If you asked Parker Shotts a year ago who she planned to vote for in 2020, the answer would not have been her current pick, former vice president Joe Biden. The 21-year-old University of Arkansas student kicked off the Democratic presidential primary supporting former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, only to watch him drop out of the race early on. Then she set her sights on former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg, but he suspended his campaign just days before the Arkansas primary. Only after both of those men, and Senator Amy Klobuchar, endorsed Biden did she decide to back him too.

Shotts isn’t alone in feeling weary after keeping track of a Democratic presidential primary that saw 27 different candidates enter the race. But at this point, with Biden the presumptive nominee, she’s one of a growing number of young people sorting through their feelings about what comes next for the party, especially in the midst of a global pandemic.

Teen Vogue started hearing from young voters after Super Tuesday, when Biden’s path to the nomination came into sharper focus. Then came one of the most tumultuous months in modern history, when a devastating pandemic swept across the globe, the economy fell off the deep end, and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders dropped out of the 2020 race. The end of Sanders's campaign left Biden as the standard-bearer for an exhausted Democratic Party. We checked back with young voters, over the past six weeks, to see how their perspectives on the election had shifted.

Several of those voters say Biden was never a first choice; they view him as the pragmatic candidate more likely to win the White House and enact some of the progressive policies they’re eager to see. Although some say they’ve actually become more disillusioned with Biden over the past few weeks, he remains their best — and now only — option.

Shotts, for example, wasn’t sure if Sanders’s unproven political revolution could actually create change, especially by tackling so many issues so radically at the same time. “I don't think it needs to happen all at once,” she tells Teen Vogue. “It’s definitely something that I would love to see happen in my lifetime, but I don't think America is necessarily ready for that all at once.” That doesn’t mean, she points out, that she doesn’t want to see affordable health care or an end to gun violence; she just personally supports a more incremental approach.

Ashley Lynn Priore, a 20-year-old student at the University of Pittsburgh, agrees that “change comes in stages.”

Priore tells Teen Vogue that she has backed Biden for months, initially because she thought “he had the best shot of beating Trump” and he “can appeal to large masses of people with very different views.”

Her views align more with Warren’s, she says, but “Biden has the experience in the White House to fix this broken system on day one” — and she feels even more confident in that decision after the COVID-19 outbreak.

“I realized how much I miss a leader being able to speak to a nation and provide hope for the future (because we've seen how Trump can't do that at all),” she writes in an email to Teen Vogue.

But other young people say this public health crisis has left them more dismayed by their options. Brooke, a 21-year-old from New Jersey who didn’t want to use her last name for fear of backlash, was a supporter of Senator Elizabeth Warren, and was waffling between Sanders and Biden in early March, after Warren dropped out.