A young girl holds a “Vote” pin in her hands while attending the Atlanta Dream game at Gateway Center Arena in Atlanta.
Olivia Bowdoin for NPR
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Olivia Bowdoin for NPR
A young girl holds a “Vote” pin in her hands while attending the Atlanta Dream game at Gateway Center Arena in Atlanta.
Olivia Bowdoin for NPR
Consider This host Mary Louise Kelly wanted to find out what young voters in Georgia are most concerned with ahead of the presidential election this year.
Naturally, she found herself at the heart of discourse and democracy: a Mexican restaurant in Atlanta, hosting an event for the Atlanta young Republicans.
There, the group had gathered to eat chips and work towards getting 1000 postcards written and addressed, urging voters to support two down ballot GOP candidates.
At the top of the ticket, group members are divided on Donald Trump. The group president, 39 year old Winslow Jones, says some love him, while others have issues.
“I think what we’re all united on is, this is a much bigger picture here that we need to look at. I can tell you, young Republicans are worried about the economy and the border and crime and safety, local crime and safety, especially around here,” Jones told NPR.
Across the table, was the president of the statewide group, Georgia young Republicans.
25 year old Jacquelyn Harn has a different reply for whether she and her peers are feeling excited about this third Trump run for the presidency.
“We’re excited for a change, and we realize we want the life that we had four years ago whenever President Trump was president and his policies, his conservative policies, we need those back and we want those not to be able to achieve our version of the American dream again.”
Housing costs, Harn says, are a huge priority to her and other young voters, who don’t feel like things would improve under Harris.
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Harris/Walz headquarters.
Next, Kelly visits the Harriz/Walz headquarters where a text banking event is underway.
Pizza boxes are stacked on white folding tables. A handful of what look like twenty-somethings are busy typing away on laptops. And at the front of the room, a screen displays dozens more joining via Zoom. This is a joint event, co-hosted by Young Democrats of Georgia and Men for Choice.
Altogether, they tell her, they’ve fired off 50,000 texts from this gathering. And they’re aiming them at a very specific group: men of color, 27 to 50 years old.
Davante Jennings, is the 28-year-old president of the Young Democrats:
“The backbone of the Democratic Party is the black vote, which is why the Republicans are heavily focused on black men specifically. And we know when we show up how elections seem to kind of flip. And right now, it’s not 100% guaranteed that we’re going to get all of the black vote,” he told NPR.
He says he’s equal parts energized and exhausted at this point in the election cycle. He says the game changer was when President Biden decided to exit the race.
“When VP Harris announced that she was running. I don’t know what happened. Things just got crazy out of nowhere. Like more people involved. More support, more work, more canvassing, more text banking. But it’s good, it’s good.”
The youth turnout.
Kerwin Swint is a professor of political science at Kennesaw State University, the last stop on this informational road trip.
“Since the Obama years, the youth vote really has sided with the Democratic presidential candidate more often than not,” he told NPR.
“In 2020, the turnout was up across the board, partly because of mail in balloting, making it easier for people to vote. So participation was up and that was very much true for young voters who had the highest participation rate in about 20 years.”
It was also national voter registration day when the Consider This team visited Kennesaw’s campus.
The nonpartisan group Poder Latinx had a tent out, distributing pins and stickers and snacks, waving students over, and encouraging them to register.
It seemed to be working: the group managed to register 81 voters.
Some of them shared what they were most concerned with leading up to the election. For Yahir Rodriguez, his top items were immigration, education, the economy and housing.
He’s a first year student at Kennesaw State and a first generation voter whose parents immigrated from Mexico. He belongs to a growing demographic in the state:, almost 10 percent of Georgia’s population is Hispanic or Latino, according to the 2020 census.
He says housing is an especially important issue for him and other young voters.
“We see that rent prices are going up, and how housing is getting expensive everywhere. We’re seeing that there are more and more corporate landlords and that’s raising the housing prices for everyone around us and even if you want to buy a home, that’s also raising the prices and everything.”
Rodriguez is looking forward to voting for Harris. But some of his peers don’t share that sentiment, like 19-year-old Lambianze Jackson, who says both candidates have bad policies.
Jackson says she’ll be voting for Harris this November, and that the overturning of Roe v Wade makes that an easy choice for a young woman of color like herself.
But she adds: there’s room for improvement if Harris wants to win over other young voters.
“Kamala, she doesn’t really explain her policies well. Like she mainly talks about tax cuts for the middle class but like, she doesn’t really have policies,” Jackson told NPR.
This episode was produced by Erika Ryan, Kira Wakeam, and Alejandra Marquez Janse. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.