Young Voters Matter: Increasing Support for the Vice President’s Campaign Across the Disturbance and the Battlegrounds for the Democratic National Convention

The 24-year-old is the National Youth Engagement Director for Vice President Harris’s presidential campaign, a role she’s had since the beginning of the year when President Biden was seeking re-election. She has to get young voters to go to the polls.

There is a new playing field for her as she addressed a group of Gen Z organizers at a coffee shop wearing bracelets that said Kamala, political girlie and voting era.

“It’s been so great to see the attention and the energy online,” Levenson said. “We’re really focused on how do we make sure that we maintain that energy and how do we then harness that energy?”

It is the same demographic that supported Biden four years ago but soured on him over the last year, and that is why the young organizers are working to rally youth support for Harris.

It is not easy to make that support stick in this election given how unreliable young voters are, and how Harris has recently launched her campaign.

The campaign can already point to promising signs. She started a program for the Harris campaign last spring that will start back up again this fall as students come back to campus.

She said there has been a great amount of people coming into the campaign. The last couple of weeks have seen a bigger number of sign-ups for the student program. We’ve seen more folks signing up for our events. More people are applying for those jobs. We need to keep going, and that’s what we have to do.

Likes, shares and polls aren’t the only things it does. Just days after the DNC ended, the campaign reported $540 million in fundraising since Harris announced her run. The past week alone saw a third of the donations come from first-timers and a fifth from young voters.

A crowd of largely young people erupted in cheers and chants of ” coach” as Minnesota Governor and Democratic vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz spoke at the DNC’s youth council meeting.

In battleground states where the margins might be very tight, he didn’t give up on the idea of young voters being able to make a difference.

He said it’s going to be won in the trenches. “It’s going to be won by your demographic for the most part. If we can turn you out and get you to vote, that’s how it’s going to be done. And it’ll be you who elected the first woman president of the United States.”

That excitement is something Blake Robinson, a 21-year-old delegate from Georgia, said he could feel as he got ready to head over to the convention center hours before Harris accepted the presidential nomination.

“What we wanted out of the Democratic Party was energy,” he said. We wanted youthfulness and energy. And now, I don’t know if you’ve been in the convention hall, but there is not a single dull moment in that hall.”

The DNC decided to not allow a Palestinian American to speak at the convention in protest of the President Biden’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.

The war is not the top issue for young voters in the US, according to previous national polls, but it remains a concern among progressive, Arab American and Muslim voters, who usually side with the Democrats.

He said they know how much the issue affects young people. It’s important to give a Palestinian-American place on this stage. We need to make sure that we’re including everyone in our speaking lineup. And we need to make sure that people see that we care about everyone and all sides of conflicts and all sides of this issue.”

Times Opinion began a project to follow a group of young, undecided voters through the election, and we started it just before the Democrats gathered for their convention. The group had very specific opinions about Mr. Trump. The January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol was particularly distressing for many of them, some of which were teenagers at the time. They called him a traitor, a narcissist, untrustworthy. He was worried he would lose an election.

When we asked them to rate Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump on a scale of 0 to 10 (with zero being extremely negative), Ms. Harris got mostly threes — she did no better than a five. Mr. Trump got mostly fours and fives, and topped out with a seven.

But there was a difference in how the group criticized the two candidates. Some had doubts about how she would affect the economy, if she supported Israel, what she knew of President Biden, and more. They labeled her a fake. Most hated Mr. Trump but were suspicious about Ms. Harris. They knew him.