‘Voting Became a Lot More Cool’: How Gen Z Showed Up for Biden
The youth vote helped Democrats win the White House. Can it deliver the Senate too?
“We were born into the tragedy protest movement,” says Reshad Daniels, a 22-year-old senior at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, summing up his generation’s perspective.
Daniels is an intern with Rev. Raphael G. Warnock’s runoff campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia, having completed another internship with Jon Ossoff’s campaign for the state’s other Senate seat. Young voters’ share of the Georgia electorate grew to 16.2% in 2020 from 14.4% in 2016, and the success of Democrats in the state has drawn heavily on the participation of Daniels and others like him: an army of volunteers, organizers, and activists whose youthful passion and generation-defining movements of moral outrage helped flip Georgia for Joe Biden and trigger runoffs for both Senate seats on January 5.
They had help from their elders. A consortium of organizations including Fair Fight and The New Georgia Project — two groups founded by Stacey Abrams in her decadelong push for voting rights in the state — registered an estimated 800,000 new Georgia voters since 2016. Forty-five percent were under the age of 30 and 49% were people of color. Just four years after Donald Trump…
