Dems voter registration gone wrong

‘So far our approach has been to chase people around with clipboards’

“The Democratic Party Faces a Voter Registration Crisis.” That’s the headline of a New York Times piece published yesterday, analyzing how the left has fumbled voter registration in recent years – a sharp downturn from prior cycles of strong voter registration efforts.

Part of that drop comes from young voters. According to the NYT:

“In 2018, Democrats had accounted for 66 percent of new voters under 45 who registered with one of the two major parties. Yet by 2024, the Democratic share had plunged to 48 percent.”

So what’s going on with Democrats’ youth voter registration efforts, and how should the party course correct from here?

I spent A LOT of time on college campuses in the months and days leading up to the 2024 election, especially in battleground states. I was struck by a glaring disparity in how Democrat-aligned and Republican-aligned groups were trying to engage with and register student voters.

Though left-leaning or Dem-aligned groups lined campus quads and promenades in an effort to court students, Republican and MAGA aligned groups were far more aggressive – and persuasive – in their efforts to register voters, even if those efforts were online.

Let me paint a picture: while on campus at the University of Pennsylvania last September, I stumbled upon a table from the left-leaning NextGen America, which dubs itself “the nation’s largest youth voting organization,” with friendship bracelets, clipboards, and a big sign that read “Register to Vote!” Enticing maybe, but also easily avoided as students rush from class to class.

Meanwhile, the Nelk Boys (not a political organization, a very large entertainment and media company reaching young Americans) launched a ‘Send the Vote’ campaign aligned with their Full Send podcast that was mentioned by other podcasters like Theo Von and featured high profile events at college campus game day tailgates at Big Ten schools. One even included a concert from Waka Flocka. The initiative was technically non-partisan, but it was cultural, and totally politically coded. A few days before the election, Send The Vote had shared an ad on X declaring that “men’s rights are on the ballot this year.” According to a Fox News report, ads supported by the ‘Full Send’ campaign reached 35 million people.

That campaign was just one of many affiliated with creators and internet personalities on the right, including, perhaps most notably, Turning Point Action, the 501c4 affiliated with Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA. Turning Point Action (and Kirk) traversed online and irl communities looking to resonate with young people, and young men especially, by tapping into a previously unspoken and at times controversial slate of issues. These issues resonated with young Americans, in some cases, more so than bland promises to restore reproductive healthcare access or protect LGBTQ rights, even if young Americans are overwhelmingly pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ rights.

For quite some time, I’ve wondered why Democratic organizations are so much softer in their voter registration efforts, often issuing bland statements like “go vote” with an assumption that people will vote in their favor, without always making the connection to candidates or having real conversations with young voters about the top issues they feel intimately on a day-to-day basis in their lives.

This dichotomy has contributed to Democrats’ poor branding with young people. The size and scale of the efforts on the left just doesn’t match what has been happening on the right. Meanwhile, the content coming out of right-leaning or MAGA-aligned initiatives has just felt savvier and more squarely in the cultural zeitgeist, whereas Democrats content, to be quite frank, feels out of date and cringe because it tries to recycle old trends or celebrities from a bygone era of entertainment.

You could argue that this is true not just of voter registration efforts, but of each party’s overarching strategy. The Dems have continued to fall short when it comes to inspiring and igniting voters, held back by too big of a focus on norms and how things are “supposed” to be done in politics.

I’ve certainly witnessed these dynamics up close, but I didn't live them day-to-day, like Connie Miller, the founder of a youth engagement organization in Pennsylvania. For what it’s worth, by Democrats’ metrics, her program was a success last cycle: they registered 15,000 student voters on 56 college campuses in PA. But she has some thoughts on how and where Dems could do better. We texted back and forth this AM, and here’s some of what she shared:

RJ: How do you feel about Democrats youth voter registration compared to Republicans?

CM: We've known that this is a problem for a long time. We just ran a program in Pennsylvania that registered 15,000 college voters across the state. I think it's inherently a good investment. Young people are still forming their part of identities. They're thinking through how they want to show up in life, they're open to being engaged by organizers, so to use the language of the left they're therefore an inherently ‘swingy’ and ‘gettable’ population of voters. But in running that program in Pennsylvania what we very rarely saw was Republicans out high traffic canvassing to get voter registration, which is the go to tactic of the left.

I think generally Democrats think of the voter registration problem as a sickness that can be solved by doing more voter registration, whatever that means. But we should be thinking about it as a symptom of a bigger problem. Our challenge isn't the number of people that we’re sending out to street corners or to college campuses to register voters. We’re investing in sending a lot of people out. The problem is whether people actually trust the Democratic Party to be in their corner, and therefore whether they are willing to register as a Democrat, which is part of why we're seeing so many young people registering as independents too.

RJ: How have Democrats fallen behind?

That’s how Democrats fell behind. Not being a party that people trusted to be in their corner. The right has been so focused on giving people a language for their pain and making them believe that only Republicans and especially Donald Trump can fix the pain that they're feeling, meanwhile Democrats have been doing more vended voter registration program and sending more people out to street corners, and I think when someone comes to your campus, registers you to vote, and is gone the next day. It looks and feels extractive rather than empowering and young people clock that for what it is. What we need year-round, organizing infrastructure.

Without a doubt we need to keep investing in that, especially for young voters, but it needs to be done with the political dollars necessary for organizers to have really, really honest conversations about the parties and the different futures that we want to build.

So far, our approach has been to chase people around with clipboards and convince them to register, but what we found on campus organizing is that giving people a reason to come to you is way more powerful. Whether that's tactical, having stickers to hand out, whether that's the service we're providing, like having a concierge voter protection assistant, or whether that's messaging, having a story that helps people make sense of this political moment. We're just not gonna close the voter registration gap until we're a party that people want to come spend time with rather than a party that's chasing people down.

I do think there's like a little bit of an impulse on the left to think about like, ‘great, people wanting to come spend time with us,’ means we have to do like a sexier flashier version of this, and I think that's actually not quite right because that's still kind of tactical. But what we've seen over and over again is that what works is making young people feel heard, giving them information, and showing them that we’re in the mud with them. After that, I think you know we invest in non-extractive voter registration work. Those hit-and-run programs can turn out funder numbers, but they're not building credibility for the party.

Ideally, we'd also be embedding voter registration where people already are, whether that means going into classrooms or being at concerts. Those are all things that we've experimented with in Pennsylvania in particular. We had a big victory recently with getting automatic voter registration when you get your drivers license. But we also know that a lot of young people, especially in cities, aren't driving or getting a license. So as much as we can do those structural fixes that are from Democratic leaders, those are gonna be the best – and that's not just because it's automatic, but that's because it's a signal to Gen Z that someone is actually thinking through their lived experiences and needs and taking that into account and how they're designing policy.

I think right now, as we're assessing the voter registration gap and everything that's happening with Gen Z, we do have an opportunity to invest in youth lead voter registration programming that actually makes Gen Z feel hard. It helps them navigate this extremely chaotic moment that we're in and tests new ways for Democrats to build trust with young voters. Those year-round programs could be the ones on the front lines really iterating on ‘What does Gen Z want and need to hear from us?,’ ‘How can we best serve them?,’ ‘How can we elevate their leadership?’

RJ: Do you have any ideas for Democrats when it comes to the future of voter registration?

CM: I think it would just be a mistake for us to let our foot off the gas now. We know Gen Z support for Trump and Republicans is soft. We know they're looking for change. As long as we're investing in voter registration programs that are listening to and responding to their concerns all year around, I think that investment will help us make the case that we’re the change and pull Gen Z voters back over to us, rather than chasing them around with clipboards.

Noteworthy reads

• Gen Z makes up more than 50% of Pinterest users and they’re thrifting, according to Pinterest’s Fall 2025 Trend Report

• How the US army is using influencers to recruit a new generation: ‘Promise them this idea of stability’, Rosalind Adams for The Guardian

• The Future of Film is No Longer a Boys Club, Alyssa Vingan for Elle

• The world's biggest comics platform is betting on video to lure Gen Z, Lucia Moses for Business Insider