In California, teens up have been gathering at phone banks and walking neighborhoods, urging young voters to hit the polls

'The young are our moral compass': how US teens are getting out the vote

For young people who grew up in the small towns near Fresno, California, where an untold number of families are undocumented, concerns that the early morning light could bring immigration officials to their doorstep is nothing new. The fear, it seems, has been there as long as the fields that two generations ago called to their grandparents and, later, became home to the United Farmworkers Movement that spread across California’s Central valley.

“For me, immigration hits really close to home,” said Jay, a 17-year-old senior at a local high school whose name the Guardian has agreed to withhold. “My parents are both undocumented and they’ve been deported before. So something that I really wanted to learn was how we can help them out,” he said.

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That’s what Jay said first led to his interest in politics, as well as what brought him on a recent school night to a nondescript barber shop turned call center – a conversion so new that men still wander in looking for a trim. Here, along with dozens of other teenagers, Jay works the phones, making last-minute appeals for people to vote in the upcoming election.

“Can I count on you to vote in the March 3 primary?” he asks.

With California’s presidential primary just days away, teenagers up and down the state have been gathering at phone banks and walking neighborhood streets, nudging eligible young voters to hit the polls.

Power California, the group behind the local efforts, is part of an alliance of 25 groups working to improve historically low turnout for young voters. The group has registered 75,000 young people to vote since 2016, and its leaders say they’re just getting started.

The adults organizing and funding the outreach are banking that the efforts will pay off – not just in results for the presidential primaries, but in down-ticket races that could flip congressional districts from red to blue and elect leaders to represent overlooked areas and marginalized voices.

Along the way, they hope to help young people create lifelong voting habits that will position them to elect leaders who will represent California’s diverse communities.

Christian Arana, Latino Community Foundation policy director, said the key to engaging young people is to focus on the issues they see play out in their communities and then couple it with how-to information on registration and voting.

“Power CA doesn’t just say: ‘Go out and vote.’ They start with the conversations that are happening around the dinner table – the lack of clean water. The fact that Ice raids continue to happen,” Arana said.

Fresno, no longer overlooked by presidential candidates sweeping through the Golden state, is a place where concerns over immigration and climate change come together.

Social media is an effective entry point into politics – the group’s polling says about half of those surveyed have taken part in social causes and hashtagged movements.

“I’ve always been drawn to causes, like Black Lives Matter, where people are fighting for rights that should just be given to them outright,” said Brianna Torres Garcia, a 17-year-old senior.

Mobilizing young people is an effort that spans the country, led not by candidates’ campaigns but by non-profits building grassroots alliances and working to improve turn out.

Sarah Audelo, executive director of Alliance for Youth Action, which has in its network 20 groups in states from Washington to Florida, says there’s a lot at stake in the 3 March primary, otherwise known as Super Tuesday, when 14 states and one US territory hold nominating contests.

“With the amount of delegates California and Texas have, the results could shift the entire narrative in this election,” she said.

Power California’s not-for-profit status means it is prohibited from endorsing candidates specifically. But organizers say the issues that attract young people typically spill over into support for progressive, Democratic candidates.

Once organizers get young people to register, it’s up to candidates to close the deal and get their votes. Thanks to a giant ground game and a message that resonates with young voters, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders appears comfortably positioned to do that in the Central Valley, where two-thirds of people under 25 are Latino.

Recent poll numbers have Sanders as the clear frontrunner, claiming 53% of young voters and the same share of Latino voters across the state.

Because those canvassing and working the phones are paid for their time, the outreach efforts rack up costs.

We see them as first-generation voters. You have to build an outreach strategy that reflects that

Power California raises much of the funding themselves through grants and donations, but some external funding comes from the Latino Community Foundation, a philanthropic not-for-profit that’s invested more than $100,000 into Power California’s civic engagement efforts.

More than half of California’s population under 21 has an immigrant or a refugee as a parent, which means young voters could be the first person in their families to cast a vote in an election, said Luis Sánchez, Power California’s executive director.

“We see them as first-generation voters,” said Sánchez. “You have to build an outreach strategy that reflects that. Like first-generation college students, we’re asking them to navigate a system they may not be familiar with. We’re trying to demystify the process and keep them engaged.”

But in order to make results sustainable, the outreach must be year-round, Sánchez said.

“Data shows that if you register young people, then get them to vote in their first two elections, they remain active voters for life. If they miss that first election, they disengage for 10 years,” he said.

Building ‘collective power’

Historically, turnout for young voters has lagged in California, but numbers in recent years have shown a promising trend. Between 2014 and 2018, turnout for 18- to 24-year-olds jumped nearly 20 percentage points, according to numbers from USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.

Organizers attribute some of the uptick to the so-called “Trump bump”, a backlash to policies implemented by the president’s administration. But other, more practical, changes have also played a role.

In 2016, California became one of a handful of states that allow for pre-registration of 16- and 17-year-olds. The program has pre-registered more than 500,000 teenagers in the past four years in an effort that California’s secretary of state, Alex Padilla, told Teen Vogue has been “wildly successful”.

According to the Padilla’s numbers, about 45% of young people have registered as Democrats, 26% had no party preference, and 24% registered as Republicans.

In the last midterms, young voters were the game changer in the elections that flipped Luis Sánchez

Sánchez says the uptick they have seen in the past few years has made a big difference in key congressional races.

“In the last midterms, young voters were the game changer in the elections that flipped,” Sánchez said.

That includes California’s congressional district 21, made up by much of the Central valley area between Fresno and Bakersfield, where Democrat TJ Cox upset the Republican incumbent by just a few hundred votes.

Alicia Olivarez, narratives and policy director with Power California, who works with teenagers on the ground, said she has already seen the efforts change the way that young people talk about elections.

“Young people have always been the country’s moral compass. When we bring in young people to do the organizing work, and they’re the ones calling and delivering the messages, we’re finding that young people aren’t apathetic at all,” she said.

Along the way, she’s also noticed a shift in the way young people talk about Fresno and the Central Valley.

“The narrative has shifted from ‘I’ve got to get outta here, there’s nothing for me here’ to ‘There are opportunities here if we build collective power’,” she said.