More engaged, harder to reach

Texas Democrats will need to get their voters to turn up in larger-than-usual numbers in this year's midterm elections if they want to win seats held by Republicans. That means mobilizing several diverse constituencies that make up the Democratic Party's coalition.

And one of the toughest will be younger voters.

There are nearly as many adults in Texas above the age of 65 as there are below the age of 26. But the two groups vote at vastly different rates. In Texas, in 2016, senior citizens voted at more than double the rateof people in their early 20s.

What Olson wanted to get across is that young people like them make up the biggest opportunity to grow the Democratic electorate this election cycle.

"This is not the prom — no one has to ask you to show up. You come to the polls, and you bring somebody with you," Olson said, to cheers.

There are a lot of reasons younger people don't vote as frequently, according to Texas Democratic Party political director Cliff Walker. Think of voting like getting on the highway. "If you're just getting on the frontage road for the first time, and you pass your first onramp, well you missed that election, but you've only gone through one onramp. If I'm 60, I've gone through many onramps, so I've had many opportunities to get on the rolls and start participating," said Older folks have seen the impact of more elections play out in their lives, Walker says. They're also easier for campaigns to reach. Walker is 38, on the younger side of Generation X, and says even he's unreachable by traditional means. "You can't reach me by television. I cut the cord; I don't have cable," Walker said. "I listen to some radio, but it's going to be hard to reach me that way. Landlines? Try to reach me on a landline. I haven't had a landline in 20 years." Democrats have good reason to focus on bulking up the youth vote. Polling shows more alignment with Democratic priorities among millennials. So Walker says campaigns have to use more sophisticated data to do more targeted outreach to engage younger folks on social media, by text message and in person – anything to cut through the noise. Late Friday night, the Texas Young Democrats hosted a party in the Fort Worth Stockyards, a chance for young liberals fresh from the convention to dance and drink and talk shop. Celia Morgan, president of the Texas Young Democrats, says her generation gets a bad rap. Sure, she says, older people have always outvoted younger people, but young Texans today are more engaged than ever. "There is a lot more popularity, and I think a political wokeness among younger people in our generation than there was in other generations before," Morgan said.