“We Don’t Read”

“Rock the Vote” has come to sound like something your dad did while wearing plaid flannel in the ’90s, so the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) movement is trying a reboot. Idealistic, earnest, and at least superficially hip, new nonprofit/nonpartisan GOTV organizations abound. They’re firmly rooted on college campuses, sending out packs of cheerful undergrads to knock on dorm room doors, testify in classrooms, and staff tables around the quad. The Parkland survivors even caravanned across the country to get their fellow young Americans registered. This summer, voter registration booths also popped up at festivals like Pitchfork, Coachella, Bonnaroo — anywhere twentysomethings were known to gather.

One of these young activists is Karl Catarata. A junior at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he spent his spring semester registering classmates on a campus just 1.3 miles from where a gunman murdered 58 people last October. Catarata is motivated by a lot of things — especially gun control — though he’s not allowed to engage potential voters on specific issues, as GOTV organizations are emphatically nonpartisan. This makes an already hard sell even harder.

Catarata says that a lot of his fellow students don’t register because they’re suspicious: “They’re worried they’ll get jury duty, or their information will be shared, or someone will steal their Social Security number,” he says. Many classmates claim to be too busy to pay attention, or they’re wary of the process, or they’re just too far behind to catch up. “A few people have said that the system is rigged against them.”

With all the energy around getting kids registered, their lack of access to information about issues and candidates keeps them from casting votes. MillZees are just as distrustful of the media as their fellow Americans (according to a 2018 Knight Foundation poll, 66 percent of Americans say the news media does a poor job of separating fact from opinion). They depend heavily on social media for news — Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook — but don’t know how to ferret out trustworthy intel about their government, candidates, and issues. And wherever they get information, they typically don’t go beyond headlines. “We don’t read,” admits Sam Davis, a sophomore and chemical engineering major at UMass Amherst.

It’s true: MillZees don’t read. Much. Even though Catarata at UNLV is politically active and planning to vote, even he usually just scans headlines. “I’ll scroll through the news on Twitter, see what’s hot. If someone on Facebook posts an article, I’ll read it.” In general, Catarata says, he and his peers are too busy to follow what’s happening.

Kyle Clauss, a New Jersey native and graduate student at Vermont Law School, gets much of his information from podcasts, including Pod Save America, The Dig, and Intercepted, while driving or doing the dishes. Although he was formerly in journalism, he’s wary of mainstream sources: “It’s tough because the whole fake news thing has opened a Pandora’s box. Even legacy publications like the New York Times don’t always get it right,” Clauss says. “There’s no purely good source.”

Like other MillZees, Kyleigh Hillerud, a sophomore at UConn Storrs who’s voting by absentee ballot in New York this November, reads headlines on Twitter and Facebook, but says, “There’s only so much you can get from them,” which is why she seeks out a variety of competing news sources, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNN, and Fox News to try to get at the truth of the matter. “My father taught me to do that,” Hillerud says. She admits that she’s unusual: “I know very few people who do what I do — my friends in upstate New York might read a headline but they don’t dig into it.”

While they may not read, MillZees are refreshingly self-aware about their current condition: “We complain, but we don’t vote. We don’t feel empowered. We’re easily distracted and unsure about how to make ourselves heard,” says Davis, who is registered in his home state of Connecticut but had no plans to vote until we talked about it in early August. He’d never heard of the absentee ballot until I mentioned it. “There are issues we care a lot about, but we’re confused about how we can change things.”

The Candidate Problem

Even if voting advocates could get past MillZees’ cynicism, apathy, and civic ignorance, come November, they’re up against an even bigger problem: the candidates themselves.

On a hot August day in Chicago, Kenan, the UMass Amherst undergrad, checked out his gubernatorial candidates’ websites. The two contenders are ultra-wealthy white men — Bruce Rauner and J.B. Pritzker — already a turnoff for young voters. Together they’ve been spending $300,000 a day on their campaigns, but their websites felt canned. The candidates have invested heavily in traditional media, which twentysomethings, including Kenan, don’t watch. And both candidates focus on the same issues, few of which resonated with him. Rauner, the incumbent Republican, preaches the gospel of low taxes, which invokes eye rolls.

Many analysts use social media stats as an indicator for youth support, and while Rauner has 2,800 Instagram followers and 29,000 Twitter followers, he has abysmal engagement on both platforms, which made Kenan suspect that the followers were fake. Pritzker, the Democratic challenger running on an anti-Trump platform, has fewer than 3,400 Instagram followers, and his 26,000 Twitter followers are equally disengaged. Fake again? The research felt too much like work. After five minutes of poking around, Kenan gave up. There was more interesting stuff to look at out there.

Young voters stay home because the candidates aren’t representing their interests, and the winning candidates ignore them when they get into office, opting to instead push the agenda of the older voters who elected them.

With all the talk of the historic number of women and minority candidates making bids for elected office this fall, most contests remain white guy vs. white guy affairs, which draw scant MillZee (and internet) interest. Nineteen of the 35 gubernatorial races and 189 of the House races are exclusively white-man showdowns. Same with 15 of the 35 Senate races (the balance includes white women). In their photos and on their formulaic websites, the candidates look remarkably similar. To distinguish them, you need a nuanced approach — the kind you get from media literacy and background knowledge, which MillZees don’t have, and reading, which they don’t do.

But it’s more than that. By and large, these candidates don’t address the issues that most directly affect MillZee voters. Three-quarters of MillZees say that gun control is their most important issue in the upcoming election, according to the IOP survey, but most candidates, fearing NRA backlash, won’t touch that one. Nearly half of millennials on a Pew survey say they can’t afford routine health care costs and see universal health care as the solution. The bulk of politicians talk around health care — offering up every flavor of public-private solution imaginable — but rare is the candidate who embraces a single-payer system. Millennial and Gen Z parents and students hold an estimated $1.2 trillion in education debt, but good luck finding a lawmaker who will stump on tackling that. Indeed, the 2018 GOP tax plan eliminated many income tax deductions that MillZees and their parents benefited from, including student loan interest, mortgage interest, and grants and scholarships. “We cannot get leaders to care about us,” says Emily O’Hara, a junior at UConn Storrs and ardent voting advocate.

It’s not entirely the leaders’ fault. MillZees are practically unreachable via mainstream campaign methods, so many a political manager advises his or her clients to skip them. The candidates do. Young voters stay home because the candidates aren’t representing their interests, and the winning candidates ignore them when they get into office, opting to instead push the agenda of the older voters who elected them. The cynicism deepens, apathy ensues, more neglect follows. It’s a vicious circle.

The Authenticity Thing

The thing is, MillZees will vote. But only under specific circumstances.

They’ve been marketed, messaged, and data-mined to death, so they bristle at anything that feels inauthentic. Painful backstories and straight talk, the currency of YouTubers and celebrities alike, will always resonate more than polished performances.

Two things will drive youth voters to the polls: identity and, if that isn’t in play, authenticity. Identity functions as a kind of shorthand for connection or realness. A compelling backstory coupled with racial and gender otherness — a “lived experience” — is MillZee political gold. Easy to capture in just a few words, identity slices through the internet noise and can’t be faked. (Or one would think. Julia Salazar, a progressive social Democrat running for state Senate in New York, has been accused of fabricating certain biographical details, including where she was born, to appear more disadvantaged. Regardless, the youth voters seem to be standing by her, for now.)

This year, campaigns with a lived-experience theme are proven winners. You couldn’t cook up a better test for this hypothesis than Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District primary, where Ayanna Pressley, a 44-year-old black female Boston city counselor, challenged a progressive 66-year-old white male incumbent who’d held the seat for 19 years. Their politics were nearly identical, but Pressley’s identity as a black woman with a history of sexual abuse captivated younger voters. The day before the primary, Pressley boasted 37,500 engaged Twitter followers (Capuano had a fourth as many), along with 7,100 enthusiastic Instagram followers (her opponent wasn’t on IG). Pressley won with 59 percent of the vote, and, with no Republican opponent, she’s heading to D.C.

Authentic messaging works across the political spectrum.

In the Georgia Democratic primary, Stacey Abrams, the black female candidate for governor, trounced her white female opponent by a huge margin: 300,000 votes. Her top issue is health care. Abrams has 118,000 Twitter followers ready to mobilize against her conservative white male opponent this November. And in Florida, black gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum bucked conventional wisdom when he triumphed over former congresswoman Gwen Graham, who is white, in the Democratic primary. Gillum is unquestionably progressive and speaks the MillZee language. The simple tweet, “We should pay teachers what they are worth. And with your help, we will,” drew 48,000 likes in just 16 hours.

Combine those optics with Bernie Sanders’ youth agenda and you’ve bottled lightning. Following the Vermont senator’s road map is first-time candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old MillZee of Puerto Rican heritage who beat a powerful white male incumbent in New York’s congressional primary in great part because she championed the MillZee platform, which includes the elimination of government-held student loans and zero tuition at public colleges. Ocasio-Cortez’s straightforward approach passes the MillZee authenticity test, while her skillful use of social media (she’s a native user, after all) has drawn national attention and nearly a million Twitter followers.

A few white male candidates have successfully tapped into the MillZee quest for authenticity as well. In Texas, youthful Beto O’Rourke, a progressive Democratic congressman running against Ted Cruz, may look like the hated patriarchy (down to his $7 million personal net worth), but he’s pro-choice, pro–gun control, and left-leaning on immigration. He also knows how to sound real. His one-minute low-fi iPhone video campaign ad, “Showing Up,” which captures O’Rourke pounding the pavement and shaking hands throughout Texas, has racked up more than 300,000 views on YouTube, and the comments section is open, inviting haters and lovers alike. The candidate boasts 461,000 Twitter followers, and his tweets consistently garner several thousand likes. Accordingly, O’Rourke grabbed 62 percent of the votes in the Democratic primary. There’s little doubt that young voters will come out to support him this fall.