Pulse Check: What Drives Young Voters

“Young people have always had collective power,” says NextGen’s Sofia Garduno Arajuo.

Young people are incredibly important to political movements – and they always have been. As we work to turn this country around, it’s absolutely essential that we hear from and center young leaders and voters.

NextGen is a national youth organization that organizes 18- to 29-year-olds and has registered more than 1.6 million young voters. They’ve been running a deep listening campaign that aims to hear from young people across the country about what matters most to them by asking them open-ended questions in one-on-one text exchanges.

I spoke with NextGen’s Senior Digital Organizing Director Sofia Garduno Araujo, who led the deep listening project, called the Pulse Check campaign, about the results of their recent report on what they learned from contacting over 1 million young people in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. From our conversation, I learned that young people see through cheap gimmicks, they’re deeply engaged in the toughest political questions, and they consider corruption a defining political problem that personally affects them.

Meaghan: I like to start by asking people how they got involved in politics.

Sofia: My identity was politicized long before I was ever called to do political work. I grew up undocumented most of my life. I was a DACA student for a while, and, you know, in 2017 Trump tried to get rid of DACA.

Through organizing around DACA, I started realizing I was able to connect with people, I could get them to join the cause. I started organizing around college campuses. Of course, I wasn’t able to vote, but I realized that I was good at connecting with people and organizing. That helped me quell the feelings of powerlessness and unease that I was dealing with, because through organizing I could find a way to find a voice I otherwise didn’t have, that others didn’t have.

Meaghan: Why is it important to think of young people as a demographic or collective group?

Sofia: A big part of it is just how large the demographic is. At NextGen, we focus on the 18 to 29 age range, which makes up such a large chunk of the voter base. Young voters are a unique demographic because there’s always new people joining every single year. So, that makes it really important to make sure we’re listening to them and keeping up with what’s affecting them.

There’s also the fact that young people have always had collective power. Throughout history, young people tend to be leaders in movements. So, that’s part of why I’ve focused so much on youth organizing within my work, because of how much potential there is engaging young people.

Meaghan: What misconceptions do people have about young people’s engagement in politics?

Sofia: A big misconception is that young people are apathetic. It’s very, very clear to me that the truth is quite literally the opposite. It’s more that young people are overwhelmed and not feeling like they are heard. They see a system that is clearly not set up in their favor, and they don’t know how to get involved.

With our texting team, we give them resources, we give them information and education, and they’re very excited to get involved. What we’re trying to do is lower the barrier to entry to getting involved. It just doesn’t feel to them that people are listening to them, that their government is representing them. So, they’re not apathetic, there’s just so much coming at them that it’s easy to shut down. It’s really about listening and talking with them in a way that resonates with them.

When talking with young people, it really comes down to just trying to talk to them again in the authentic way, more as a friend, like, “I’m here as a resource, whatever you need, whatever questions you have, I can help, but I’m not any better than you.”

Meaghan: NextGen just released a report on what you heard from young people. What stands out to you about the survey results?

Sofia: Since February, we’ve now sent 1.1 million texts to young people trying to ask them open-ended questions, like, “Hey, what issues are affecting your life the most right now?” or “This year has been a lot. How are you feeling?”

We’ve sent texts to Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. We’ve had a really high response rate, which goes back to the idea that young people aren’t apathetic, they’re actually very tuned in.

The overall top issue is the economy. I mean, that’s not really a surprise to anyone. We actually separated our economy-related replies into a few different sections, so one is housing, one is the job market and wages, one is just cost of living, groceries, things like that, and then there’s just general economic concerns. Taken together, economic concerns rank highest.

The second most common response is anti-fascism and democracy. When we’re looking at single issue tags, anti-fascism is definitely the top one. Young people are very worried about rising fascism. They’re seeing the rise of fascism in terms of billionaire influence and corruption in politics on both sides.

Young people are very, very clear on that. Halfway through the campaign, we actually had to add a response about Democratic Party inaction, because across the board, they’re seeing it. What they’re responding to isn’t the party division anymore, it’s the corruption aspect. We saw that in both the economy and democracy responses. For young people, there’s a very clear link between the billionaire oligarchy that we’re seeing, and they’re able to connect it all very clearly.

The third response is foreign policy, and, again, that’s very clear. We actually started this campaign before the war in Iran started. As soon as the war started, we heard about how they’re scared of World War III, they’re scared of being drafted. They also understood how the war was affecting their economic struggles. They were saying things like, “I can’t get to school because I have to drive, and gas prices are astronomical right now.”

It’s also fascinating to see how much young people understand that all these things are linked. We asked them to pick one thing, but in many of our responses, they make a clear connection between all of them. We try to ask people to pick just one tag, but a lot of them are like, “No, it’s everything, it’s all connected. It’s not just one problem, it’s an amalgamation of problems.”

Meaghan: Do you have advice for reaching young voters?

Sofia: We’ve seen that young people can be engaged with texts. We think we’re getting those results because we’re listening, we’re not being transactional. Listening is a huge first step.

I’ll give an example about connecting with people. In 2018, I was a field organizer in a primarily Latino community. The amount of times that I went up to a door and I was talking to someone in Spanish, and someone would tell me, “This is the first time a campaign has ever spoken to me, come to my door, and been able to speak my language, and like have a real conversation with me. I’m going to vote for your candidate just for that alone.” I think we really underestimate how much listening can actually make a difference.

In this texting campaign, we don’t ask people to vote for any candidate after we text with them. We tell them about things they can do related to the issues that they said they cared about, we show them how to contact their representatives, we give them information, but we don’t make it transactional in terms of asking them to do something for a campaign. We’re validating what they’re saying, we’re giving them stats about how many other Americans agree with them, and we’re trying to give them an outlet to do something with the frustration they might be feeling. We say, “We’re here to help you, and you know what’s best for your community.”

Meaghan: I’ve been asking everyone, how are you coping?

Sofia: I mean, it’s tough. One thing that I found a lot of solace in is that I feel like I have a really strong community here. I moved to Chicago about a year ago, and pretty much my whole friend group moved here at the same time. We’ll be able to just come together and talk about how it is affecting us. That’s helped me a lot.

The other thing is I like to go to the park and see the birds. I love birds. And, I actually recently started flying kites, because now I’m in the Windy City, this is the perfect place for kites. I love it, it feels like the best thing in the world. So, if the weather’s nice, I’ll go to the park and fly a kite.