American gen Z voters share how they feel about Kamala Harris’s presidential bid, why they like or dislike her as a candidate and whether they think she could beat Donald Trump, as the vice-president races towards winning the Democratic nomination for November’s election.
‘I think she’s just what we need’
“I think [Kamala Harris] is the only one that makes sense. She will get the votes Biden couldn’t. She could get the Black, Asian, Latino, women’s, LGBTQ+ and youth votes. She stands more for progress and equality than an old white dude and if she wins it will be historic. The Democrats need a bold move and I think she’s just what we need.
“I hope the Democrats realize what an opportunity this is for them.” Will, 22, construction worker from Portland, Oregon
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God, progressives suck. Conservatives vote. Every election. Doesn’t matter what the polls say. Doesn’t matter what the weather is. Doesn’t matter who is running. They fucking VOTE. That’s why a small minority is able to run roughshod over the interests of the majority: the majority doesn’t fucking vote!!
Conservatives vote. Every election.
Turnout has varied enormously over the last twenty years. Conservatives are riding the same waves as the rest of us. A lot of that is built into home ownership. We’re seeing a more migrant population that needs to constantly re-register and re-engage with the local political establishment after every change of address. Republicans are no longer the home-owning majority, now that the college demographic has shifted over to the liberal side of the spectrum. And Democrats are no longer the freshly migrant urbanites of the post Jim Crow era, fleeing the brutality of the Dixiecrat states.
Dems have eclipsed Republicans on voter registration, they consistently out-compete on turnout, and they’ve had a number of wave elections in off-years precisely because they’re more consistent at voting than their Republican peers.
That’s why a small minority is able to run roughshod over the interests of the majority
No. Gerrymandering, vote caging, and strategic disenfranchisement at the county and state level are why small minorities are able to run roughshod over the interests of the majority. States like Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas have absolutely batshit insane maps, with a handful of districts packed to the gills full of liberal voters while conservatives are spread thinly across the remainder. Wisconsin just broke the GOP gerrymander that’s kept the state legislature locked firmly red with barely 40% of the popular vote.
That’s been a clever stopgap against popular governance in the short term, but its also a dangerous game when a suburban cohort shifts or defects on razor thin margins.
When Dem wave years happen, you can see thousands of seats flip overnight. But without that supermajority of voters, you’ll see those same seats collapse red again. That was the story of 2008 -> 2010 and 2016 -> 2018 -> 2020. Suddenly influxes of Democrats would appear for a cycle only to get obliterated in time for Republicans to recement their gerrymanders.
Consequently, the Republican strategy has been to run out the clock on incoming Dem administrations, confident that they’ll be back in control as soon as the wave passes. Democrat strategy has been to… fuck around for the two years they have a significant majority and then bitch at voters when the moment passes.
Not the senate which gives 4 seats to represent 1M people who live in the Dakotas and 2 seats to represent the 40M people who live in CA? Not gerrymandering effecting seats in the house? Not the fact that the way EC votes are apportioned making it doable in practice to win the EC with 45% of the popular vote and possible to win it with as little as 35% of it?
That’s because their party reflects their voters’ will. More than two-thirds of Democrats said that they didn’t want Joe Biden for a second term, but they forced him through the nomination process anyway, without any challenge or debate. Meanwhile, the Republican party elites didn’t want Trump on 2016 or 2024, but when their voters chose him, they accepted it. They didn’t make back room deals with the other candidates to make Jeb the nominee, like the Democrats did for Biden.
And then Democrats convinced Biden to not run for a second term. Sounds like the party did in fact listen to the voters’ will, and that’s being reflected in the excitement that we’re seeing across the board.
And you know what? I wish Republicans made backroom deals. I wish they recognized Trump was a significant threat and aligned to go against him.
And then Democrats convinced Biden to not run for a second term.
The polls, plus stingy donors, convinced Biden not to run.
Of course, Lemmy-ites will insist that polls don’t matter and you can just scream at people to vote if you’re at a fund raising disadvantage when you need to close the gap.
I wish Republicans made backroom deals. I wish they recognized Trump was a significant threat and aligned to go against him.
When Republicans make backroom deals, you get a 5-4 SCOTUS majority halting the recount process in Florida.
We’re somewhat lucky that Trump was on such shit terms with Doug Ducey and Brian Kemp in 2020.
People actually voted for him in the primary.
Yeah, after Obama convinced all the other moderates to drop out and clear a path for Biden. Meanwhile, Warren stayed in and split the progressive vote, blocking Sanders. This isn’t a conspiracy theory; I literally just linked to two Congressmen openly admitting it.
No. It isn’t. And no, it doesn’t.
They vote no matter what. They vote even if they hate the candidate. Even if they hate the platform. They vote out of a sense of moral obligation that progressives entirely lack.
Their party works against their interests. I know it, you know it, and anyone who looks at it critically for half a second knows it. And yet they still vote.
There was that interesting research ten years back about the pillars of conservative and progressive morality. I seem to recall conservatives having five nearly universal core values, while progressives had only three of those. Conservatives value tradition and loyalty on an equal level with eg fairness and truth. Liberals still value tradition and loyalty, but they are not core values, and so things like truth take a higher priority. Conservatives literally don’t care about the facts when they feel like their loyalty is tested.
This is why they aren’t worth anything as people I don’t think its a good trade off.
I mean… Even when we do have a primary, most of the left just stays home. It doesn’t help that most people just can’t be bothered.
I don’t know that that’s true. It’s kinda hard to find data on progressive vs. centrist turnout, but generally, turnout for primaries has been going up, not down, and it was definitely young progressive voters that gave Obama the victory over Clinton.
Your own link shows 28.5% of eligible voters, most would imply more than half, so I don’t know what your argument is. It doesn’t matter if it’s highest it’s ever been if it’s still pathetic.
Yeah, but, “most of the left stays home,” also implies centrists or conservatives vote in higher numbers than the left, which doesn’t appear to be true. Voters are more invovled in primaries than they have been in years, and the left and right seem to be voting at about the same level. Like, yeah, voter apathy is really bad in this country, but it seems pretty bipartisan, so it’s not a left-specific problem.
It’s also fairly unfair to compare total numbers vs an assessment of the actually competitive states. Everyone knows that solidly blue and red states have little say your side is either already going to win or can’t possibly win at the national level. It’s inherently harder even if important to get people to invest in the smaller races.
I honestly think it’s more accurate to say Republican voters reflect their party’s will (or more accurately Trump’s will). Trump can say and do anything and Maga voters will fall in line behind him no matter what. Even if what he says or does goes against what Republicans have historically been in favor of. Like when he sunk Nafta for his own terrible plan. He runs a cult of personality and the republican party had to either nominate him or be abandoned by their enflamed base.
Dems should have absolutely nominated Bernie. But if Bernie started spouting hateful rhetoric like Trump does he wouldn’t have a base anymore.
Dems should have absolutely nominated Bernie.
Idk. I think Bernie would have made a better President, but I still question whether he’d have made a winning President. Americans are easily Red Baited, and I could see Republicans cowing a lot of moderate liberals with “He’ll turn American into Venezuela!” scare stories and some sudden sharp drops in everyone’s retirement funds on the eve of the election.
In 2020, Biden was absolutely the safe path to victory, even if he was a corporate shill and genocidal enabler through his time in office.
This implies that progressives are the majority which, as a progressive, I highly doubt.
If you look at the Republican parties platform 70% of America is to the left of it
This is why I keep repeating “vote for the administration, not the candidate”. Just look at the damage the Trump administration circus did futing the shit show that was his term. Now look at the good that the Biden administration has done in its term. Harris would likely keep a large portion of the team.
The only real deep blemish on the Biden administration has been its support of the Palestinian genocide. If Trump was president, he would has encouraged Netanyahu to be far more brutal. You can also kiss Ukraine, human rights, and democracy goodbye under a Trump second term. But sure…don’t vote.
Vote for the administration AND JUDGES!
we’ve had a front row seat to what happens when idiots don’t vote (for Hillary because butterymales or whatever) because they’re too focused on the personality of the candidate… Who picks the judges matters!
Alito and Thomas have both signalled that they’ll retire if Trump wins. I find forcing them to either remain in a job they both clearly dislike or get replaced with a judge who’ll reverse the harm they’ve done to be pretty motivational.
Hope they fucking croak from the stress of being investigated by the DoJ.
Yep. Trump pulled his judge picks right off the wish list of extremist judges the Heritage Foundation hand-picked for him. It’s sickening how many judges he got to appoint, on top of getting to choose 3! 😭 SCOTUS justices (one of the seats was stolen by McConnell).
Of course one of those judges was Aileen Cannon who after delaying the classified docs case against him as long as possible, finally went ahead and tossed it out completely on the ridiculous grounds that there shouldn’t have been a special prosecutor for it.
For sure. I throw judge selection under administration. The President doesn’t know any of these judges, they are presented to the President by the team the President put together.
This is how it is done in Australia by our High Court. A judiciary panel shortlists the candidates and the Government usually takes the first on the list - conservative or liberal government, doesn’t matter. The selection isn’t politicised - the most qualified gets the job.
Our high court has a reputation for annoying governments from either side.
I wish… Our system is the heritage foundation chooses whatever judges align with what they want to accomplish, spend 2 decades calling liberal appointed judges “activist judges that want to legislate from the bench” and then hand the Republican president a list of activist judges who will legislate from the bench because everything Republicans say their opposition does is projecting what they actually intend to do…
I hate that it works… They do it first so when you push back on what they are doing it looks like the childish “no you!” argument so it immediately defuses any resistance…
As a professional circus performer, please don’t bring us down to their level. Most of us are bleeding heart communist hippies, and circuses take a TON of coordination to run.
The only real deep blemish on the Biden administration has been its support of the Palestinian genocide.
Definitely the biggest, but not the only. Two others that stand out to me are his breaking of the rail strike, and his border policies.
But of course, this all comes with the caveat that all of this, under Trump, would be unimaginably worse
If you weren’t voting before you have already announced that you are a moron. Chasing 22 year old votes has limited utility. Most of them just don’t turn out. We should avoid putting too much stock in the words of morons who rarely bother to show up.
If you want to fight voter apathy in later years, getting young people tuned in and engaged is probably the best way to do it. Sure, there’s always the chance they still might not show up now, but showing you are listening to young people still helps solidify your party as worth supporting and can lead to stronger support when they get older and are more likely to find the time to get out and vote. 22 year olds don’t stay 22, and the recent trend of people not becoming more right-leaning as they hit middle age might be in part due to Obama and others making young people feel heard 15 years ago. Saying “young people don’t vote, don’t listen to them” is short-sighted at best.
I didn’t say don’t listen to them I said don’t over-weigh the importance of people who haven’t shown up in the past
Good to hear, but if you weren’t voting to oppose obvious fascism before, you’re not a very good/informed citizen.
Shaming people is an absolutely awful way to convince them to change their ways.
When the threat of fascism isn’t enough – what else is there?!
People want to vote FOR something, not against something. We want hope for a better future.
Just look at how popular Bernie Sanders and his policy proposals are. People were excited to vote for him, because he was proposing to actually help the average American.
And look how far that went. How Bernie was still unable to turn out massive numbers of young people.
It’s absolutely incorrect to say that voters are blameless. Bernie had a platform that was the dream for young people, and they didn’t show up – and I say that as someone who was 24 at the time and did vote for him in the primary.
we did show up. They literally rigged it against him.
Yeah really like who are these people who weren’t going to vote for Joe? Are they stupid?
It’s because of those people that you now have another, better, more winnable option. You’re welcome.
On the other hand, if more people had turned out in 2016 we wouldn’t be here.
Politics shouldn’t be a popularity contest.
If more people had thought they were being listened to, perhaps they would have.
If you want politicians to listen to you, try voting in the primaries.
People need to educate themselves. Look at how Jerry Falwell and his ‘Moral Majority’ took over the GOP. They had one simple trck; if the local Republican clubhouse got 20 people at the regular meeting Falwell’s folks would show up with fifty. They got the little jobs, like county clerk and sheriff, and then the bigger state positions and finally were in a position to control who got the white House.
If you want politicians to listen to you, try voting in the primaries.
Please don’t gloat that the primaries have had a preordained winner for every presidential race since 2012. Particularly not when the most recent preordained winner had to step down, to the acclaim of the vast bulk of the party.
and BotH Sides aRe ThE SAme, right?
If you’re going to tell people not to vote, try coming up with an actual alternative action.
uninformed/misguided apathetic “i don’t care about politics” kids who saw nothing but ancient white men and can’t/won’t distinguish between them
And then vote because of gender and race and not politics.
It’s another reason Harris would be crazy to go with anyone but Mark Kelly. You’ll get people who never dreamed of voting to just vote for the novelty of an astronaut and fighter pilot.
Wow. Americans really say shit like this without a trace of irony 🤷♂️
hahaha — oh please, do enlighten me, good foreigner.
I don’t think that’s possible.
Look what happens when the party listens. Maybe they’ll keep listening if they see this works.
Maybe Biden stepping down heralds the tipping point away from arrogant, ineffective, conservative gerontocracy within the Democratic party and toward a more progressive future.
I get very frustrated when I see a few voters clinging to their “uncommitted” status even now. And the ones who do this often look like the kinds of people that the Trumpists will put into camps if he gets re-elected. Stop acting precious about it and commit to the obvious choice. The election is not about you, it’s about the future of the country and whether or not we want to embrace or reject fascism.
The other danger to avoid (again) is the assumption that because polls and news looks good for a candidate, a single vote won’t matter, which results in a lapse of not voting. Repeat a few million times. Lead suddenly gone.
Vote, even if everyone is claiming it’s a solid win. Vote as if your vote does matter, don’t even debate if that’s true or not.
Well said. Even if you are in a solid-whatever state, the degree to which that is true is important. A 5 point lead is different from a 10 point lead, is different from a 20 point lead. The closer you can make it, the more you force people to pay attention to you.
At the same time, if you know your candidate is going to win and you live in a shitty two-party system, then the only means you have to protest about the policies of the party you primarily support is to give them a no vote when they’re guaranteed to win.
Example, everyone knew the Labor party was going to win in the UK election, it was guaranteed after the 14 years of incompetence from the Tories. That being said, Labor really wasn’t promising much. The only party that were offering any real change were the Greens.
So what do you, knowing that Labor are going to win but not agreeing with their policies? You let them know by voting for other parties, and then Labor reassesses their policies on the votes they lost.
And then a bunch of people do that because “my guy is going to win anyway so it doesn’t matter” and you end up losing. Remember Brexit? never be too confident.
The only means? How about writing a letter? Attending a town hall? How about protest? We have far more influence than a single vote.
Also, I don’t think anyone in Labour is reassessing any policies on votes they lost to the Greens in this example, due to how few votes the Greens got. That said, I do believe people should vote for whatever they think will do the most good. If someone is a single-issue voter on environmental issues, voting Green is a sound way to support the policies they care about. Not to push dems, that is unlikely to happen, but to actually support the policies they care about.
And vote blue to the bottom of the ticket! Let’s take the whole government and then push them hard to fix this broken system!
Local is always as important, if not more, than the Presidential race. Midterms as well. In a world so highly interconnected and real time, we should be so much more democratically inspired, and yet apathy reigns.
and yet apathy reigns.
Part of that has been a directed effort. Oil lobbyists, russian and chinese bots, other corporations, etc all have a vested interests in spreading disinformation and doomerism to encourage apathy.
They also keep everyone poor and stressed so we don’t have time or energy to think about anything else… Let alone something as nuanced and important as politics/democracy
the big winning factor for kamalas voter base is literally just her age. She’s nearly 20 years younger than trump. 20 years
literally nothing else matters. Especially among gen z, it just helps that he has such a comprehensive background in government and around other politicians as well.
the big winning factor for kamalas voter base is literally just her age.
Its her (relatively thin) track record. Biden’s been wading through the blood of a hundred Palestinians a day for the last six months. Kamala’s kept her hands relatively clean.
I suspect the Kids Today are going to sour on her as her profile rises. She’s got a long history of saying shit that turns off youth voters at the actual polls. But for the moment, people are exuberant about Genocide Joe being shown the door. That - plus JD Vance getting caught with his dick between a pair of couch cushions - is giving her campaign a healthy bump.
Anyone who is holding Biden responsible for Israel is an idiot. Congress is the one who votes for or against aid. Not handing the aid that congress approved in an election year is bordering on political suicide with the moderates knowing that moderates in swing states will entirely decide this election. Harris’ big virtue on this issue is that she isn’t president and has virtually no power to do anything so she can talk more. Blame ought to accrue to Israelis, their leaders, their hard liners, congress, and the US population for still cleaving to Israel after all their behavior.
Anyone who is holding Biden responsible for Israel is an idiot. Congress is the one who votes for or against aid.
The Biden administration once again bypasses Congress on an emergency weapons sale to Israel
In politics it’s the opposite of “devil you know”. It’s why Congress flips so much after a presidents first election.
People know Biden know, and the more people know Biden the less they like him.
I don’t think Harris will be great, but there is a chance she will be. That’s enough to get a lot more votes than Biden.
If she hits the ground running we could even gain seats in 2026 for once. But she can’t just “look into” shit to run down the clock. She needs a list of shit they can accomplish, and how many votes in Congress to accomplish each.
Be totally upfront about what we can do, and actually try to accomplish what we can do on day 1.
People will remember that come midterms.
Ok good but if you planned to not vote against trump in any case, you’re with the fascists.
you could also just be stupid
For many late Gen Z’ers, this will be the first election they even get to vote. I remember being in high school and I couldn’t wait to vote when I was 18 because I followed politics very closely. My peers on the other hand, not so much. For every kid at my school who was politically active enough to care about issues that mattered to them, there were about 4-5 more that were completely and utterly apathetic or didn’t have a clue about the candidates or the issues.
The danger in assuming that people who are making the decision to vote now were somehow complicit with having Trump is that they may not have been aware of the problem to begin with. A lot of young eligible voters miss their first few elections because they haven’t developed a political opinion beyond whatever their parents might think, they haven’t taken the time to properly educate themselves on the issues, or there’s still a disconnect between how the election results might affect them in their daily lives.
A fresh new candidate that is pumping energy into the race is getting young people motivated to vote, and that’s a good thing. Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth.
Don’t overcomplicate a very obvious and easy matter.
