definitely a top issue, especially for young women.
Camila: The right to an abortion, as a woman of color, I feel like that's very important to me.
Arit: Gen Z one is not as religious as past generations and they actually really support the right to abortion access. Three out of 4 Gen Z voters support abortion rights broadly, and only 3 in 10 say that they believe abortion is morally wrong.
I think that this is like a very visceral issue for especially a lot of people of reproductive age who are seeing themselves losing the rights that past generations have had to abortion access. I mean, we're seeing even the risk of losing access to contraceptive care or to Plan B. And so we've seen a lot of data that suggests that young women are registering at higher rates, especially in swing states. I mean, we saw in Kansas with the ballot proposal that would have allowed more abortion restrictions in the state, like that was soundly defeated, and young women voters were a big part of that.
Gustavo: More after the break.
Gustavo: Arit, you mentioned earlier an interesting stat to me that since the last election there's 8 million new voters cause they're old enough to vote from Gen Z. So how much outreach are these political parties doing to get them?
Arit: I think this is about reaching voters where they are and a lot of Gen Z voters are on TikTok. A big chunk of them say that they also get their news mainly from the app.
And a lot of candidates are trying to reach them on the app. They're Senate candidates like Tim Ryan, a Democrat in Ohio, or Dr. Oz, who's running as a Republican in Pennsylvania, and we have Rep. Katie Porter in California. All of them are hopping onto TikTok Trends to sort of get people to go vote early, to remind them to request their ballot and to go vote on Nov. 8.
TikTok clip: Get in, loser. We're going voting.
Arit: And the major leaders in the Democratic Party are also making a big outreach push to young voters on TikTok. For example, Obama has appeared in a couple of viral TikTok videos encouraging people to go out and vote, including one with Under the Desk News:
Obama, on TikTok: What are you, what are you doing under my desk?
V: Well, under the desk is kind of my thing, I mean.
Obama: But here's the thing. You can stay for now, but when it comes time to voting, you're gonna have to get up because you've got climate change legislation on the ballot. You've got gun safety. And if we can elect more pro-choice members of Congress, we can reinstitute Roe vs. Wade as the law of the land. So…
Arit: And then there's Biden, who recently did a TikTok with his Gen Z granddaughter, Natalie Biden, when she went to vote for the first time.
Natalie Biden, on TikTok: Hey, I'm Natalie Biden and I just turned 18 and I'm going to vote for the first time with my pop.
President Biden: I'm so excited for her. It's the first time, the first vote. God love her.
Gustavo: So the candidates that you mentioned earlier, Maxwell Frost and Karoline Leavitt, what's their footprint on any of social media? Do, like, do they break it down depending on what the social media is? Because I'm an old man, so I do have cable news, and I just see nothing but political ads on TV, but I don't use TikTok, so I wouldn’t know what's going on in TikTok.
Arit: You know, it's funny, like those particular candidates, Maxwell Frost has a TikTok, but he hasn't really invested in it that much, and Karoline Leavitt doesn't have one. But even though they're not on it, their names as hashtags are still trending on there. I mean, because for Gen Z, that is like the news source, obviously Gen Z is not on Facebook. Twitter is not the main source of news, newspapers, TV, I mean TikTok, for about like three-quarters of Gen Z voters, that is the main news source.
Gustavo: Finally, Arit. OK… So you have all these new voters and they're running for office, and the parties know that if you could get that vote, that's gonna be great for them. But survey after survey over generations show again, young people vote at lower numbers than older people, and there's less of a turnout in midterm elections than in general elections. So… how important can getting that Gen Z vote be for those parties, but also how do you get those young people to come out to vote?
Arit: You know, especially now in this midterm where there are so many races that are gonna be determined by 10,000, 30,000, 50,000 votes, if you have 8 million new voters across the country, like, you have to try to reach out to them. But I think the challenge that both parties face is, you know, young voters are less engaged in, especially, midterm elections, especially on the Democratic side, there's been such a big focus on who's gonna be president and national politics, and there's less focus on determining Congress in the off years. And even less focus on, who is in control of the state legislature, who's the governor in your state, who is on the city council where you live. But you know, talking to Judith Browne Dianis, she said that the key issue is that you have to make young voters feel like their vote matters and their vote will lead to tangible results.
Judith: Gen Z voters really are not in tune with midterms, right? Everybody focuses so much on the presidential elections so that they really didn't kind of understand that there were midterm elections for many of them, or they didn't have the information to participate. So that's really important, right, that we tend to focus on presidential elections, but we know how much is at stake in the midterms. And so for young voters of color they're motivated when they know that they have the power to make change.
Arit: Because if people don't think that their vote matters, they're not gonna take those extra steps to register. They're not gonna take those extra steps to request their ballots. I think back to Madeline Ryan Smith. One thing she said is that there is a big university in her otherwise rural district, and one of the challenges she's facing is that a lot of the young voters there, they are registered back home, like wherever they grew up or at their parents' house.
And if those voters instead would request the ballots there in her district where they live, that could make a big difference in her race.
Madeline: So we've been doing a lot of work this year getting college students registered where they currently live and where they go to school, because those local elections for them matter.
Arit: So it's about engaging voters, helping them understand what are the stakes in their election, and also just like making it clear that the process to getting registered to voting is not maybe as complex as they think, especially for these first-time voters.
Gustavo: Arit, thank you so much for this conversation.
Arit: Thanks for having me.
Gustavo: And that’s it for this episode of The Times: Essential News from The L.A. Times.
David Toledo, Denise Guerra and Madalyn Amato were the jefes on this episode, and Mario Diaz mixed and mastered it.
Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Roberto Reyes and Nicolas Perez. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back Wednesday with all the news and desmadre. And don’t forget to vote whether you’re Gen Z, Gen X, millennial, Greatest Generation, or my generation: the shaking your fist at the cloud generation.
Gracias.