Youth vote in the news: 1/11
Jim Messina's tips for Biden, Vivek Ramaswamy's free beer, and tension over letters from young White House staffers show how generational dynamics are already a huge part of the 2024 showdown.
I just got back from Iowa, where adrenaline is high for young Republicans ahead of next week’s caucuses (more on that soon). Since then, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie dropped out of the presidential primary, spicing things up in the Republican field. But while former South Carolina Gov. and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy are vying to be the face of the next generation of GOP leadership, former president Donald Trump is the frontrunner in the Hawkeye State.
Meanwhile in D.C., young staffers are breaking norms at the White House by criticizing president Joe Biden for his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas.
All that said — from the Biden administration to the campaign trail, it’s becoming more and more clear that generational dynamics are a huge part of the 2024 race and the primary season especially.
Here are this week’s youth vote headlines.
Obama’s Campaign Manager Has Some Advice for Biden on America’s Youth: “Don’t Assume They’re Gonna Vote”, Vanity Fair, 1/8
First, from me. I spoke with former president Barrack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, about President Joe Biden’s youth vote problem. While a lot has changed since 2012 (like the advent of TikTok, which Messina says he’s “obsessed with”) the Democratic operative thinks the president should draw on cultural powerhouses like Taylor Swift—and “lead with values” on Israel and the economy to get young people to the polls. He also weighed in on Travis Kelce.
Part of what I found most interesting, was his take on young people’s current perception of former president Donald Trump:
“People have forgotten what he did. He sort of disappeared. He just says crazy shit on Truth Social that no young voter ever sees. Once there’s an actual campaign and people are highlighting it, journalists like you will start to focus on those issues and start to write pieces on this. That’s what campaigns do. They drive those contrasts. When I talk to young voters, when I go give speeches at college campuses, people don’t remember that Donald Trump wanted to ban all Muslims from America. I mean, that just is too long ago. Some of them weren’t even voters then,” Messina said.
Bosses in the Biden admin are pressed over young staffers’ anonymous letters, Eugene Daniels for Politico, 1/10
In exploring how past and current administrations have dealt with staffers’ dissension to policy decisions, Daniels exposes how historically unique it is that today’s youngest White House staffers are willing to publicly critique the president and his senior staff — this time over the president’s support for Israel in the war between Israel and Hamas.
“Protest culture is shattering the last remaining barriers in official Washington, exposing a generation gap between how young staffers and their older bosses view the responsibilities of a Washington operative,” Daniels writes.
Quoting strategists from the Clinton-era like James Carville and Paul Begala, as well as Harvard Kennedy School pollster and youth vote expert
, Daniels paints a picture of a bygone era when staffers wouldn’t dare speak out against their principal. That era feels foreign for Gen Zers and young millennials who have championed their political power through protest.“For a younger generation of activists, these types of analyses seem painfully outdated. In college and afterward, they marched in rallies in an era of mass protests around gun violence, women’s rights and police brutality — in which political debates often have been directly impacted by vocal pressure. Whether that comes from outside actors or inside actors is largely immaterial,” he writes.
One of the key pieces of Vivek Ramaswamy’s Iowa plan: Free beer, Alex Tabet and Katherine Koretski for NBC News, 1/9
Tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is making a direct appeal to young Republicans with frat-bro vibes and campaign events titled, “Free Speech and Free Drinks.”
“In the basement of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house here at Iowa State University, Vivek Ramaswamy made his pitch to a crowd of about 50 young men — and one young woman — on a Friday evening last month, as a campaign that often attracts more men than women took on a literal frat house atmosphere for a night,” Tabet and Koretski write.
But is it working? The pair reports that at one of these events, held the weekend before Halloween at Iowa State University, the alcohol consuming crowd as so loud that it was hard to hear the presidential candidate. It ended up being one of Ramaswamy’s shorter speaking engagements this cycle.
“Many of the students in the chaotic Halloween weekend crowd told NBC News they weren’t aware of who Ramaswamy was. They were simply there to pregame the rest of their night. And while a few of the young men were excited about Ramaswamy’s presence, they weren’t necessarily going to caucus for him,” they write.
Haley makes a play for younger voters — who grew up in the Trump era, Philip Bump for The Washington Post, 1/5
When former South Carolina Gov. and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley announced she was running for president, she said it was time for a “new generation” of leadership. And last week, she made a direct appeal to young voters in Iowa, who have only ever known the GOP with Trump at the center. Bump explores how the Republican party’s youngest voters came of age during the Trump-era, which has inevitably shaped how they think about politics. This matters for Haley and anyone else trying to make inroads with this voting bloc, he explains.
“When we consider that nearly 50 percent of the lives of members of Gen Z have elapsed since his [Trump’s] 2015 announcement — and significantly more of their adult lives — we are reminded of the size of the hill that Haley needs to climb. She’s not just battling Trump. She’s battling the embodiment of Republican politics for most of those voters’ lives,” Bump writes.
