Plenty needs fixing
As Greg Sargent tells it:
Young people have delivered unmistakable political surprises lately. They have proved decidedly progressive on many big issues. They voted at outsize rates in the last three national elections. They are fueling population growth in swing-state college towns, making Republicans nervously rethink their strategy.
Now, if a group of Gen Z political operatives has its way, young people might surprise us in another fashion: by getting involved in those sleepy, unglamorous, decidedly uncool contests known as state legislative races.
This week, David Hogg, the 23-year-old gun-control activist driven into politics by the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., launched a political action committee called Leaders We Deserve, which is devoted to recruiting young candidates for state legislative seats — largely in red states.
“That’s where the worst bills are coming from,” Hogg says.
I’m forever telling friends less engaged in day-to-day organizing to stop obsessing over the presidential race. Yes, Democrats need to regain control of the Supreme Court, etc., but the real damage is being done at the state legislative level — largely in red states. Did you not see what the GOP just tried to pull in Ohio? What DeSantis is doing with education and his culture wars in Florida?
I spent 2016 telling progressives President Hillary can’t solve my legislature problem; President Bernie can’t either. WE have to solve that problem. Here.
Gen Zers get that more than many of my Boomer friends.
“The challenge we face is, what are we going to do to undo the harmful legacy left behind by extreme right Republicans and the 50-year chess game they’ve been playing,” Hogg told me.
The importance of legislatures is sometimes lost on Democrats. When Republicans captured many statehouses across the country in the 2010 midterm blowout, it caught Democrats napping. We are still suffering the consequences: GOP legislatures gerrymandered legislative districts (and congressional maps) and passed voter suppression laws, deepening their hold on power.
But there are serious barriers to entry. State legislators are typically very poorly paid. It’s a part-time job best suited to people already well off or with spouses back home who can share the financial burdens. One might even say the system is rigged to keep out younger legislators. Hogg wants to fix that. But it will have to happen from the inside.
On Hogg’s list is North Carolina Democrats’ state chair Anderson Clayton, 25, as well as more seasoned officials. I was probably the only person over 35 on her campaign Slack channel when she ran for the office in January-February. With that behind-the scenes vantage, I was super impressed with the team she assembled and the grassroots campaign she ran. Clayton defeated the incumbent endorsed by the governor, attorney general, and all of the state’s Democratic members of Congress.
The challenge now is to use their newfound celebrity to turn out more younger voters. While celebrated for youth turnout increasing over the last several cycles, they still lag far behind the voting rate of us old farts. Below, 44% of all NC voters 45 and under (to the left of the white vertical line) are registered independents (unaffiliated in NC). Democrats’ targeting of them for voter turnout efforts, in a word, stinks.
Michah L. Sifry commented on the recent “The Experience of Grassroots Leaders Working with the Democratic Party.” One complaint that jumped out at me involves Democrats’ targeting being too narrow (something I’d already concluded about unaffiliated voters):
Most volunteer leaders see their state Democratic party’s efforts to organize outreach as “too little, too late.” One in four call their party unresponsive. A majority of respondents said the party does a terrible job targeting voters, saying that its lists are far too narrow.
The question I ask is are those younger voters not turning out like their elders because they are unengaged, or because they are not being engaged? By Democrats.
Now to fix it.