Will Young Voters’ Initial Excitement for Harris Build Enough Momentum to Get Them to the Polls?

Last night, the youth-led activist group Climate Defiance—which had loudly called for Joe Biden to withdraw his bid for reelection earlier this year—endorsed Kamala Harris for president. But, despite that support and soaring enthusiasm from young people after Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, with 40 days left until the election, excitement has cooled off among many young voters who are prioritizing climate and calling for stronger commitments from the candidate.

After the Sept. 10 debate, some young voters and climate groups were unimpressed by both candidates’ support for oil and gas production, voicing dismay over Harris’ shift to the center on climate.

“If Harris wants to win, she needs to be far more progressive than she was tonight,” wrote Gen-Z for Change on X after the debate. “She needs to ban fracking, support public transit, secure a permanent ceasefire, and more.” 

But the group prioritized defeating the Republican presidential candidate: “Regardless, Trump is dangerous,” the post continued. “Trump is a racist. Trump is a fa(s)cist dictator. We need to stop Trump.”

The Sunrise Movement stated that the debate was a “missed opportunity” for Harris to contrast her record on climate with Trump’s. 

“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the youth-led organization wrote.

Both groups had been strong voices on the left calling for Biden to cease his reelection bid, and had voiced optimism about Harris’ potential to support swift action on the climate crisis, citing her past support of policies like the Green New Deal and her legal prosecution of oil and gas companies. Gen Z for Change and the Sunrise Movement are among the many progressive organizations phone banking, canvassing and otherwise pushing for youth voter turnout in swing states. But according to some activists, the Harris campaign isn’t doing enough to inspire young people to show up to the polls.

The voter outreach nonprofit Vote.org reported a 585 percent increase in voter registration and verifications the night of the debate, and a link Taylor Swift posted on Instagram that night to Vote.gov with her long-awaited endorsement of Harris reportedly received more than 400,000 clicks within 24 hours, more than half of the website’s overall visits that day.

But some young voters are still calling for more concrete policy from Harris.

“Honestly, young people have grown up seeing politicians share platitudes that they never live up to, and part of what we are just merely asking is, what is your plan?” asked John Paul Mejia, a 22-year-old Sunrise organizer based in Washington, D.C. “For Harris to meaningfully win over young people, she should show the electorate broadly, but also young people, what she’s fighting for.”

Wavering Enthusiasm as Election Day Nears

For months, Biden seemed to have drawn out everything but passion from young voters frustrated with his mixed record on climate, angered by his lack of empathy for Palestinian deaths, despairing at his debate performance, disdainful of his age and disenchanted with the U.S. electoral system in general. In the spring, some polls showed Biden, who won young voters by a more than 20-point margin in 2020, struggling to maintain a lead over Trump with Millenial and Gen Z voters. Even young people who vehemently oppose Trump weren’t enthused by Biden, and were loudly and publicly urging him to step down.

When he finally did and Harris announced her candidacy, the political winds seemed to change. Within two days Vote.org saw a 700 percent spike in voter registrations, the largest increase in the entire election cycle, higher than after the Sept. 10 debate and even higher than when Taylor Swift promoted voter registration last year. Of those 38,500 newly registered voters, 83 percent were under 34 years old, Vote.org reported.

It is an outrage that Party Elites have hatched a nefarious plot to foist Biden upon a base that is desperate to get rid of him. 65% of Democratic voters want Biden off the ticket yet senior "leaders" have formed a suicide pact with him. This cannot go on!! This must stop!! pic.twitter.com/m5RPqids8x

— Climate Defiance (@ClimateDefiance) July 19, 2024

The day after Harris announced her candidacy for president, Shiv Soin, a 23-year-old climate activist and director of the youth-led environmental justice organization, Treeage, in New York City, said that he was feeling energy he hadn’t seen in years.

“I think in the last 24 hours, there has been more excitement in the Democratic Party than there has been since Obama,” Soin said.

According to an August poll from NextGen America, a progressive nonprofit focused on increasing youth voter turnout, motivation to cast ballots had grown among young people in battleground states since the spring, with 78 percent saying they are “extremely motivated” to vote in August, compared with 68 percent in March. 

Both Trump and Harris’ campaigns are courting young voters. Trump has enlisted Gen Z social media influencers like video game streamer Adin Ross and Tik Toker Bryce Hall to try to reach conservative youth online, while the Harris campaign’s rapid-response social media accounts have latched onto viral trends like coconut tree memes—alluding to a Harris comment widely shared online—and pop music references. But the age group leans Democratic.

In the swing states NextGen polled, Harris has drawn support from 68 percent of young “double haters”—voters who disapproved of both Biden and Trump—compared with Trump’s 6 percent. Previously, Biden took 29 percent of double haters in those states and Trump took 9 percent.

Harris’ pick of Tim Walz also garnered praise from young climate leaders, who pointed out his support of clean energy transition legislation in Minnesota, while others criticized his approval of the Line 3 pipeline that carries Canadian tar sands oil through the state.

Days after Harris’ campaign announcement, Sunrise Movement communications director Stevie O’Hanlon called her candidacy a “game-changer” that would put “millions of young voters in play,” and could lead to “historic” youth voter turnout. 

But a week after the first debate, the initial excitement from young climate voters seems to be fading, she said. 

“In the weeks after Biden dropped out…there was a real upsurge of enthusiasm and energy among young people, and I think a lot of hope among people who felt disappointed by President Biden that she would strike a different course,” O’Hanlon said. “I think there are ways that she has struck another course, and there are also ways where she has stood by some of Biden’s unpopular policies with young people. I think she is a little bit at a turning point now, as we are about 50 days out from the election, about how much deep enthusiasm is she going to be able to draw?”

Sunrise has said publicly it intends to reach more than 1.5 million young voters through phone, face-to-face and digital outreach in support of the Harris campaign. As of September 19, Sunrise reported that it has reached more than 350,000 young voters in swing states and plans to ramp up its outreach in the coming weeks. Gen Z for Change, the League of Conservation Voters, NextGen America and Hip Hop Caucus are also doing outreach to young climate voters.

“We make our demands based not on what is convenient or easy but what is absolutely necessary.”

— Michael Greenberg, Climate Defiance founder

O’Hanlon said that most undecided voters the group has contacted are deciding between Harris or abstention from the election, and said she thinks that Harris’ support of fracking during the debate—combined with what she sees as the lack of a comprehensive climate platform, and a failure to take a stronger stance on Gaza—will lose her points with some undecided young voters.

“I think it really hurts her credibility with young voters who feel like they’ve been burned before by politicians and aren’t super willing to give grace to politicians right now,” O’Hanlon said.

Michael Greenberg, founder of Climate Defiance, met with Harris’ chief climate advisor, Ike Irby, on September 3rd, and said that he urged the campaign to support an end to fossil fuel subsidies and exports, as well as a phase down of domestic fossil fuel use, including shutting down projects like the Line 3 pipeline. 

“We make our demands based not on what is convenient or easy but what is absolutely necessary,” Greenberg said. “We recognize that there’s obviously a tremendous difference between Trump and Kamala on climate, but we need Kamala to go bolder.”

On September 9th, the organization posted a critique on X alongside a screenshot of the paragraph-long climate plan on Harris’ campaign website. 

“What is this? A policy platform for ants, @KamalaHarris? The climate proposal needs to be at least three times bigger,” the post stated.

At a fundraiser on September 24th, however, Climate Defiance endorsed Harris for president. Greenberg said that the decision to do so came after discussions with staff and the organization’s board, and a survey of members, in which he estimated about three-quarters of the votes went toward endorsing Harris and the rest went to third-party candidates.

“Obviously she’s not perfect at all but we’d rather protest her and try to move her than be protesting Trump who is worse and who we are not as well positioned to move,” Greenberg said, the day before the event. “It’s a crucial time and it’s important that we play our part in saving our country from tyranny.”

In early September, Sunrise Movement, Gen Z for Change, the Green New Deal Network and the Climate and Community Project released “Unity 2025,” a platform advocating for clean energy investments, climate-smart farming, public investments in affordable housing and more. The effort to counter Project 2025, a policy wish list for a second Trump administration spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation, is billed as a way to urge Harris to listen to young voters who want to see real policy commitments from her campaign.

Sunrise’s executive director, Aru Shiney-Ajay, has had multiple meetings with the Harris campaign, including with Irby and new climate engagement director Camila Thorndike. Shiney-Ajay said that her meetings have focused on showing the campaign that there’s an active base of climate-interested young voters who could be mobilized by stronger commitments from the campaign.

“[Harris] seems to think that she needs to tack to the center on climate and that just isn’t necessarily what polling shows or at least our efforts on the ground show,” she said. “In my opinion, it’s a little bit of a miscalculation.”

Across the Political Spectrum, Young Voters Want Climate Action

In recent years, young voters from both major parties have consistently ranked climate as a top issue, and in this year’s election, it’s more of a priority for them than ever: An Environmental Voter Project poll released last month found that 40 percent of young voters in key battleground states wouldn’t vote for a candidate that doesn’t prioritize “addressing climate change,” calling it a “deal breaker.” An additional 40 percent said they would “prefer” a candidate who prioritized climate change. 

Youth groups on the left have loudly pressured Harris to take swift action against the fossil fuel industry. A coalition of youth-led organizations including groups focused on climate, immigration and gun control issued a set of policy demands for Harris, emphasizing ending fossil fuel subsidies, investing in green housing and stopping approval of new oil and gas projects.

Meanwhile, Trump, a frequent espouser of climate denial, has promised to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, ramp up domestic oil and gas drilling and repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s landmark climate law and the biggest investment in slowing global warming in U.S. history.

That may be putting some conservative youth votes in play.

Danielle Butcher Franz, CEO of the American Conservation Coalition, a group bringing conservative youth together to advocate for environmental protections, said that the Republican party’s failure to platform policy addressing climate change is losing them support from young conservatives. 

Currently, nearly a quarter of Congress espouses some form of climate denial, but Franz said that young Republicans aren’t on board with such messages. And, while climate might not be enough to motivate staunch conservatives to vote Democrat, it might push them to abstain from the election, she said. 

“There’s a huge electoral liability for politicians who are still stuck in those types of rhetoric circles,” Franz, 27, said. “It is something that you see both sides of the aisle of young conservatives and young progressives pushing back against, because it’s just not the reality that we live in.”

Daniel Rissanen, 22, grew up in a conservative family in Georgia and always considered himself a Republican. He voted for Trump in his first election in 2020, but after the January 6 insurrection he felt alienated from the party he’d grown up in. Now Rissanen identifies as an Independent, and if he had to vote today he’d choose Harris, although he has also considered voting for a third-party candidate. Either way, he is actively discouraging his friends from voting for Trump.

“The election no longer feels as tense, as violent, as pressurized, as it did when we thought it was Biden-Trump, which is a relief, I think, for the country in general,” Rissanen said.

Climate change is a priority for Rissanen, a recent college graduate and computer numerical control machinist at a fabrication shop in Atlanta. One of his top issues is conservation, with a particular focus on public lands. Seeing Trump gut protections for public lands and sell or lease them off to the highest bidder made him even less enthusiastic about his candidacy. 

“Our public lands in this country are really important for people to…get away and get out in nature,” Rissanen said. “It’s also really important to conserve those ecosystems to help slow climate change.”

Like many voters across age groups, Rissanen hadn’t heard of the Inflation Reduction Act, but when he learned what it was he was enthusiastic and said it was the type of information that had potential to influence his vote toward Harris.

Polling from NextGen in battleground states found that two-thirds of young voters had heard of the IRA, but according to the Environmental Voters Project, 38 percent of young battleground voters reported not knowing much, if anything, about the bill. Only 35 percent knew it included climate provisions. 

Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, executive director of NextGen, said that the organization is prioritizing educating young people about the IRA and its provisions, emphasizing opportunities for green jobs.

“When young people learn about what the Inflation Reduction Act is, they overwhelmingly support it and are excited about it,” she said.

But climate action is not a priority for all young voters, and some young conservatives are still staunch supporters of Trump. According to NextGen’s latest poll, 40 percent of voters 18-35 in battleground states are planning to vote for Trump, compared with 57 percent for Harris.

Jordyn Landau, a 27-year-old resident of Ames, Iowa, voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and plans to vote for him again this year. She was originally drawn to him because he seemed like an outsider to politics, and at this point, she doesn’t think there’s much Trump could do to lose her vote. 

A certified scuba diver, Landau said that she cares about clean air, clean water and marine wildlife, and believes in climate change. 

“We all want our environment to thrive,” Landau said. “We don’t want the end of the world because of different natural disasters and stuff like that… I feel like we all have the same end goal, we just have different ways of thinking of how we should go about that.”

Landau said she would support government incentives for small businesses to “go green,” but added that she fears a swift transition could hurt communities like hers.

“I just don’t want to be forced to do something that will cost me a lot of money, or hurt my community,” Landau said. “But also…I’m a big advocate for clean oceans and protecting our ecosystems that way.” 

The Inflation Reduction act does provide tax credits for small businesses to go green by installing solar power infrastructure or purchasing clean transportation vehicles, for example, and estimates it will make a $24.6 billion investment in clean power generation and storage in Iowa before 2030.

But ultimately, Landau emphasized that her top issues are immigration and the economy, specifically tightening restrictions on the U.S.-Mexico border and combating inflation. Climate and the environment aren’t likely to influence her vote, she said.

“Climate is not something I think about day-to-day,” Landau said. 

Third-Party Converts

In a March poll of voters from 18 to 29 years old nationwide conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics, 18 percent said they would support one of three third party candidates: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West, or Jill Stein. A March poll from NextGen America found that in key battleground states—Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia—20 percent of voters between 18 and 35 were third-party supporters.

In NextGen’s latest poll, conducted in August before RFK Jr. dropped out and endorsed Trump, the number of youth voters supporting a third-party presidential candidate had halved, to 10 percent. 

In June, 22-year old Texan Noor Shaikh posted a video on Tik Tok explaining her choice to vote for a third-party candidate, arguing against blind party loyalty. But after Biden dropped out, she made a new video responding to her original. 

“I will be voting third-party,” said Shaikh in June, before getting cut off by her July self. “I will now be voting for Kamala Harris,” she said, with a sigh. 

Alison Potts, a 32-year old administrative worker in New Jersey had also considered abstaining from the election because of the war on Gaza, but has also decided to vote as a method of reducing harm. Potts said she sees both climate change and abortion as “issues of life or death.” 

“At the end of the day, [climate is] one of the things that was going to sway me, regardless, to vote with the Democratic Party,” Potts said. “The detriment we do now when it comes to climate change is going to be lasting for the next generation.”

Choosing Not to Vote

Some young voters aren’t ready to forgive Harris for the sins of the Biden administration.

Jana El-Gengaihy, a 17-year-old high school senior in Scottsdale, Arizona, will turn 18 just in time to vote this year, but she’s not sure she will go to the polls. El-Gengaihy, who volunteers with a local hub of the Sunrise Movement, said her top issues are Palestine and the climate crisis. She does not support Trump, and she’s slightly more hopeful about Harris than she was about Biden, but she’s still not convinced that Harris will take young voters’ grievances seriously. 

“It just doesn’t sit right with me that voting for either of them means that I’m continuing this genocide,” she said.

Low turnout by younger voters has often been met with derision from both major parties, particularly Democrats, who typically get more youth votes. Soin said this is a disrespectful way to look at a constituency with valid reasons to feel apathetic about Congress and the presidency. 

“They’re not making the case effectively for young voters to turn out and vote,” Soin, who is planning to vote for Harris, said. “Not voting is a decision that people are making. It is a decision that a lot of people are making. And rather than smearing and disrespecting people, how about we ask why?”

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