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

It was the height of “brat summer”. Kamala Harris was a “femininomenon”, electrifying a high-stakes presidential race that many of the country’s youngest voters had been dreading: a rematch between the two oldest candidates in American history.

Chartreuse-blocked memes and coconut emojis filled social media feeds. The tidal wave of young “Kamalove” sparked a rush of small-dollar donations and volunteer sign-ups for her days-old campaign. For an extremely online generation of young Democrats, the vibes were so good.

On the ground in St Louis, a cadre of young progressives were gathering for an entirely different election – one with virtually no bearing on the balance of power in Washington, but one they believed mattered deeply. There in Missouri’s first congressional district, representative Cori Bush was fighting for her political survival.

Many of the twentysomethings had traveled from out of state, sacrificing summer jobs and sleeping on yoga mats to campaign for Bush in the sticky August heat. “We just stopped our lives and went to St Louis,” said John Paul Mejia, a 22-year-old student and climate activist.

Mejia was there as part of Protect Our Power (Pop), a youth coalition that came together earlier this year for what he described as a “David-and-Goliath” mission to defend leftwing members of Congress against a well-funded effort to unseat them.

To them, Bush, the nurse turned racial justice activist, was one of the few elected leaders who shared their sense of urgency about everything from the country’s affordability crisis to safeguarding abortion access.

As a newly elected member of Congress, Bush had slept on the steps of the US Capitol to protest against the expiration of a federal eviction moratorium. The action paid off: the Biden administration extended the pause. In warning about the threat to reproductive rights, Bush testified before a House panel that she had had an abortion at 18 after becoming pregnant by rape. In 2023, she emerged as one of the strongest critics of Israel’s war in Gaza, a stance that reflected a groundswell of youth dissent but ultimately imperiled her congressional career.

“There’s pretty much nobody else, even members of Congress who are closer to our age, in some instances, who actually represent what our generation cares about,” Vincent Vertuccio, a 21-year-old college student and an activist with Pop, said of the progressive Squad members. “If we lose these people, even one or two, it’s a direct diminishment of our power.”

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.

“People are feeling the issues really hard, but I don’t think that they’re feeling people fighting for them equally as hard,” Mejia reflected afterward. “That worries me, especially at a time when we’re also facing a crisis of democracy.”

Gen Z poised to play decisive role?

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.

Composite: The Guardian/Ben Braver/Marianna and Santiago/Marion Smart and Ashleigh Ewald/Amini Bonane

With the presidential candidates offering sharply contrasting visions for the economy, abortion, climate change, foreign policy and democracy itself, there is an understanding among young liberals that the outcome could have profound, generational implications for the country – and the planet.

“We are going to be the margin of victory,” said Marianna Pecora, the 20-year-old communications director of Voters of Tomorrow, a gen Z-led group working to mobilize first-time voters and students. As the race moves into its final stretch, her closing pitch is direct: “Don’t let this election happen to you.”

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.

Yet no generation is a political monolith, and gen Z – the left-leaning, racially diverse cohort born between the late 1990s and early 2010s – is no exception. Millions of young adults identify as conservative, and a widening youth gender gap has emerged as a central political fault line.

Still, experts say this generation face an unprecedented set of challenges – from the economic to the existential – that have eroded their faith in American institutions and fueled a deepening sense of “fatalism” about their own futures and the fate of the country. “We weren’t part of the structures and the systems that created this massive situation but now it’s really on us to fix it,” said Vertuccio, who has a tattoo that reads, “organizing works”.

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.

They’ve experienced political whiplash when the country that twice elected Barack Obama chose Trump as his successor. In 2020, they turned out in force to defeat Donald Trump, only to witness the 45th president refuse to concede and his far-right allies attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s victory by force.

A growing body of research suggests that rising economic inequality, climate change and technological advancements are taking a toll on young people’s mental health, leading to high levels of anxiety and loneliness. A recent NBC News poll of gen Z adults found that nearly half expect life for their generation to be “worse than previous generations”.

“There’s a feeling of vulnerability and isolation – that there’s no one really representing their interests, particularly politically,” said Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). “Where you have a lot of young women becoming more active in politics because of that, particularly progressive women, a lot of men are just withdrawing completely, whether it’s dating, politics or work.”

Surveys indicate that both young men and young women favor Harris over Trump. But the youth gender gap is striking. In a youth poll released by Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, Harris led Trump by 47 percentage points among young women, compared with 17 percentage points among young men.

The gulf-wide – and growing – divide reflects a dynamic that is shaping the 2024 election and could have lasting implications for both political parties: young women have become more liberal, as young men drift away from the Democratic party.

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

For decades, Democrats have dominated the youth vote, with voters aged 18 to 29 favoring Biden by 24 percentage points in 2020, according to Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (Circle). While young people have historically voted at lower rates than older adults, that trend may be starting to change.

Youth voter turnout rose to 50% in 2020, probably a modern record and a remarkable 11-point increase from the 2016 presidential election, according to a Circle analysis. Young voters of color, it found, played a particularly “instrumental” role in Biden’s victories in closely contested battlegrounds such as Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona.

Two years later, young people again voted at high levels during the congressional midterms. Their fury over the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade was credited with helping Democrats defy historical expectations.

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.

“When there’s an issue that gen Z is passionate about,” she said, “they’re willing to engage, despite – or maybe because of – the fact that institutions aren’t necessarily addressing their concerns.”

From youth activism to youth votes

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.

“Perhaps the most important, consistent finding over 25 years of analyzing young voters – the most significant predictor of youth participation – is that young people participate when they can see a tangible difference in the process,” said John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and the author of Fight: How Gen Z Is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America.

This generation of activists, the first born after the release of the smartphone, blends traditional methods of activism – like old-school marches and campus protests – with modern digital strategies such as TikTok trolls and internet memes. But even more, what makes their activism unique, researchers say, is the way they have translated youth protest into youth voter participation.

“When the oldest members of gen Z turned voting age, they carried those values forward and voted at rates that previous generations have not even touched,” Della Volpe said.

Despite their low confidence in American institutions, Della Volpe said gen Z, including young men, tend to be pro-government. As a cohort, they are more likely than older Americans to say that the federal government should – and must – do more to address the country’s problems.

Some young people, like Ben Braver, a 22-year-old public school teacher near Tampa, Florida, aren’t waiting for their elected elders to act.

Braver, who shares earnest explainer videos on TikTok making the case for progressive policies, is running for a seat in the Florida state senate. He decided to challenge his Republican opponent, the incumbent state senator, after he voted for Florida’s six-week abortion ban that took effect earlier this year.

“We can’t afford to wait until 2040, when we’re already the majority. We have to start now,” Braver said. “We need people writing policy that they’ll have to live under.”

Building power in a right-leaning structure

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.

“If young people had voted in 2016, we might have been able to avoid the Trump administration,” Mayer, now 22, observed.

At the time, the teen turned to “pre-Elon” Twitter. His unfiltered anti-Trump musings gathered a following and in 2019, his handle, Voters of Tomorrow, graduated from a Twitter account to an official political engagement organization “for gen Z, by gen Z” – just in time to help drive Trump from office. “They pissed off the wrong generation,” emerged as a rallying cry.

Mayer’s team became enthusiastic boosters of the Biden administration. They worked to translate the president’s sprawling, sometimes wonky, achievements on climate, gun control and student loan debt for a generation increasingly turns to social media for its news.

But over the course of Biden’s term, many young people grew disenchanted with the 81-year-old president, harboring reservations about his foreign policy and age.

“Young people want to vote for someone who’s going to shake the system,” Link Lauren, a young, right-leaning TikTok influencer who worked on Robert F Kennedy’s independent presidential campaign, said in an interview this summer. “They want disruption.”

Early polls showed Trump performing far better with this voting bloc than he had in 2020 and, in some cases, drawing even with – or doing better than – Biden. The numbers sent shockwaves through the Democratic party. Was gen Z turning Maga?

Analysts and organizers, Mayer included, were skeptical. Gen Z, after all, was more socially liberal, less religious, more educated and more likely to identify as LGBTQ+ than previous generations. Rather, they saw the numbers as a pulse check: young people were frustrated by the state of the post-pandemic economy, by the slow pace of change in Washington and, yes, by the prospect of a contest between the same (very) old candidates who had dominated much of gen Z’s political memory.

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.

“When you see kids gunned down in schools, then the supreme court says domestic abusers can have guns and your abortion rights are gone, it creates a sense of hopelessness,” Mayer said. “It feels like the government is working against you.”

The coconut army

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.

Marion Smart, a 21-year-old student organizer with Voters of Tomorrow’s Georgia chapter, was preparing to welcome hundreds of liberal students and activists to the group’s Year of Youth summit in Atlanta when it happened.

Summit-goers descended on Atlanta’s Loudermilk center days later, chugging boxes of coconut water as they dashed between a panel on running for office as a member of gen Z and a training led by a panda head-wearing digital organizer.

Harris’s nascent campaign sent an envoy, Eve Levenson, the national youth engagement director, and the vice-president herself took time in the whirlwind of her elevation to record a pre-taped message, in which she vowed to work for their vote.

In response, they pledged to turn out the youth vote. “We’re all part of the coconut army and we’re gonna take this election by storm,” Smart said.

Ashleigh Ewald, the group’s Georgia state director, felt the political ground shift immediately. She had toiled for months on college campuses around the state, trying to convince her discontented peers to get involved in the November election. Now they were seeking her out, asking how they could help.

“Because of Kamala Harris, that pessimism turned into enthusiasm,” the 22-year-old said.

Gen z voters have flocked to the vice-president, helping to drive up her popularity.But Harris’s ground-breaking candidacy – she would be the first woman to serve as president of the United States – has particularly energized young women. After she entered the race, youth voter registration among young women rose sharply – a trend one Democratic data analyst dubbed the “Harris effect.”

Nearly six in 10 women under age 30 view her potential presidency as a “very important” milestone in American political history, according to a national survey by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life. The sentiment is notably more pronounced for younger women than it is for older women and significantly more than for younger men.

Leaving a “contingency planning” workshop for a potential Trump victory, Amini Bonane said the session had been a sobering reminder of the stakes this election. It was part of the reason Bonane, a 29-year-old community organizer who came to the US as a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, decided to run for a seat on the city council in her home town of Fairfax, Virginia. With Harris as the nominee, she has felt a surge of energy in her own race.

“I’m just so excited and – hello! – I’ll be on the same ballot as,” she paused, shaking her hands in excitement, “possibly the first Black woman Potus. That is just so motivating for me.”

Courting gen Z

The online hype that followed Harris’s sudden emergence was not only good for the vibes. It helped reset the entire political narrative around her, propelling the once-unpopular vice president into what her campaign playfully coined its “Kamala era”.

Conservative media outlets had long amplified Harris’s quirky turns of phrase –derided as “word salads” – and her laugh to portray her as unserious. Young supporters reinterpreted those same clips as charming and authentic – a powerful currency in contemporary politics.

Harris’s campaign has nodded back, embracing the viral trends on her gen Z-run TikTok, @kamalahq. It eclipses Trump’s personal account, @realdonaldtrump, in engagement, though he has substantially more followers. During a youth voter drive last month, Harris said young voters were part of the reason she was so optimistic about the future.

“Your generation is killing it,” she said on a call with gen Z organizers. “You’re brilliant. You care. You’re impatient in every incredible, good way.”

To offset Harris’s steep advantage with young women, Trump has been heavily courting gen Z’s “bro” vote with amped up displays of masculinity. He has turned up at Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts and a college fraternity house. Wrestler Hulk Hogan tore off his shirt during a speech at the Republican convention in which he praised Trump as a “gladiator”.

The former president has appeared on shows with the controversial YouTuber Logan Paul and video game streamer Adin Ross, both of whom attract sizable followings of gen Z men. The Nelk Boys, a group of online content creators and pranksters, are helping too, by spearheading a voter registration initiative on Trump’s behalf. His team is also relying on Turning Point Action, the political advocacy wing of the far-right youth organization Turning Point USA, to drive out young conservatives.

The Harris campaign and allied youth groups, meanwhile, are aggressively targeting college students – nearly two-thirds of whom voted in 2020. As part of the push, Harris and Walz launched a homecoming tour of historically Black colleges and universities, aiming to reach young Black students across the battleground states.

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.

Still, her pivot to the ideological center since becoming the Democratic nominee has left some young progressives disappointed. On the campaign trail, Harris frequently promotes her support for fracking – a reversal from her 2019 presidential run when she embraced a ban. She has also adopted an increasingly hardline approach to illegal immigration and resisted calls to endorse an arms embargo on Israel, whose devastating campaign in Gaza has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians.

“Young people right now, our generation in general, are very, very clear-eyed on the fact that Donald Trump cannot return to the White House in November,” said Mejia, the progressive activist with Pop. “The question presented to the Democratic party is: how much does it want to invite young people into its coalition in order to defeat Donald Trump?”

‘Something our generation hasn’t seen yet’

In the weeks since Harris entered the presidential race, she has steadily recaptured lost ground, multiplying Biden’s lead among young voters.

The Harvard Youth Poll showed Harris with a commanding 32-point lead over Trump among likely voters aged 18 to 29. Young Democrats expressed a heightened commitment to voting this November, with significantly more “definitely” planning to cast a ballot compared with their Republican counterparts. Yet the overall share of young Americans who said they definitely planned to cast a ballot this year was 56%, down slightly from 63% at this point in 2020.

“Young people are right to be cynical and I don’t expect one candidate to change that,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the president of NextGen America, one of the largest youth-voting groups in the country. “That happens over time by government responding.”

But the first step is electing leaders who listen to young people, Tzintzún Ramirez said, arguing that Harris was the only presidential candidate offering solutions to their concerns on the economy and abortion rights. There are signs young people increasingly agree. A recent New York Times and Siena College poll found that voters under age 30 were significantly more likely than older voters to believe that Harris “cares about people like you” and to see her as a representative of “change”. They were also more inclined to view Harris as a “strong leader” and to describe her as “fun”.

Though the glow of “brat summer” has faded with the season, organizers say they have been able to convert that energy into lasting on-the-ground efforts to help turn out the vote. Over the next few weeks, youth voter engagement groups will be out in force, knocking on doors, registering students, and making pledges – and plans – to vote. In true gen Z fashion, youth organizers are also using memes and friendship bracelets to drive young people to the polls.

In the days ahead, Pecora of Voters of Tomorrow will cast her first vote for president, a mail-in ballot for Harris. It will be counted in California, hardly a presidential battleground but, poignantly, the vice-president’s home state.

Pecora was just 13 in 2016, when Hillary Clinton conceded the election to Trump. She was in high school, taking classes by Zoom, during the depths of the coronavirus pandemic when Biden won four years later. Then came the nightmarish Capitol riot on January 6, when Trump’s supporters tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. “There has yet to be a presidential cycle in my lifetime when democracy wasn’t on the line,” she said.

Yet the 20-year-old is allowing herself to be hopeful, even as her team pours over numbers that tell the same story – that the race will be nail-bitingly close. Voters of Tomorrow says its on track to reach its ambitious goal of 15 million direct contacts in hopes, Pecora said, of electing a leader who recognizes the “power and agency” of young people.

“We see an option that tells us that politics can be something different,” she said. “It can be more hopeful, more productive, more caring and empathetic and loving. And that’s something that our generation hasn’t really seen yet.”