When We All Vote wants to register 500,000 voters this year
A Q&A with When We All Vote's new executive director, Beth Lynk. The launch of Students for Biden. And how courts are impacting youth voting access.
The youth vote space is chock-full of organizations that strive to get teens and twenty-somethings to the polls. Every group has its own flair. Some are local, others are national. Many rely on student organizers, others are bolstered by full time staffs, and some operate with a mix of the two.
Few, have such a slate of high profile influencers, celebrities, artists, and athletes as When We All Vote, which was started by former First Lady Michelle Obama in 2018 with a goal of changing the culture around voting for young voters and voters of color. Today, When We All Vote announced its new executive director, Beth Lynk, who has the tall task of leading the organization through an election cycle that Politico dubbed what is “expected to be the most expensive and nastiest in modern political history.”
Previously, Beth served as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She’s held roles at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Planned Parenthood, and led the Census Counts Campaign at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Yesterday, I chatted with Beth to learn more about her 2024 vision for When We All Vote. Here’s some of what she shared, edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
“The culture, and I mean that with a capital C, has ever been more important” — When We All Vote’s Beth Lynk
What are the top three words you would use to describe yourself?
Beth Lynk: Optimistic, mission-driven, strategic.
What specific flair or flavor will bring to the organization?
“One of the things I've been talking with the team a bit about is my optimism for this year. I don't think the work of When We All Vote has ever been more important, and I don't think that the culture, and I mean that with a capital C, has ever been more important. And the fact that When We All Vote sits at the intersection of democracy and culture makes me incredibly optimistic for our road ahead. That brightness and lightness is going to be the light through what is going to be a very busy season this year. And one where unfortunately, we see a lot of people trying to bring in that kind of darkness, or apathy, or dark clouds. But one of the things we will see from When We All Vote is really just being that bright light to engage and have those conversations with our community and with young voters and show the enthusiasm and energy that young voters and members of our community have for the issues that they care about like climate, and gun violence prevention, abortion, having a living wage. We know that young people stand up for the issues that they believe in. We know that young people are leaders in their communities. And we are so excited, and personally I am so excited, to show that power to the country and ultimately to the world.”
What big ideas do you have for engaging young voters this election cycle, given that most young people aren't psyched about the idea of a 2020 presidential rematch?
“Our strategy for this year has three parts. One: voter registration. Our goal is to register 500,000 Americans to vote, especially Black, brown, and young voters. Two: voter turnout. We will turn out 5 million new voters to cast their ballots. And three: we will change the culture around voting. We will build a culture of voting through music, sports, entertainment and media with our partners, our celebrity co-chairs, and ambassadors to continue those conversations around voting, civic engagement, and education.
In terms of what that actually looks like in practice, that will look like bringing voting to popular culture. We’ll be at music festivals and concerts, HBCUs, sporting events, NBA games and so much more. Our parties at the polls initiative and program is getting bigger and bigger. This is our effort to engage and bring excitement and energy to the early voting process. We're going to be holding more than 500 early voting parties across the country. We're also, and I'm really excited about this, investing in the next generation of voters through our ‘My School Votes’ program. We have a paid ambassador program that we're actually recruiting for right now for high school students and educators to ensure that their own communities are registered, educated about, and ready to vote. So students, current high school sophomores and juniors, and teachers or administrators can currently sign up for that program to become a ‘My School Votes’ ambassador.
We're also continuing to engage our celebrity talent and our roster of celebrity co-chairs. More to come, some really exciting partnerships that we'll be rolling out over the rest of the year. And then we are mobilizing our hundreds of partners through our ‘Culture of Democracy’ collective, which is a network of non-traditional organizations, or teams, entertainment and media entities, national and local advocacy groups, all coming together to register, educate, and mobilize people to vote. We’ll particularly be engaging our community around big moments like Juneteenth and National Voter Registration Day.”
You mentioned voter education. Something I hear so frequently especially with young and new voters is, ‘I want to register, but I don't know how,’ or even along the lines of uncertainty about what down ballot office-holders do. How do you view the role of voter education?
Before coming to this role, I served as the director of the Census Counts campaign, which was an effort to engage and mobilize historically undercounted groups in the 2020 census. And one of the things about the census that is very interesting other than being the nation's largest peacetime organizing effort, is that the Census happens every 10 years and it is a very complicated undertaking, and most people don't know how to do it. You generally know, ‘Hey, I'm supposed to respond to the Census,’ but the questions can get nuanced. How to engage can look different for different people. And if you're a college student, versus someone who lives in an apartment off-campus, or if you live in a home with your parents, the way that you show up, the way you're counted looks different. In some ways, voting — whether it's state to state, whether you're transitioning from being at home with your parents to now being in college, or transitioning from being in college to being a young adult on your own — might look different based on the state you're in because the rules look different. And knowing about the issues that matter locally can also look different and be easier or harder to understand depending on where you are. And so that's why I'm really excited that our focus at When We All Vote has been and will continue to be on voter education and bringing information to where people already are. CIRCLE has found that 42% of youth non-voters said that they didn't feel qualified to vote, and many of them didn't have access to voter or ballot information. We seek to fill that gap. It's not that people aren't engaged. They’re extremely engaged, and once they're educated, they are also extremely likely to to cast a ballot. Knowledge is power, and we're going to pass along that power to our community.”
The launch of Students for Biden 🚀
The Biden-Harris reelection campaign officially launched its student organizing operation and received endorsements from 15 youth groups including Voters of Tomorrow, Next Gen America, Path to Progress, Blue Future, College Democrats of America, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Team Enough, and Students Demand Action.
In a statement announcing their endorsement, Path to Progress’ executive director Sam Weinberg acknowledged some concerns that many young voters have with the Biden-Harris administration, while stressing that these issues (and others) would only be heightened by another term for former President Donald Trump. Weinberg’s statement stood out amongst those from others who endorsed the president. He talked about the “sky-high” stakes of the 2024 election and (taking a page from the Biden-Harris reelection campaign’s book), sought to draw a stark contrast between Biden and Trump.
“Young Americans know that while no candidate is perfect, progress will be possible under a second term of the Biden-Harris Administration. Over the past three years, Gen Zers have seen unprecedented investments in our futures, from the largest investment in climate crisis prevention in human history to complete student loan forgiveness for millions of Americans. While we endorse President Biden and Vice President Harris and want to see them remain in the White House, we also pledge to continue demanding justice here, at home, and around the world, and to push the Biden-Harris Administration to live up to the values of our generation,” Weinberg wrote in the statement.
He added: “We also know that there is more work to be done and that President Biden and Vice President Harris are receptive to our needs and committed to finishing the job they started. We survived a Trump presidency once, and we refuse to endure it again. The stakes? Sky-high. Another Trump term? Apocalyptic for LGBTQ+ people and communities of color. The GOP's agenda? Ban no-fault divorce, punish abortion patients, wreck the planet, attack trans people, ignore asylum seekers, level Gaza. This election? No sidelines allowed. Every vote matters. Staying home on Election Day is a vote for Donald Trump. We, Gen Z, will decide this election. Our future and lives are on the line, so let’s vote for the progress we deserve.”
The youth endorsements come as young activists continue to pressure the Biden-Harris administration over its handling of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, and after a separate group of progressive youth organizations (that have not yet endorsed the president) announced a “Youth Agenda,” calling on the Biden-Harris reelection campaign to “finish the job” in 2024 with a list of demands last week.
For more on Students for Biden and youth dynamics at this point in the campaign, check out Elena Moore of NPR’s latest story: Young voters helped elect Biden in 2020. His campaign is courting them again in 2024
The New Battle Over Youth Disenfranchisement
In a new piece for the State Court Report,
, a writer and editor at the Brennan Center for Justice and the author of ‘Thank You For Voting’ (the book and the Substack) along with Lena Pothier, a student at NYU and former Brennan Center intern, wrote about how a crackdown on youth voting access (restrictions on same day voter registration and limits around student IDs as voter IDs), could negatively impact youth voter turnout rates. Geiger Smith and Pothier explore a slate of legal cases from state courts in Idaho and Montana, to a federal court in North Carolina, could determine how easily young people can reach the ballot box this year.