Gen Z and Kamala Harris: is the meet-cute enough to bring her to the White House?

On the morning of the election, as the group made a final push to get out the vote, news broke that Harris, to their delight, had chosen the progressive midwestern governor Tim Walz as her running mate. From the trenches of a hard-fought campaign, they spared a moment to celebrate what felt like a win.

That night, Bush lost her re-election bid in a primary contest decided by fewer than 7,000 votes.

The defeat stung. Pop had run a scrappy campaign: its volunteers collectively placed 120,000 phone calls and knocked on more than 20,000 doors. But they were up against a torrent of outside spending, primarily by pro-Israel groups, that transformed the race into one of the most expensive House primaries in US history.

In interviews with dozens of activists, organizers and candidates working to build youth political power on the left, a portrait emerged of a generation fed up with the status quo in Washington but eager to flex its electoral might this cycle. Many are genuinely enthusiastic about the prospect of a Harris presidency. Others hope she will be a bulwark against Republican extremism, if not the transformational figure they crave.

Approximately 41 million members of gen Z will be eligible to vote in November, including millions who were too young to vote in the 2020 election. Their participation could be decisive: the presidential contest is deadlocked, probably hinging on tens of thousands of votes in a handful of swing states, and the battle for control of Congress is as close as ever.

Gen Z has lived through tumultuous times, from the worst recession since the Great Depression, which saw millions of American families lose their homes, jobs and savings with almost no consequence for those who caused it, to a pandemic that closed their schools and their polarized communities.

There is virtually no doubt that Harris will win more young voters than Trump in November, but the margin will matter greatly.

Young voters are once again poised to play a potentially decisive role this election, said Melissa Deckman, CEO of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and author of the forthcoming book The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy.

For a segment of gen Z, youth activism has practically become a rite of passage.

Rather than despair, many young people mobilized in response to the election of Trump, to school shootings that killed classmates, to the climate crisis, which they believe too many of their leaders still ignore, episodes of police brutality captured on video, the rising tide of post-pandemic book bans and anti-LGBTQ+ laws, a bloody Middle East war playing out in real time on their phones, and the loss of federal abortion protections that has left young women with fewer rights than their grandmothers.

Santiago Mayer emigrated from Mexico to the US as a teenager in 2017, arriving in the heady months after Trump took office.

At his new high school in southern California, he was shocked to learn that many of his classmates were mostly tuned out. Trump, who ran for president on a fiercely anti-immigrant platform, had just implemented a travel ban targeting predominantly Muslim countries and was pushing Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Mayer identified a deeper tension: a left-leaning generation was trying to build power within a political system that seemed to structurally bend rightward.

With Biden as president, there had been an expectation that he would guard against Republican threats to the environment, abortion access, voting rights and gun control. But then the most conservative supreme court in history stepped in and eroded those protections while raising the possibility that other rights could be next.

Gerrymandering has made the US House less competitive, harder to govern and more polarized while an arcane Senate rule known as the filibuster stands in the way of most major legislation. Beyond Washington, the country is increasingly cracked into red states and blue states with dramatically different laws governing abortion access, LGBTQ+ protections and union membership.

The mood among young Democrats changed entirely on 21 July, when the octogenarian president exited the race and threw his support behind Harris, who, at 59, seemed positively youthful by comparison.

Democratic organizers say Harris has made concerted policy appeals to young people, particularly on housing and abortion, which she highlighted in a recent appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast that is popular with gen Z women.Harris has also staked out support for eliminating the filibuster to codify abortion rightsas well as legalizing recreational marijuana.