Harris gets hip to court Gen Z

Lukas Heisler, the 23-year-old bespectacled beer director for The Common House coffee shop in Anderson, S.C., feels strongly about the rights of the working class. But he isn’t pinning his hopes on the outcome of the 2024 election.

“I don’t want to vote for Kamala [Harris] because I don’t see her as really adding any real value,” he said. “Not that she won’t make a difference, or that she won’t have … giant policies that are different than Trump’s. But at the end of the day, I see the Republican Party and the Democratic Party as not disparate enough.”

As President Joe Biden’s successor in the 2024 presidential campaign, Harris has made significant efforts to appeal to 18-to-29-year-olds like Heisler, commonly referred to as Generation Z. But she may have difficulty winning over young voters who have become disenchanted with the state of politics.

Harris is popular with Gen Z, which makes up roughly 16 percent of the electorate in the upcoming election. A New York Times/Siena College poll in June found that 18 percent of younger voters responded that Biden should remain the Democratic nominee. Interestingly, his approval rating among that age group increased by 7 percent after the debate. But even a year ago, he wasn’t as popular as Harris, who now has support from over half of Gen Z voters, many of whom already leaned Democratic.

On the campaign trail, Harris has tried to adopt a youthful persona. At a July 30 rally at Georgia State University, she took a jab at Trump, saying, “As my friend Quavo would say, ‘He does not walk it like he talks it.’” Singer and rapper Quavo performed at the event in front of about 10,000 young people waving blue signs in support of Harris. Rapper Megan Thee Stallion also made an appearance wearing a blue cropped pantsuit. She followed up with an Instagram post which included the caption #hottiesforharris.

Hours after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, British pop star and Gen Z darling Charli XCX announced that “Kamala IS brat” on social media, referring to the singer’s latest album, Brat. Since then, political journalists and commentators have struggled to translate the reference for older audiences, but the meaning of the term “brat” is of secondary importance to the fact that a Gen Z idol paid Harris a compliment. The post got over 54 million views and 300,000 likes. The Harris campaign rebranded its X profile to imitate the singer’s album cover. By the end of July, Harris had joined TikTok.

Policy-wise, Harris prioritizes many issues that Gen Z Americans say they care about. While publicly supporting Israel, Harris has also been vocal about human rights for Palestinians. She hasn’t made clear statements about her planned policy on the war in Gaza. And Newsweek reports that about 43 percent of Gen Z voters express sympathy for Hamas.

Just under 20 percent of young voters listed access to abortion as a concern in a survey conducted last year. Harris is the first vice president to visit an abortion facility while in office. She has also promised that if elected president, she would sign a bill to enshrine a right to abortion in federal law. Harris’ loud support for abortion could translate to votes, especially among Gen Z females. But Gen Z women are already almost 10 percent more likely to side with a Democratic candidate than their male peers.

Lukas Heisler, for one, is far more concerned about issues such as inflation and cost of living than abortion or Harris’s ambiguous position on the Israel-Hamas War. In a 2023 poll, 53 percent of Gen Z respondents ranked inflation and gas prices as one of their three main concerns. In that same poll, abortion barely made it into the top five, right under “addressing climate change.”

Newsweek called Harris’ nearly 20-point lead over Donald Trump a “youthquake.” But Daniel Cox, a researcher who specializes in youth and politics at the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out that Harris does not have nearly as much support among young voters as former President Barack Obama had for his campaign. In 2008, 66 percent of voters under the age of 30 voted for Obama.

Cox noted that of 41 million Gen Z voters, about half identify as politically independent. “What you’ve seen, particularly among young men, is this negative view of both political parties,” Cox said. “So you have … a lot of young people who don’t like Democrats, but they still tend to be pretty liberal.”

Many Gen Z voters, whether or not they agree with Harris’ platform, would like to see a break from hyperpartisan politics and the high cost of living. Heisler chalks up the problem to the two-party system rather than to a specific candidate:

“I feel like we’re just kind of stuck,” he said. “People keep saying that they’re going to do this or that, and they actually do the same thing as whoever came before them and whoever is going to come after them.”