With Biden off the ballot, it’s time for Gen Z to show up and vote | Opinion

Gen Z voters have finally gotten what they wanted: an election without two old men on the ballot.

With President Joe Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign, Kamala Harris will almost assuredly take his place as the Democratic nominee. That’s good news for Democrats, as Biden faced glaring problems with voters under 30. But it’s also good news for younger voters, who have struggled to see themselves even remotely reflected in the person at the top of the ticket in recent election cycles.

For months — years, even — young voters have been telling Democrats that they want a candidate who isn’t Biden. They’ve begged the party to admit what they’ve long seen: that another election with Biden on the ballot will only end in four more years of Donald Trump.

Now that it’s finally happened, we need to actually vote.

In North Carolina, millennial and Gen Z voters consistently punch below their weight at the polls. We’re the largest and most diverse group of voters in the state, but we have the lowest turnout of any group. In the 2022 midterms, for example, turnout was 24% among Gen Z voters, and 34% among millennials. Turnout among older generations was more than twice as high. And in the 2020 presidential election — which in North Carolina was decided by just 1.34% — turnout among millennials and Gen Z hovered around 60%. For older generations, it was 80%.

Up until a week ago, there wasn’t much of a chance of that improving this year. Enthusiasm for Biden had fallen among Gen Z voters in North Carolina, and their intent to vote in November was lower than any other age group, David McLennan, a political science professor at Meredith College and director of the Meredith Poll, told me. They were also more curious about third-party candidates than any other age group.

McLennan expects those numbers to change now that Harris has replaced Biden in the race. A big factor — and also the most obvious one — dragging down Biden was his age. Gen Z is especially supportive of age limits for presidential candidates; McLennan’s own polling shows that North Carolina’s Gen Z voters believe candidates should be limited to younger than 55 years old. At 59 years old, Harris falls outside of that range. But she is the youngest presidential nominee that we have ever been old enough to vote for, and that should mean something.

So far, Gen Z feels more excited about Harris than they ever were about Biden, sharing memes and TikTok videos that even had Jake Tapper attempting to explain what “Kamala is brat” means on CNN. Friends of mine who had planned to vote for Biden through gritted teeth in November now seem far more galvanized by the thought of voting for Kamala instead. The Harris campaign has embraced the humor and shared some jokes of its own, but it does have to tread carefully. If they lean in too hard, it can come across inauthentic or just plain cringy, like Hillary Clinton’s use of slang on the campaign trail in 2016.

Of course, Democrats shouldn’t expect that Harris’ age and social media wit will be enough to win the youth vote. Age plays a big role in making younger voters feel represented, but it’s not everything, and Democrats in North Carolina have not always done the greatest job at making young voters feel seen or heard. There’s a reason why Gen Z loves Bernie Sanders despite the fact that he’s even older than Biden — it’s because he speaks boldly about the issues that matter to them. That includes issues like climate change, marijuana legalization — things that Democrats support on paper but don’t always emphasize on the campaign trail.

Harris is better than Biden on issues that many Gen Z voters have shown they care deeply about. She’s a better messenger on abortion. And while she isn’t as openly pro-Palestine as many young progressives would like, she has been more critical than Biden of Israel’s treatment of civilians in Gaza and was the first Biden administration official to call for a ceasefire earlier this year.

Another factor at play: For the first time, North Carolina Democrats will be led by someone deeply familiar with Gen Z and willing to make them a priority. At 26 years old, state party chair Anderson Clayton is the youngest to hold the position in the country, and she’s focused more of the party’s efforts on harnessing the youth vote.

Still, none of this matters if Gen Z stays home in November. Harris may still be imperfect, and she still may not be the candidate that younger voters would have chosen for themselves. She’s still a product of a system many of us don’t like. But she’s closer to it than Biden was, and sitting around and waiting for the perfect candidate to show up isn’t going to move us forward.

Change is incremental, and the fact that we’re in this situation at all is a sign that it’s starting to happen. It’s a sign that our voices do matter. If we want to keep it that way, it’s our turn to show up.