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This year, perhaps more than ever, it feels important to persuade the young people in our lives to vote – or if they plan to vote, not to waste their vote on a third-party candidate. But how?
First and foremost, it is important to listen. Any conversation must begin with asking young people what issues are important to them. We have done this with our own interns and what tops the list for them are abortion rights, reducing gun violence, voting rights, and racial justice. (And, yes, the situation in Gaza will likely come up. Our advice: Don’t get sidetracked into a debate about what is happening on college campuses.).
Once you know what is important to them, ask them what they are doing about it. They’ll mention protests, social media, and more – but probably not voting. Tell them that all those other ways of taking action are great, but there are some people who have disproportionate power over the issues that matter to us, and they are elected officials. These officials pay attention to voters, and they’re not all the same. Knowing how candidates are different from one another can allow a voter to bring about positive change.
If the young person is open to it, guide them to information about how the candidates and parties differ in their positions on the issues that they have identified as being important to them. There are several websites and apps that provide this information in a non-partisan way. We recommend Guides.vote, Activote, and Ballotopedia. Help the young person to identify which level of government has the most influence on the policies that matter to them and who the candidates are at that level. That makes voting seem both practical and strategic. And learning about the power of state and local governments is eye-opening and motivating for youth.
Another thing you can do to make voting seem worthwhile to a young person is to tell them a story about your own regrets about either not voting or not working hard enough for the candidate of your choice and what happened as a result. Some of us can go back as far as 1968 and talk about the consequences of the presidential election—escalation of the war in Vietnam, and Watergate. Some of us may be able to talk about 2000 when the presidential race was so close that the Supreme Court ultimately stepped in to decide the outcome based on a few hundred hanging chads on paper ballots in Florida. As a result, we got 9/11, the War in Iraq and major setbacks to fighting climate change. And then, of course, there are many people who could have worked harder to influence the outcome of the 2016 election – and you can point to the policy consequences of that election, including the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
A third approach that might help is to reframe what voting means. These are challenging times and unfortunately most young people are very unhappy with the two major presidential candidates. Nevertheless, the candidates are not the same. Share these sayings or your own insights:
Voting is not a prize or a love letter; it’s harm reduction.
If you don’t vote, you are doubling the voice of someone who disagrees with you.
However, it is probably best to avoid asserting that a vote for a third party is a wasted vote or to remind young people that people fought and died for the right to vote. We have learned that young people resent such lectures.
Good luck with your conversations! Let us know how they go. We are almost done recruiting 40 college-student interns for the summer session of Students for Voting Justice and we are planning to have similar conversations with them. Persuading young people that voting will help them to achieve their goals is one of the central elements of our program. It is one of the ways in which we achieve our mission, which is to empower our young people to strengthen our democracy.
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