CHICAGO (AP) — “Brat Harris,” “We need a Kamalano Menon,” “Gen Z is feeling the Kamala Love.”
Since President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Gen Z voters have flocked to social media to share coconut tree and “Brat Summer” memes, reflecting a marked shift in tone for a generation that feels left behind by the Democratic Party.
Youth-led progressive groups have been warning for months that Biden has a problem with young voters, urging the president to work more closely with them and refocus on the issues that matter most to them or risk losing their votes. With Biden out of the race, many of these young leaders are hoping that Harris can overcome his decline in support with Gen Z and capitalize on a new burst of energy among young voters.
Since last Sunday, a flurry of statements have been released from youth-led groups across the country, including in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, California, Minnesota, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, with leaders thanking Biden for stepping down and celebrating the opportunity to field a new candidate. On Friday, a coalition of 17 youth-led groups endorsed Harris.
“This changed everything,” Zo Tobi, a spokesman for the Movement Voter Project, a national progressive funding group that focuses on youth-led organizations, said when they heard the news that Biden was dropping out of the race and endorsing Harris. “All of a sudden, the world as it is has turned into a world of what could be.”
As the campaign enters a new phase, both Harris and her Republican rival Donald Trump are targeting young voters who could have a decisive influence in some of the most battleground states.
Harris recorded a short video message that was screened at a conference of Gen Z activists and elected officials in Atlanta on Saturday.
“I know young voters are key and I know your vote is not taken for granted,” Harris told the rally, highlighting her support for gun safety, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights and climate change action.
Eve Levenson, the Harris campaign’s national youth engagement director, spoke at the conference in Atlanta and praised the response of young voters across the country to the vice president’s elevation to the front-runner position.
“It’s amazing to see the tremendous enthusiasm from young people online, but even more amazing to see that online energy is already translating into a tangible desire to take action and get involved in our campaign,” she said, citing new voter registrations, small donations from young voters and requests from students for help setting up campus-based campaign organizations.
Speaking at a faith conference hosted by Turning Point USA in Florida on Friday, Trump slammed Harris as an “incompetent” and “far-left” vice president and vowed to champion the cause of religious Americans in his second term as president.
“With your vote, I will protect religious freedom in all its forms,” Trump told conservative groups focused on high school, college and university campuses. “I will protect Christians in our schools, in the military, in our government, in our workplaces, in our hospitals and in our public places. And I will protect other religions, too.”
John Della Volpe, polling director at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Politics, who has worked with Biden, said he hasn’t seen “white-hot energy” among young people since President Barack Obama’s campaign. While there are few reliable polls at the moment, he described the movement as “a combination of the hope we saw in the Obama campaign and the urgency and fighting spirit we saw after the Parkland shooting.”
In many ways, this was the first time many young people felt their voices were being heard and that their actions could have a political impact, he and several other young leaders said.
“This election has been a fundamental reset,” he said. “People, particularly young people, have been disappointed with politics and the direction of the country for a long time, for a lot of important reasons. It’s been weighing on them. And then they wake up the next morning and it seems like everything has changed.”
About 6 in 10 adults under 30 voted for Biden in 2020, according to AP VoteCast, but Biden’s approval rating among that group has dropped significantly since then, with only about a quarter of that group saying they have a favorable view of Biden in the most recent AP-NORC poll, conducted before Biden dropped out of the race.
This poll, along with a New York Times/Siena/CNN poll conducted after Biden withdrew from the race, suggests that Harris is slightly more favorable than Biden among younger voters.
Sanjay Muralitharan, vice president of the National Association of College Democrats, said he felt like a weight had been lifted off his chest when Harris entered the race.
There had been monthly calls for collaboration between youth-led groups and the Biden campaign, but Murairitharan had been concerned for months about how Biden would be perceived among young voters, as she saw young people leaving groups like the College Democrats and Young Democrats to join more left-leaning groups.
In statements and social media posts, the College Democrats have urged the party to prioritize young people and change course on the Gaza war, and have “worked tirelessly to bring the College Democrats program to fruition” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later this summer. But Muralitharan said they have received limited outreach in return.
Harris’ campaign is an opportunity to move in a new direction, he said. The vice president has been a vocal supporter of issues important to younger voters, such as climate change and reproductive rights, he said, adding that Harris could also change tack and distance herself from Biden’s approach to the Gaza war.
“The perennial obstacle we’ve run into is Biden being the lesser of two evils and his impact on the Gaza crisis,” he said. “For months we’ve been given this broken script and it’s been hard to organize young voters. But that’s now changing.”
Santiago Mayer, executive director of Voters of Tomorrow, a Gen Z voter engagement organization, said the Biden campaign has “created a whole new framework for working with youth organizations” that can now transition to supporting the Harris campaign.
“Generation Z loves Vice President Harris and Vice President Harris loves Generation Z,” he said. “So we’re ready to work for her.”
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Associated Press writer Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
