“I wanted to prove I could build a successful digital outreach campaign and show the importance of social media grassroots in elections,” Carrol, 18, said.
The page now reaches as many as 1 million people a week, has collected 19,000 likes and has brought 1,000 donors to Buttigieg’s campaign through a customized fundraising link.
Carrol’s effort is not a surprising one. Dating back at least to the sit-ins against segregation in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 and subsequent activism by young people in the 1960s, youth-led movements have often helped define political moments.
Reflecting the emphasis being put on young voters in the 2020 race, five Democratic presidential candidates are scheduled to answer questions from students and young voters in CNN town hall-style events Monday beginning at 7 p.m. from Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire.
The Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 and a focus on young voters in the 2018 midterm elections has put increasing emphasis on them as an important demographic, particularly for Democrats. Nearly 60 percent of people 18-24 say they are Democrats, while just a third say they are Republicans, according to an analysis of Pew Research Center data over the last year.
But it remains to be seen whether young voters will turn out on a large scale. Even with the youthful support for Sanders in 2016, a study by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement found that Sanders “did not inspire a surge in turnout from young Democrats.” Less than 20 percent of young voters turned out in primaries in Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire, according to exit polling by Edison Research.
Still, Democrats see enormous potential.
“Young voters are listed as low-propensity voters,” said Louis Elrod, president of the Young Democrats of America, the youth arm of the Democratic Party. He explained that because many young people do not donate to campaigns, or do not have a voting record yet, campaigns usually do not take the time to talk to them like they would other voters. “You hear this bias all the time that young people are apathetic. We’re not apathetic.”
In the past four years, young people have called for big structural economic and social changes by forming organizations such as March for Our Lives, United We Dream and the Sunrise Movement. The ferment is a reaction both to the Trump administration and to legislative decisions of older generations who will not bear the full brunt of their decisions on issues like climate change and student debt.
“This election feels like a question of our generation and how it will shape the next 20 to 30 years of this country,” said Greisa Martinez, deputy executive director of United We Dream, an immigrant youth-led group that supports migrants, regardless of their documentation status.
“Our lives are on the line,” she added. “We are going to do everything possible to elect the right people with vision and with gut and with leadership.”
Democratic 2020 hopefuls have taken note and are trying to tap into this generational energy by promoting progressive issues that are animating young voters.
“You see most campaigns taking up Bernie’s talking points from 2016 — it’s become the norm now,” Elrod said. What used to be seen as far-left platform positions, he said, are now “standard if you want to reach out to the next generation.”
Climate change, health care, immigration reform and creating a more functional economy are central concerns for two generations, millennials and Generation Z, who often align ideologically when it comes to more progressive issues but come from different eras.
“These young people who are different stages in their lives will be the ones making more decisions in the future,” Martinez said.
People born from the 1980s through the mid-1990s are generally considered millennials, and those born afterward are Generation Z.
“Four years ago, millennials were pretty much the youngest voting generation,” Elrod said. “They remember the time before the internet. The next generation is going to be the best-informed generation in American history. They’re going to be the largest generation in American history and the most diverse generation in American history.”
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2020 1 out of every 10 eligible voters will be a member of Generation Z, and millennials “will account for a smaller share of eligible voters than they did in 2016.”
For many campaigns, youth outreach has mostly been focused on engaging college campuses.
“Right now, the way that we’re thinking about organizing young people is through the institutions they are a part of, so college students and high school students,” said Yong Jung Cho, constituency organizing director for the 2020 Sanders campaign.
Chris Hayden, a spokesman for Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said the campaign would include “an expansive digital operation that includes traditional social media platforms and channels like peer-to-peer texting,” and that its strategies were being led by youth vote directors based in Boston and Iowa.
Elrod said a focus on campuses can leave out many younger voters.
“There is that perception that all young people are in a college campus,” he said, “and while that is extraordinarily important, what we have found and have been pushing for is that the party and campaigns need to push for young people not in college, earlier rather than later.”
Michael Bossetta, a fellow at the Center for European Politics at the University of Copenhagen, who specializes in new forms of political participation through social media, noticed through his research of Facebook ads that Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington were among the candidates aggressively targeting people ages 18-25. He said that even though younger voters cannot donate as much as older generations, “they have more tech skills that can create very organic messaging and growth.”
As a case in point, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur and a political newcomer who has run a campaign oriented toward social media, has reached the threshold of at least 65,000 individual donors needed to participate in the Democratic debates this summer. Some more established candidates, like the former housing secretary Julián Castro, still have not reached it.
Breaking down policies into bite-size components that can be expressed visually on social media platforms like Instagram can help tap into younger people online, Bossetta said.
“It’s this concept of light politics,” he said. “The content that is sort of shareable, light in the sense that it can travel across social media, and not heavy in terms of policy. They’re sort of very universal messages.”
For the Yang campaign, “being a memeable person” is important, said Zach Graumann, Yang’s campaign manager. He added that memes made candidates seem accessible and approachable.
“That’s where $1,000 a month is memeable,” Graumann said, referring to the campaign’s signature proposal of a universal basic income that the government would provide to every American adult.
Some fear that reducing issues to Instagram-friendly images and memes can produce hollow and superficial politics, but Bossetta said young people can be astute, skeptical consumers of news.
“They’re pretty good at what’s authentic and what’s not,’’ he said. “They’re so in tune with the idiosyncrasies of the social and cultural dynamics of these platforms that they know when something is totally scripted, slightly scripted or genuine.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.