Day 120: Florida Freedom Summer of 2024: GenZ doesn’t have to win the nationwide election today.  Tomorrow belongs to them, 

and to the still youthful voters of Generation X, and the Millennials, as well as a whole new crop of 18 and 19-year-olds who will be old enough in time to register and vote in 2024.

Our Freedom Summer vision is already happening, obviously not in Florida yet!  However, law student volunteers left their base communities to get out the vote today in Georgia. 

Whatever the outcomes today, Republicans as well as Democrats know that issues youth appear to be concerned about—climate change and especially the gross profits of the Exxon/Mobile gang,  gun control, student debt, women’s right to choose, a woman/s right to an abortion—will not be served by the GOP in the next two years.

So two more years of new voters will be there in 2024, and they won’t be voting Republican.   By 2024, Republicans will be known sbove all as the party of voter suppression, as new young voters sign on to increase--not limit--the number of people voting.  

Judging what might happen in 2023-24 by what did happen this year, more student protests are likely to be taking place on campuses and perhaps even during sporting events.  Trump and his Republican opponents likely will be trying to get teen-agers involved to appear at campaign rallies, but if the national cameras remain focused on those events, the lack of young—people 21-25 by 2024, will be evident.

This mid-term election has proven to be a training ground for young people to decide what is needed, when and where, to get out the vote, on campuses, even in high schools.   Like learning to ride a bicycle, once you learn what is needed to get out the vote, you are not likely to forget.

To add even more young people to the roles, California voters today could approve the right to vote for 16-year-olds.  Even if it should be rejected, the attempt itself is likely to result in efforts elsewhere to lower age limits.  What does that mean politically?

It’s no brainer.    Both parties will recognize if they haven’t already that more young voters mean more voters for Democrats.

On the local level, high schoolers and young people are targeting school board races for potential young candidates.  More than 50 years ago, the United States Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision which blocked a 15-year-old from appearing on the ballot in a school board race.  Until this election, there has been no significant movement to change that outcome—until now.

The emergence of GenZ, the generation of Zoomers, roughly 1995-2015, primarily, has erupted on college campuses across the nation.   As at a sporting event, the audience can feel a shift of momentum when one team, usually behind in the game, starts to find a new energy which becomes contagious.  Outcomes then often shift in favor of the team which was once behind.  Politically, nationally since Barack Obama, the underdogs invariably have been Democrats.

Donald Trump undoubtedly benefitted from young voters when he first ran in 2016, but the momentum shifted away from him when young people created a national urban movement in 2017, with a “March for Our Lives.”  Black Lives Matter and Me, Too! energized blacks and women respectively in recent years.

In this election, inspired by the George Floyd outcry, both blacks and women have been visible in this election process.  The attachment today under a twitter campaign for the political rock star of our time Maxwell Frost of Orlando reveals innovative new organizing techniques primarily suited to young people’s needs and desires.  Concerts and parties are held to turn out the vote.  

DACA students who are ineligible to vote show up to encourage other young people who are eligible to register and vote.  Latinos are turning Quinceañeras celebrating the coming of age of Latina teens into election preparation affairs. 

Native American tribes also were getting media attention, particularly in Oklahoma where they are in sufficient numbers to influence the outcome of local and even statewide elections.

College athletes are being recruited, not to play, but to participate in the registration/voting effort. Young people are organizing the homeless to vote in Portland, OR.  In Chapel Hill, youth is providing transportation for those who don’t have it.  When Bernie Sanders went on an election tour in the Middle West isn’t wasn’t for or about him.  It was an outreach effort on campuses for young Democratic candidates.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of Hamilton, was doing the same in Houston, TX.  And as in the summer of 1964, whites could be seen in the effort to get out to vote in black neighborhoods.   So whatever happens on November 8, 2022, be aware that young people are coming and will keep coming from tomorrow until the presidential primaries in the winter and spring of 2024, and the presidential election in the fall on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024.

The GOP voter suppression efforts in 2024, are not likely be treated warmly in the nation’s urban and suburban areas.

Gabriel Hillel, for Florida Freedom Summer of 2024