let’s gooo
And if they don’t vote, it won’t matter.
So help them vote. Volunteer with efforts to get out the youth vote. Push for universal mail in voting where you are, or at least early voting. Help get politicians and initiatives on the ballot that they actually care about.
Shaming and complaining about the demographic you want to reach accomplishes nothing.
Obligatory-
If you are a legal resident of Wisconsin, and are not currently serving time or on paper, you can register to vote entirely online if you want, and you can request absentee ballots for all elections for the entire year (no reason needed, but necessary annual renewal, it’s my New Year’s resolution every year because it’s so easy to accomplish. entirely free of charge ofc.).
Just go to www.myvote.wi.gov to register, request absentee ballots, check your registration, or find your polling place. If you have any difficulty with your registration, you can find your local rep and contact them directly.
Please vote. Please vote for your own wellbeing. Please.
Edits to fix link redirect per convo below
Hi, your link (the actual link, not the link text) is to https://www.reddit.comwww.myvote.wi.gov .
It doesn’t work. Every swiss citizen older than 18 receives them at home. The younger generation doesn’t vote.
I’m older now and the older I’m the more people of my age around me vote. It’s depressing. I try each time to make the younger vote but it’s not working. And, I didn’t miss one. Next one is the 3rd March. I will try again.
Don’t take me wrong if I convince if just one younger person, it’s a win.
I hope things will change, but we still have abysmal turnout. TX started allowing early voting over 40 years ago and we still struggle to get people to the polls. Early voting is a span of 2 weeks, where in the 1st week, polls are required to be open for at least 9 hours and can be open from 6 AM to 10 PM on the weekday and shortened hours on the weekend, and in the 2nd week, polls are required to be open at least 12 hours a day and typically have the same hours as election day. Yet we still have virtually no lines through all early voting and a massive line on election day.
It doesn’t help that the news only bangs the final day of voting into peoples’ heads.
Many Republicans vote exactly on election day because they are being fed lies that early voting and mail in voting are riddled with fraud.
I’ve been helping my fellow zoomers by figuring out what their townships/town wards/city districts are, then what their local/state/federal legislative/executive/judicial districts are, then who’s running for what position, then where to vote and (primaries and generals).
Information is power!
But both sides are the same or my vote is worthless or it’s too hard to vote or something
In Australia it’s always on a Saturday, and it’s compulsory to vote. Works OK for us.
if you think both parties are the same you’re living in a fkn alternate reality. Only one part is seeking to end democracy in America and set up reeducation camps
Yes, but political engagement can’t revolve around voting.
It’s shit. You have to navigate a beurocracy and don’t even always have choices down the ballot. And when you do, you often have no idea who the candidates are beyond some half baked Facebook page. It’s also a huge burnout pit. Put months of stress into a binary outcome you can barely control. And even that is if you’re engaged in canvassing and etc, otherwise it’s just a chore.
Youth need to be mobilized in long term action projects. Something like Encode Justice for example, where they make civic engagement a part of their daily life, is far superior. It’s also harder, but that comes with doing something actually impactful.
Things can change, though. California voted for an open primary in 1996 (think that was the year) and now you can participate in either one. Prior to that, you could only vote in the primary for the party you registered with.
Open primaries invite strategic voters to sabotage the party they want to lose rather than supporting the candidate they want to win.
Of course you can still do that with closed primaries—you just have to register as the party you want to vote for in the primaries, ignoring your own preferences. Nothing forces you to vote for your registered party in the general election. It’s slightly more involved this way since you would need to change your registration more frequently, and commit to it earlier, but that isn’t much of a hurdle.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted - you’re 100% correct. People voting against their own demographic is nothing new.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National_Jews
Please get out and vote.
Unless all these Gen Z kids actually fucking VOTE it won’t matter, because Boomers fucking do.
Oh, you think the choices are trash? Well fucking vote in the primaries then. Get involved at a local level, and start promoting candidates that represent you. Don’t just bitch and moan that the choice is between a codger and senile draft-dodger.
FPTP coupled with Electoral College means the only ethical vote is for the least problematic candidate.
The reason nobody young is ever is involved with primaries is because it’s driven by corporate lobbyists. How are the youth supposed to get involved with that when they are competing against billions of dollars? The choices will always be trash until we end the lobbying. It doesn’t work with just promoting candidates that represent you. It involves massive sums of money that 99.9 percent of Americans will never touch.
Sanders came very close to winning the Democratic nomination two election cycles in a row, and his funding was largely individual donors, while Clinton and Biden were being funded by corporate interests. Sanders probably lost in 2016 because the DNC put it’s thumb on the scale; he lost in 2020 because many primary voters didn’t believe that he could win against Trump, and wanted a candidate that could peel away moderate Republicans. And that’s a national level.
At a local level, there’s a lot less money, so fucking start there, where it’s not being driven by greed.
Sanders came very close to winning the Democratic nomination two election cycles in a row,
That is some revisionist history, because he did not. He did better than any openly socialist candidate has in 100 years, but because of the rules of the DNC was not actually in contention at any point.
When I was young, I participated in the primaries for Obama’s first election (Texas…). I was more or less put in my damn place by the older members and not allowed to have an opinion. It was Hillary this or that and racist comments otherwise. Seriously, Gen Y & Z need to participate, vote, and get involved at the primary and electoral college level or nothing is ever going to change. Don’t let those assholes decide who gets to run. I really really wonder what kind of impact those votes, in the areas that have true primaries, will have if we step up early.
Lobbyists are a crucial part of the political process as far as educating legislators and their staff. Legislators cannot possibly know the workings, let alone the body of statutory and case law at play, with every activity and industry legislatures have to regulate and facilitate.
Seems like you realize the money they spread around is the problem: bundlers, megadonors, super PACs, dark money, financial and agency disclosure laws, etc., that’s where we need to start reforms.
It’s unpopular, but yeah. Also, people forget that lobbying is, at it’s core, a group of citizens with a particular interest in a specific area banding together to try and convince a politician that what they want is the best course of action. If BLM started lobbying seriously like the NAACP does (or did; I don’t know how active they are now), they’d still be working for the same cause, and likely more effectively. Yeha, you need your ground game and people in the streets engaging in protests and demonstrations, but you also need people that will directly engage with lawmakers to get shit done.
People think of the NRA as nothing but a national organization working at the federal level, but for a long time–before they really started to suck under Wayne LaPierre–they did a ton of work with lobbying at the local level, and actively worked for what their membership wanted.
I agree there’s a history of young people not voting, but every presidential election year there’s a whole group of kids who were 14 at the time of the last election but are 18 for the current one.
Every four years since I can remember, that group of kids has been increasingly engaged politically, I think recent YouGov polls on this have been like very high, like 75% intend to vote and of those like 85% intend to vote more liberal candidates.
Trump was so bad, for everyone. Everyone remembers Trump’s wanton child separation policy, his partisan Supreme Court picks, his COVID failures, and his constant lies and vitriol. Even small children can see Trump for what he is, maybe even with more clarity than most adults. Point, people who were ten years to seventeen years old at the beginning of Trump’s presidency are eligible voters now. The Republicans see this tsunami coming at them. TV news has been calling it a blue wave to scare up red voters, but it’s really a youth wave.
At the same time, older conservative voters are dying off. Republicans know they will never fairly win another popular presidential election. Their plan is to steal the White House with lawfare or outright terrorism.
Just be warned, not everyone thinks Trump was bad. A lot of people look at their economic situation prior to the pandemic, and think that it was pretty good, and so Trump must be okay. Sure, he raised taxes on the middle and lower class, but that was sold as a tax cut (…except that it was very, very temporary), and the hike went into effect under Biden.
The people who think Trump is good are lost causes. They bring nothing of value to anyone.
Doesn’t help when the people who run the primaries go to court to ensure that they do what tf they want. 🤷
Bud, that’s politics. Our hope is to get these young kids engaged and then send them off to a law school that focuses on public interest law and restorative justice, instead of churning out more corporate defenders.
Growing up I’d here this phrase that I thought was some lawyer joke, “first thing we do, is kill all the lawyers.”
I realize now it’s not a joke, but part of a fascist’s plan to legalize atrocity.
If enough young people are showing up in the primaries, then the DNC can’t easily silence them without also alienating all of their other constituents. And while the DNC wants and needs large corporate donors and PACs, they need people voting for them even more. That’s why Sanders was so dangerous to them; if he had won the 2016 or 2020 primaries, despite the DNC openly hobbling him, he would have upended their internal power structure. (And the 2020 primaries were relatively fair; Biden was seen as a safe and moderate candidate by a large number of moderates who were more worried about beating Trump than getting a more liberal Democratic candidate.)
Super this. Don’t care what anyone privately identifies as as long as it includes “voter” in the tag cloud.
Said every election since ever and nothing changes. Pipe dreams, like a general strike.
Nothing changes because the people that say they want real, significant change never show up in enough numbers to get shit done. If gen Z really gives a shit, then they need to all get out and fucking work for it. I’ve voted in every election and every primary I’ve been eligible to, since turned 22. If 100% of the gen Z kids that are eligible to vote showed up to the primaries, they could get any candidate through that they wanted. Primaries typically attract far, far fewer voters than the general election does; in some states, primary participation is as low as 3% or eligible voters.
Vote. Seriously. (If practical: get involved, too). The U.S. is currently in the middle of a large shift of generational power.
Many of these changes are fairly recent:
- 2020 was the first federal election where the Baby Boomers didn’t make up the largest voting generation.
- It was only in 2016 that the number Gen X and younger voting numbers grew larger than the boomer and older numbers.
- Those numbers had been possible since 2010. Despite having more eligible voters (135M vs 93M), the “GenXers and younger” only had ~36M actual voters, compared to ~57M older ones.
Looking forward, the numbers only get better for younger voters. There hasn’t been a demographic shift like this in the U.S. in a long time (ever?). The current power structures can not be maintained for much longer. It is still possible for that shift to be peaceful. Please encourage the peaceful transfer: vote. Vote in the primaries. Maybe even vote for better voting systems. This time is unique, but change takes time. Don’t let them fool you otherwise: that’s just them trying to hold on to their power.
2020 had very flexible early voting and absentee voting and many people weren’t going to work in person anyway.
Every prior year, being retired was a huge advantage for ability to go to the polling places and actually vote. It’s easy to see how retirees would be represented disproportionately given that reality.
Believing that nothing has changed is the most privileged form of cynicism in these threads. At ever conceivable time scale, there is plenty of progress.
There will never be a utopia. There will always be something to improve.
Because people are already jumping to conclusions without reading the article. Here is the core of the survey data.
https://www.axios.com/2024/01/23/gen-z-less-religious-more-liberal-lgbtq
Identifying as Republican went from 32% in the Boomer Generation to 21% in Gen Z. Identifying as LGBTQ+ went from 4% with Boomers to 28% with Gen Z.
With the exception of millennials, who were born between 1981 and 1996, Gen Z adults are notably less likely than those in other generations to identify as conservative.
Or in simpler terms, both Millennials and Gen Z are equally less likely than those in other generations to identify as conservative.
It turns out that people don’t become more conservative as they age, they become more conservative as they gain wealth. Millennials and Gen Z aren’t.
Dude it’s plainly obvious, at least in my lived experience trying to reach 40. The Republicans I know who “became” republican all either
- Moved up in class (perceived or real)
- Became religious
- Legitimately has a mental illness
I am not saying this as a dig, and I am not saying all Republicans etc etc just the people who weren’t and then CHANGED THEIR MIND.
Get on board GenX. We’re the future and the soon to be majority, so you might as well join the club. We promise we’ll treat you better than the boomers treated you.
Because people are already jumping to conclusions without reading the article. Here is the core of the survey data. Identifying as Republican went from 32% in the Boomer Generation to 21% in Gen Z. Identifying as LGBTQ+ went from 4% with Boomers to 28% with Gen Z.
The conclusion I would have jumped to is that the percentage of Gen Z who identified as LGBTQ+ would be greater than that who identified as Republican. So it seems I don’t actually need to read it. 😜
28% LGBT is what seems dubious. Lot of spicy straights in that pool I suspect.
The B part of LGBTQIA+ is doing some heavy lifting in this stat. And as usual there’s probably a lot of women who are straight but think they’re Bi because “Margot Robbie could probably get it if that was an option” kinda like a lot of guys who think admitting a guy looks good makes them gay
Then can we please be out and get out and vote?
I’m voting for Biden unless there’s another nominee that will be the predominant choice against Trump. I don’t like either of them but the choice is easy. Biden can’t win my state, but I’m still going to vote for him literally just because he is running against Trump. I might cow about how I ate the Dems won’t run on much else, but the contrast is big this time. It’s always been really though, the Dems should be our new right wing party and a new farther left party like the Green party ought to be the more leftist faction. Dems to me already are neolibs with a neocon leaning. Leftist Populism must be embraced by the neolibs long term. Either way something has to give. Too much wealth to go around (even globally). The greedy old ideologies of constant growth at the expense of the poorest people in the world can’t go forever. Growth economics can’t go forever either. I have hope. Just go vote because that’s what we can do easily as a minimum effort.
The fact that you think the Green party is far left is just hilarious to me.
The neoliberals won’t embrace anything unless there’s profit in it.
Preferential voting is the only chance of a progressive gaining the power they need to make desperately overdue changes to healthcare, worker rights, housing, cost of living, etc.
A neoliberal government that occasionally panders to progressives is better than a neoliberal government that gets horny at the idea of spitting in poor peoples faces, which is better than fascists.
But we need to do so much more than “not making things worse”.
