Will Gen Z Hand Democrats a ‘Blue Wave’ in the Midterms?

(upbeat music) - If a candidate wants to be successful with the youngest generation, they have to make an appeal directly to the youngest generation, to Gen Zip, who just feel a sense of apathy or even potentially political homelessness. (upbeat music) - You know, I'm someone who experiences the struggles of young people because I am one, I come from a working class background. You know, I've worked at McDonald's, I sold my blood at a plasma center. I'm one of the few renters that has ever become a Colorado legislator. - Mani Routinel is the Democratic candidate for Colorado's eighth congressional district. He's in a tight race with sitting Republican Representative, Gabe Evans. And this district, which includes suburbs north of Denver, is younger than most. Census data show the median age is under 36 that compares to a national median just under 40. Routinel himself is 31, and he says that helps him reach Gen Z voters where they are online. - What's your go-to karaoke song? - Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cat. - Ooh, what do you care so much about Medicaid? - I was raised on Medicaid. It's a deeply personal for me. - That's from a video posted on Routinel's Instagram account where he has over half a million followers. On TikTok, he has a more modest, but still pretty good, 115,000. - I was raised on these platforms. I grew up watching Instagram, and so I sort of know how to connect with that sort of audience, and I'm able to use that to get our message out there. - Routinel's opponent, Gabe Evans, told me, he's trying to reach those same young voters. - My campaign basically is Gen Z. My campaign manager is Gen Z. My comms director is Gen Z. What pretty much my entire campaign is staffed by Gen Z folks. And so really letting them help take the lead in how they want to carry that message to their peers. According to the Reuters Institute, most young Gen Z years, though it's between the ages of 18 and 24, get their news primarily on social media. That's one young voter told me. - I hate to say that TikTok is definitely like my main source of news. - Of course, Routinel isn't bringing news to his followers. He's asking for their vote. In the presidential election two years ago, Democrats nearly lost the under 30 vote. With midterm elections right around the corner, can the party reclaim America's youngest voters with the kinds of margins they have in the past? And can they do it without turning off others? It's Sunday, October 18th. I'm here at BNMA for the Wall Street Journal. This is what's due Sunday. And today we bring you part two of our special series on the youth vote, looking at the Democrats. Joining me now to discuss all this are two of my colleagues here in Washington, politics reporter, Sabrina Rodriguez, and Maya Davis. So first things first, I'm 38, but am I talking to two Gen Z years or no? - You're trying to do it, you're millennial. And. - Proud member. Proud member. - I'm Gen Z, okay, great. So yeah, you'll represent all 50 million of the possible voters. - Oh my god, that's a lot of pressure. - Who are Gen Z? Well, I'd like to ask you about the Democratic party's messaging first, and then we can talk about policy and issues. Two years ago, President Trump's victory was in part, chalks up to his broad media strategy. He went on all kinds of non-mainstream podcasts that have younger audiences. And one of the big things a lot of Democrats were talking about was how to navigate media like that themselves. Sabrina, what do you think? Have they been moving in that direction? - There's definitely been a concerted effort. There were a lot of questions for Democrats about what exactly they had missed. And particular Democrats have always prided themselves in sort of being part of the culture. And, you know, having Hollywood on their side. - Having celebrity endorsements. - Having the celebrity endorsements, kind of understanding social media in a way that Republicans had not. But Trump sort of flipped the script on that. And I think Democrats have spent much of the past two years really trying to like pick up the pace. I think one of the challenges is how do you do that authentically? People who understand how social media works certainly helps come across like you get it. Instead of, you know, you had a staff member that made you do a video and you have no idea what the trend is that you're doing. And that's where you have candidates like Mani Routinel who are really trying to just actually show up as themselves on social media and like build a presence speaking to people's concerns without sort of pandering to young people. - I talked to one of the people trying to build an ecosystem like that for Democrats to match what Republicans have or conservatives have. And that's a steward pearl mutter. He created good influence. It's a for-profit company that connects pain candidates with influencers who can promote them. And this year some Democratic candidates have paid them for that. He says that the left is behind. - We are playing catch up. The right had a massive head start. And it comes from the most natural places. There was always a distrust of the media. We're on the left. There was a trust in the media. And there still is to some extent, but what became clear in 2024 is that you couldn't just rely on that. - What do you think? We've seen in the last two years the infrastructure has certainly grown. But there's still this debate within the Democratic party about who are the influencers and the voices that they want to raise. The big one being, you know, Hassan Piker. This, you know, controversial Twitch streamer. - On the left, he does have millions of followers and people who are actually listening to him. So there's also just attention in the left as they figure out how this works. And who are the voices they want to be amplifying in that influencer creative space? - I would add on to that. I think the authenticity that draws people to social media creators plays a big role. And we're even seeing like congressmembers on the hill. They're making these social videos more and more often kind of talking directly to the camera explaining, here's what I'm doing today. I'm going to vote or even joining on to TikTok trends. So you'll see members that are not even part of Gen X doing the dances and just kind of trying again a following there. - I really want to get into like what's the same and what's different, like this part of our conversation and we just had, and that was true. I mean, one was the ALS ice bucket challenge. I can't even think that we're doing that. And that was like 2014 and social media has been a thing for so long. So what's different, what's really different this time around for how Democrats and Republicans have to do things on social media? - I think the pace, the audience is expanded on social media and they're just demanding this every day, multiple times a day, information and entertainment and videos. And I think that is something that's changed a lot since the very beginning days of when politicians are experimenting with this. But the money when it comes to influencers is definitely on the right and that can make up for a lot. We've seen some reporting that influencers on the left have caught up in terms of head count but the right is still paying a lot more for these influencers to be able to spread their messaging to reach these young voters. - That certainly is new. This is the first election that Trump is in or a first, you know, midterm that Trump is empowered during where Republicans all told when you look at super PACs that candidates, the committees themselves that belong to the parties have more money to spend than the Democrats. Does that change things and how they can reach young voters especially? - Republicans are certainly going into this election with far more money, you know, the president's super PAC magazine has hundreds of millions of dollars that they've been able to deploy. Now that money is predominantly we're seeing going towards like television ads which can cost a lot. It's so much easier to put up a social media ad to post up a video on TikTok and stuff and it's just not nearly as expensive. And as part of why you see candidates and parties leaning into it so much more, it's a lot cheaper. - So that's something Pearl Mutter was telling me about. There's a difference in how much these things cost and of course the social media stuff is going to be where you reach those young voters. Pearl Mutter told me as much. - What are we doing to reach those people? And TV ads aren't going to do it. Newspapers aren't going to do it. It really is just social media and those trusted voices. But there's just no substitute for that. - After that defeat for Democrats two years ago, there was this idea that Democrats need their own influencer ecosystem like we said, including their own Joe Rogan. I visited a group of university Democrats at the University of Virginia recently and one of their organizers had an answer to that idea. - I think Mamdani is our Joe Rogan in a way. I think that he's the person who, you know, again social media, he disseminates information so well and we all take it up. - You can't talk about the Democratic party's hopes to reach young voters without talking about the democratic socialists of America or DSA and Zoraan Mamdani. He went from Longshot candidate to Mayor of New York and basically filmed his path to City Hall on vertical video. - We went to Hillside Avenue in Queens and Fordham Road in the Bronx. Not to lecture, but to listen. And what we heard was a desire to bring down the cost of living. That was our focus. - So are DSA candidates making explicit appeals to young voters? - Yeah, I mean, young voters are the group that makes up the most of DSA and the group that likes DSA the most. And among young voters, money is their biggest worry. And DSA is a membership group, right? It's not a political party, but in terms of having messaging that appeals to the worries of young voters that are so worried about the finances and the economy. There's a lot of energy there when people are thinking of Gen Z and how Gen Z votes, they're all often equating that with the energy that is seen on the far left. I've spoken to a lot of moderate Gen Zers and specifically moderate Democrat Gen Zers who kind of feel outshouted. These are mostly college students. They were working on this pledge called Promise to America. Their, I think, main tagline is like, we are capitalist, not socialist. So there is this somewhat effort to kind of push back against the narrative, but most of the energy specifically on social media is coming from the far left of the party. - I would just add, I mean, one of the things that Democratic Socialists have been able to capitalize on so greatly is the fact that, you know, voters writ large but especially young voters are feeling really disillusioned with institutions. There is a belief that the institutions are not working and that's somewhere where democratic socialists have really thrived because they're talking about we just need to change the system and are talking about much more radical change. That's a good place to leave off for the break we're going to take and after that we will talk about socialism versus capitalism in the eyes of young voters as well as some populist ideas. So coming up we talk about the issues Gen Z cares most about and which wing of the democratic party is talking about them most effectively. That's after the break. The democratic socialists of America are likely to increase their numbers in the house from two lawmakers to as one analyst forecast somewhere around seven. It will still be a small group but they've succeeded in focusing attention on the leading concern for American voters, especially the young ones affordability. Maya, what are democratic socialists and other Democrats saying they would do to make household budgeting a little easier and is that resonating with young people? We've seen a lot of the democratic messaging specifically on social media move more towards affordability catering to the anxiety that is felt among the generation that they're trying to court here on social media with just not being able to afford things. Housing is a top financial pressure. Less young people are buying homes or even able to buy homes now than they have been before. I think a large part of the DSA platform that aims at targeting this is wealth taxes, something that DSA candidates have been talking about. There is this just like frustration when you're seeing people in generations above you who have been able to buy homes at a much younger age, and it's something that seems just so out of reach and so expensive that frustration is widespread within the generation. Among young voters, socialism and capitalism have changed as far their appeal goes. There's a poll in July by CNBC found that more young voters have positive feelings about socialism than capitalism. Now, we at the Wall Street Journal did some relevant polling on this topic too, which our polling editor Aaron Zinnner told me about. What we found was I wouldn't call it a rise of support in socialist policies, more a rise in support of populist policies. Policies that had the government intervening in some way to help regular people, to help consumers or average folks at the expense of the elite, at the expense of health insurers, or investors, or big corporations, they were very popular. But when we ask about the labels, yeah, young people seem to say yes to socialism and no to capitalism more than even just a few years ago. Maya, how does that match up with what you're seeing on the ground from talking to people? Yeah, I've spent time in Ohio and Kansas and following campaigns talking to voters across the country where you're not seeing that same excitement outside of the big cities. Something across the board, I have seen, though, and is reflected in polling is an increasing popularity in policies that used to be very much associated with the left, such as Medicaid for all, becoming more widespread in popularity. And this is something that used to be thought of as a very socialist ideal that is now becoming more mainstream. There's an interesting horse shoe in the politics right now. I think what we're going to see from the midterms has been sort of the rise of the economic populism that has sort of already taken place on the right with Donald Trump and with people aligned with him, but is now taking a bigger hold when it comes to Democrats. So among age groups, though, do you think it could be that policies that excite young voters could turn off older ones? Yes, no question about it. I mean, we've seen that older voters have a greater skepticism to socialism and to democratic socialism and populism. And again, all these things associated with the left. For older voters, there's much more of a belief of sort of the incremental change. And again, just a skepticism to drastic change in politics. And that is something that we sort of see that difference. We've seen it in specific demographic groups, for example, with older Black voters and sort of older Hispanic voters, it goes across demographic groups, skepticism to everything that democratic socialists and the left are promising or saying that they want to accomplish. Talking about demographics earlier at the top of the show, we heard from Democratic candidate Mani Brutnell in Colorado's eighth. That district is 40% Latino. Now, that's a vote that like the youth vote, as we've seen, once reliably went to Democrats, then shifted toward Republicans, plus the Latino population is itself younger than average, median age, closer to 31 compared to around 40 for the country as a whole. What does that overlap mean for the vote, you think? One of the biggest developments from the last decade is more and more the recognition that Latino voters are in many ways swing voters. We see that Latino voters by and large identify more as independence and less and less or sort of identifying with either party. To your point about Latino voters being a younger demographic group, they are crucial to either party's future. I mean, they're going to be a crucial part of any coalition. That's a winning coalition. I want to talk lastly about turnout. Young voters don't exercise that right the way older ones do, but the director of the Yale youth polls, Jack Dozer, he told us that he predicts high turnout this year among young voters. I think it's pretty fair to expect that there will be higher turnout than usual for young voters. We're seeing a really significant attention towards issues of the economy, issues of affordability. Rachel Jan Faza, who researches Gen Z disagree, she says turnout is probably going to be pretty low. What we've been hearing a lot of in our focus groups is that life feels so hard to afford and people have so much economic anxiety that they don't even really have time to think about anything else. And I don't think that it is as mobilizing as a vote motivator. I spoke to a handful of young people when I visited Charlottesville. Some were engaged ahead of the election and others less so. Are you registered to vote? No, not yet. Do you think you will register? I don't know. I'm not always voting if I'm going to be honest. So what's the energy level among young voters and could that determine whether we get a blue wave or something smaller like a blue puddle? There has been a push on social media in reaching Gen Z and reaching young voters where they are. Even when you open Instagram, there's kind of like a banner at the top that says, "Hey, have you registered to vote?" Whether that will translate and manifest in them actually showing up to the ballot box, that's something that's to be seen. I mean, I think that is an issue that Democrats and both parties face in every election. How do you get young voters to actually believe that their vote matters? How do you actually get them to believe that things will be better or change or improve if they go out and vote? And I think that is an issue that both parties have to face looking to the future. How do you get them to sort of lock in and buy into a process that a lot of people don't believe in? That was the Wall Street Journal's Supreme Rodriguez and my Davis, thank you both. Thank you. That concludes our two-part series on Gen Z and the midterms. You can find all of our coverage and polling analysis online at WSJ.com. Today's show was produced by Hadi Muir and me with supervising producer Sandra Killhoff and deputy editor Chris Sinsley. Michael Oval created our music. I'm Pierre BNMA and we'll be back tomorrow morning with a brand-new show. Until then, thanks for listening.