This just in, voters may have power. 🤷
Who could have possibly known? It’s almost as if the <35 demographic showed up to every election every time then policies they support may become a priority. Who could have thunk it?
Maybe they would if they were afforded the opportunity to. They’ve shown up in “unprecedented numbers” in almost every recent presidential election, starting with Obama’s first term. But it’s never good enough for anybody else.
Maybe if they had better political education and easier access to voter registration, they’d show up more.
Older people can show up to elections because they have benefits that the younger generations don’t. Things like time off, better wages, and no student debt to worry about. The kinds of jobs that kids work are the same kind to refuse to give you the time off on election day and fire you if you miss work.
I’ve been hearing the same song and dance since I before I was 18. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it reminds me of the conversations about kids not protesting. Millennials got blamed for not being able to afford to protest, and Gen Z grew up nihilistic enough to simply not give a fuck and just eat Tide Pods because we’re all gonna die to climate change anyways.
They’ve shown up in “unprecedented numbers” in almost every recent presidential election, starting with Obama’s first term. But it’s never good enough for anybody else.
“Young people don’t vote” is just an excuse to ignore young people’s concerns, and it has never mattered that it’s not true.
The two parties are not going to figure this out. I think we are in the middle of one of those major shifts in the landscape. Probably still end up with only two, and one of them might keep its name, but it seems to me this country’s leadership has simply outlived its ability to sense the world around it. They’ve patched over all sensory organs with some kind of insider-curated feed.
And yet we can ignore young people’s concerns because they don’t vote.
