The aftermath of Super Tuesday
The aftermath of Super Tuesday
A youth agenda, another potential TikTok ban, and a dispatch from Rep. Maxwell Frost's music festival in Orlando.
After a primary cycle that didn’t feel much like a primary cycle at all, Super Tuesday has come and gone, setting up the rematch we all expected between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. As we know, this is not a reality many young Americans (let alone any Americans at all) are excited about. Which means that in order to turn out young voters, both presidential campaigns have their work cut out for them over the next eight months.
Along those lines…
This morning, progressive youth organizations that rallied for Biden in 2020 including Sunrise Movement, Gen-Z for Change, United We Dream Action, and March For Our Lives — along with partners like the Ohio Youth Alliance and Young Feminist Party (formerly Generation Ratify) launched a “Youth Agenda,” calling on the Biden-Harris reelection campaign to “finish the job” in 2024. The groups announced the agenda at a press conference on Capitol Hill with progressive leaders including Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, as well as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York, Greg Casar of Texas, Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, Ro Khanna of California and Jamaal Bowman of New York.
The agenda includes priorities on the issues each organization is dedicated to including: “climate change and an end to the fossil fuel era,” “democracy,” “gun violence,” and “immigration.” As part of the democracy section, the groups included a demand to ”call for a permanent and immediate Ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank,” cementing their position on the war in the Middle East as part of their non-negotiables for 2024. All four of the leading coalition groups wrote a letter to Biden one-month after October 7 warning him that his handling of the Israel-Hamas war could put him at risk of losing support from progressive young people in 2024. They’ve reiterated that today.
“In addition to calling for a lasting ceasefire, we've laid out the key policies on the top of young voters' minds. If you commit to prioritizing these actions, young people will turn out and make 'finishing the job' a reality. To invest in America, invest in us,” the groups wrote in a letter along with their agenda, which is the latest letter in a series of many these organizations have sent to the president since his 2020 campaign.
📲 Asked about the agenda, Gen-Z for Change’s Elise Joshi told The Up and Up in a text message:
“In order to earn our trust and our vote, our leaders must embrace our values and progressive policy agenda. Bigoted laws are being implemented across the country, from defunding public schools to banning trans youth in sports. In order to combat this, we cannot offer the status quo. We must act boldly across issues. This agenda offers the Biden Administration for achieving just that."
A dispatch from last weekend in Orlando
On Saturday, Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida hosted the MadSoul music festival in Orlando, Florida. Just days before Super Tuesday, the event fused politics and culture with a lineup including AOC and MUNA (with surprise guest Pheobe Bridgers). I covered the festival for The New York Times, which you can read here: A Music Festival Headlined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While there, I spoke with more than two dozen festival goers, almost all of whom described a frustration with the political status quo. As I wrote in the piece, “among the self-described activists, soon-to-be-first-time voters and community organizers in the crowd were many people who said they were primarily drawn to the festival by its promise of music and arts.”
Energy ramps up in the fight to ban TikTok
It looks like energy is brewing once again in the fight to ban TikTok. The leaders of the ‘select committee on the Chinese Communist Party’ have introduced a bipartisan bill in the House that would require the Chinese-owned ByteDance to sell TikTok, or the platform would be banned from app stores in the United States. NBC News reports that “the White House has signaled support for the bill while stopping short of endorsing it.”
Notably, the action around TikTok comes just after President Biden’s reelection campaign launched its own account on the platform (sparking reactions from popular TikTokers, as I wrote about for POLITICO Magazine), despite the president having signed a bill banning the app from most federal devices last year. When I spoke to TikTokers about Biden’s decision to join the TikTok community, some said they appreciated him being there, and that it would be hypocritical for him to later ban the app. Eight months before the 2024 election, there are potential implications of a national TikTok ban.
📲 In a text message today, Malik Davis, who runs a TikTok account known as POV of an HBCU student, said:
“This is exactly what I was talking about it is very sad if this ban goes through Biden would definitely need to rethink his campaign strategy because he needs the GEN Z votes and a way to reach us is through TikTok.”
Asked if he thought a TikTok ban could hurt Biden’s chances with young voters who use the platform, Davis added: “Most definitely it would backfire if this actually happens.”
📲 Annie Wu Henry, who ran Sen. John Fetterman’s TikTok in 2022, said:
“It’s interestinggg to say the least that the Biden Harris campaign is on TikTok itself, and as the sitting president, if this goes through the House and Senate, would he veto?” She added: “If the ban does go through I don’t think it’s the end all be all. Tiktok isn’t the only place to engage, inform and mobilize young people, and that work will just need to course correct and continue to push along — but I do think that it won’t make things any easier.”
“If the ban occurs, I’m particularly concerned with how it will be conveyed and if communication around it will be effective. Because if they don’t manage communication on what is happening and further WHY, there’s a lot of room for misinformation and disinformation, and it will also in general, likely spur further conversation on free speech and such, especially because platforms like TikTok right now are a main hub for many people to show, educate, and speak out on what’s happening with Israel and Palestine. For Biden, but this election cycle at large, there’s a lot of narrative and information — that could be only part true or even completely false — and it could circulate because of headlines or tweets, etc, and the question is, what is the plan to fight this if we lose one of the main spaces where people turn to for information, combatting misinformation and to have these issues broken down?”
