The Up and Up goes to Miami
The Up and Up goes to Miami
Miami Dade County flipped red in 2022. Young organizers there say enthusiasm in 2024 is low. But housing, abortion and marijuana ballot initiatives, and the war in Gaza are top of mind.
After reading about the massive fundraising totals from former President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach haul (which raked in a record $50.5 million) and President Joe Biden’s campaign event at Radio City Music Hall in New York City with former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton (that brought in $26 million), I couldn’t help but wonder how and if a portion of these mega-sums will be used by either campaign to court young voters.
According to the Florida-based canvassers I sat with for a listening session last week in Miami, youth-vote organizers could use all the help they can get to drum up excitement about voting in 2024. These young operatives work with Engage Miami, a youth civic engagement organization in the city. They said excitement around the election is low and voter engagement is difficult.
Jamie Halabi, who’s 24, said when he’s talking about voter registration with students at Florida International University, a public school in Miami, “they feel like they don’t want to do it, even though they are citizens, and they’re above 18, but they feel scared to participate in this.”
“When I ask them why, they’re like, ‘Oh it’s all a scam, and we feel like we can’t change anything,’” Halabi said.
That tracks with how young people in other cities are feeling about politics right now (and points to national trends of political exhaustion). Our conversation at Engage’s headquarters came one week after New York City teens told me they were worried about increasing party polarization and one 16-year-old admitted: “I don’t feel really hopeful about the future of American politics.”
Enough throat clearing.
If and how young people in Florida vote this November could play a major role in the outcome of the 2024 election overall. Florida is ranked #10 on the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts (CIRCLE)’s list of the top ten states where young voters have the greatest potential to impact the results of the presidential election. And Miami Dade County in particular is of special intrigue after Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis won there in 2022, despite the fact that Democrats had carried the district for 20 years.
So beyond conveying feelings of jadedness, what did the young organizers and voters I spoke with there have to say? Our conversation was dense. Overall, they shared a continued focus on issues rather than political party or politician (along with a frustration with both presidential candidates). This was my second time at Engage’s headquarters, and third time visiting Miami since the start of my listening tours in 2022. Over the past two years, young people in the city have expressed growing concern with housing and the cost of living. This time around, they said top priorities for young people in the area are (once again) housing and life affordability, as well as abortion and marijuana (which are both on the ballot in November), and the war in Gaza — which could impact youth voter turnout.
Issues > party
Jessica Gonzalez, who’s 23 and was born and raised in Hialeah, said she’s inspired by issues and the laws around them rather than any one particular politician.
“I’m more interested in laws than with the [candidates] when it comes to elections, Gonzalez said. “Because you could have dreams for a person, they could go for a lot of things you want, but they could say that one thing or do something shady that you don’t like,” she said. “But with laws, it’s more flexible.”
She referred specifically to upcoming ballot initiatives on abortion and marijuana - both of which Florida voters will have the opportunity to weigh in on in November. She also mentioned raising the minimum wage and housing affordability.
Kay Hoveskeland — who’s 21, lives in Orlando, and attends the University of Central Florida — commutes to Miami twice a week for her work with Engage. Both in Orlando and in Miami, she said, homelessness is top of mind. She mentioned that DeSantis had recently signed a law which prohibits people from sleeping in public areas.
“Today I went into Dunkin, and somebody asked me to buy them a sandwich and then they were like, ‘I don't know how to get to the shelter that I'm trying to get to.’ And that was today that happened, where somebody was going in about their personal story about how they didn't know whether they were going to make it to the shelter… It's not my life, but it affected me, and I see it in my neighborhood,” Hoveskeland said.
“There are not enough shelters,” said Camila Gantiva, who’s 25 and lives in Liberty City, which she said has changed in recent years. “They’re knocking down all of the old buildings and building new apartments,” she said, adding, “the crime is still the same… the streets are still really dirty, the schools are still horrible… there’s a lack of education, gun violence.”
All the organizers agreed that housing, life affordability, and workers’ rights go hand in hand. The young Floridians, each between 21 and 25, had worked multiple jobs and were frustrated by mistreatment at their respective workplaces. They described their work in the food services, security, and car sales industries and stressed the importance of raising the minimum wage.
“We have a really bad pay problem here,” said Gonzalez. Florida voted to raise the minimum wage in 2020. The increase will take place incrementally over six years before reaching $15.00 in 2026. “Even so, it's impossible to even try to own a house or own property over here. Most people now, young people I talk to, they’re thinking about getting trailer homes,” she said.
On 2024…
Zooming out, I asked the group how they felt about the 2024 presidential election.
There was a brief pause before Halabi said: “It’s going to be wild.” He stressed that as a country, the attention has turned to international affairs rather than focusing on domestic issues like homelessness. “Why I say wild is because Joe Biden, as president, he did not give what he promised for Americans.”
“I take a different take. I’m over it. It’s a rerun. Nobody likes a rerun,” said Hoveskeland. “I think people are over it, especially our age, and bringing up what’s going on overseas. I am not happy about our candidates, and I know a lot of young people aren’t. There’s going to be a lot of convincing and begging and pleading for people to get out to vote,” she said.
“I’ve spoken to a lot of people and they’re not even voting,” said Gantiva. Asked why, she said, “because you’re just picking evil of the lesser evil.”
Gonazlez said that a lot of young people on campus at Miami Dade College have said they don’t want to vote for president. She once again emphasized that, “they could just vote on the laws,” but she worries that, “they really don’t know whats on [the ballot].”
The two types of potential non-voters: The apolitical and those concerned with Gaza
Hoveskeland thinks there are two types of young people who won’t vote this November. “One is just like apolitical,” she said. The other, may choose to abstain because of the war in Gaza. “I’ve talked to people in Central Florida… on UCF’s campus there’s a huge, huge Muslim population, and they’re not voting because of what’s going on overseas. They’re unhappy with a war we are engaging in.”
I asked if these are young people who would have voted, were it not for the war.
Hoveskeland described knowing a girl who she said is, “the most leftist person I’ve ever met,” and said that because of what’s going on overseas, that young woman is “now voting for the opposite party.” Asked why that young woman thinks Trump’s policies would be better than Biden’s, Hoveskeland said: “Because we haven’t seen it yet. It’s just assumption of, ‘Oh, well he would have handled it better.’”
Gantiva and Gonzalez pointed to the fact that there was no war in that area of the world while Trump was in office.
“He did make the deal and he signed for Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel,” Halabi said. “He did try to make peace,” he said. “He tried to change the policy in the Middle East.” Meanwhile, Halabi said, Biden is approving funds to Israel for its war in Gaza, while there are domestic issues like student loans, gun violence, and homelessness that are going unaddressed.
Self-interested votes
Asked what specifically is most likely to get voters in Florida to the polls this year, Hoveskeland said that while Gaza is a top concern, she thinks abortion is more central to the daily lives of young Floridians.
“At the end of the day, we are an individualistic country. And so I mean, the war is a distance away. Abortion, that is at people's fingertips. They're getting pregnant and need this medical care now, versus seeing it on TikTok and being like, ‘Oh, let me close the app.’”
Hoveskeland said it depends who you’re talking to — and priority issues will differ for different people, depending on individual circumstances. There are some young voters, she said, including perhaps members of Muslim or Arab communities, who will prioritize Gaza even if they believe in the constitutional right to an abortion.
“If you’re constantly seeing just the worst images and videos in your entire life on TikTok, and then you’re just expected to go on about your daily life, like you didn’t just witness the most crazy thing on your phone, it’s really easy to have clouded judgement about what candidates actually stand for. So in terms of Trump, I think a lot of people are forgetting he has said pretty bad things about abortion. But at the same time, [they may think] I just watched a kid with no limbs on my phone. One outweighs the other at the moment. It’s a lot of, ‘What is most important to me in that moment?’”
So how will the organizers motivate young voters?
There are hurdles to the voter registration process, the organizers explained. First, to Halabi’s point early on in our conversation, students are sometimes turned off by voter registration because they don’t think voting will make a tangible difference in their lives.
According to Hoveskeland, there’s a simple way to motivate young voters.
“We attack it with issues,” she said. “We say, you care about issues, vote on this…. You can do the whole inspiration thing, yes, but there are things that are actually being voted on this year, go vote for them.”
“You say the word abortion and people have a million opinions. That’s a trigger word, and we try our best to be nonpartisan here, and just really encourage every single person to vote. At the end of the day, if they care about the issues, they’re going to get to the polls.”
But beyond that emotional barrier, there’s logistical obstacles like a long voter registration process. In part, young people can be intimidated by the multi-step requirements. “The papers do look really scary, but it comes down to very simple information,” Gonzalez said.
Florida enacted new voter registration laws since 2020, which require third party groups to give registrants receipts for their registration. This, according to Hoveskeland, “changed the entire way we do voter registration.” While providing a receipt adds an extra step, Gonzalez said that this has actually helped with registration. “People can feel that it’s more valid,” she said.
A generation that’s frustrated
Lastly, I referenced recent data showing that Gen Z is identifying as more conservative than their parents at higher rates than millennials did 20 years ago, and other data from 2022 showing that Gen Z is more likely to ditch party labels and identify as independent — both of which demonstrate an ideological shift from Gen Z’s older counterparts. I asked the organizers if the young people they speak with are eager to identify with a political party, think they’re somewhere in the middle, or if they feel neither represents them.
Halabi said it’s not necessarily cut and dry. Likewise, Hoveskeland stressed that Gen Z is not a monolith — but she doubts that on the whole, Gen Z is moving further to the right. “We’re the most frustrated we’ve ever been with minimum wage, and the most queer generation we’ve ever had… so can those things be true at the same time?” she said. “We’re a melting pot… young people all think differently.”
“I think we’re the most opinionated generation because of social media,” Gantiva said.
I asked what else differentiates our generation from the ones that came before us. Hovesekeland said it’s the nature and frequency of crisis, in comparison to technological growth and increased wealth, that creates a discrepancy Gen Z isn’t down to put up with.
“There’s been generations that have experienced pandemics. There have been generations that experienced school shootings, terrorist attacks, housing crises, depression, all of the stuff that we’re experiencing. But has any generation experienced it to the magnitude we have? Have they experience having to know what it’s like to know that you might not come home from school that day? They had child labor laws, sure, and that was bad, but now we’re seeing increasingly in the year 2024… a roll back of child labor laws,” said Hoveskeland.
“We’re increasingly seeing our technology advance, and more and more money being put into politics, and more and more billionaires in our country, and at the same time we’re just seeing so much despair. I don’t think any generation has experienced the type of despair that we have.”
A note to readers
This conversation at Engage Miami was part of The Up and Up’s series of listening sessions with young Americans (mostly) in battleground states. These listening sessions are separate from The Up and Up’s traditional reporting and are treated like focus groups. Participants are offered $25 in compensation for their time. These listening sessions and the travel required for them are made possible thanks to a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.
If you’re interested in convening a group, or have suggestions of where I should visit next, please reach out. I’d love to hear from you.
More from Miami…
After chatting with the organizers at Engage, I drove to The University of Miami in Coral Gables, where I interviewed potential young voters passing by the campus’ student center in partnership with The News Movement — a social first news brand focused on Gen Z. These students shared many of the same concerns as and affirmed many of the fears of the Engage organizers.
Here’s some of what they had to say:
Make sure to follow The Up and Up on Instagram @the.upandup for more videos like this one.