December 9, 2025 • 43 mins
Voter turnout among young people is climbing, political affiliations are shifting, and the generation that grew up with social media is flexing their electoral muscle. Stacey Abrams is renowned for getting 800,000 people registered to vote in 2020. So, why is the youth vote so important? What's changed since 18 year olds gained the right to vote in 1971? And how have forces like Rock the Vote or TikTok shaped young people's POV on politics?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ever since eighteen year olds gained the right to vote
in nineteen seventy one, they've been the most underrepresented group
at the polls, which is a little bit misleading because
it's not the same group of young people that turn
eighteen every cycle.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Right, that's obvious.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
I remember when I turned eighteen, I registered to vote immediately.
We just sort of lived in one of those civically
minded towns. But lately something's changing. Youth turnout is climbing.
Political affiliations are definitely shifting, and the generation that grew
up with social media in their hands is starting to
flex their electoral muscle in ways we haven't seen before.
(00:33):
So what's actually driving young people between eighteen and twenty
four to show up?
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Now?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
What's changed since the seventies and eighties from rock the
Vote campaigns to TikTok activism? How are these forces shaping
youth perspectives on politics.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
You may not be into politics, and I understand why
the politics is into you, and it is a stalker.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Today we ask Stacy Abrams, what's at stake if young
people don't vote?
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Here we go again, again, again again.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Hey, I'm Kal Penn and this is here we go
again again, A show that takes today's trends and headlines
and asks why does history keep repeating itself?
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Here we go.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
To dig into the past, present, and future of the
youth vote. I knew only one person would do.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
I'm Stacy Abrams and I am the host of the
Assembly Required podcast and the founder of the Ten Steps campaign.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
She's a best selling author, an entrepreneur, a former tax attorney,
a political powerhouse, and a voting rights icon who literally
helped flip Georgia blue by registering eight hundred thousand new voters.
She's run for governor and somehow still finds time to
write romance novels under the name Selena Montgomery. I am
talking about the singular Stacy Abrams.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Thank you, and I want to tell folks I write
under both my name and Selena Montgomery. We are friends.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
So do you ever have beef?
Speaker 3 (02:18):
We don't. Well. Selena writes for romance, Stacy writes legal thrillers.
Stacey has a higher body count, so Selena is nice
to her.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
In twenty twenty, you famously got eight hundred thousand people
registered to vote by building a huge grassroots network, And
I'm wondering if you can just tell us about that
work and what it was like.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Part of that came about from my run for governor
in twenty eighteen, but even before then, it was really
about gradually engaging voters where they were, and instead of
waiting for voters to come to us saying I want
to register, I launched a project in twenty fourteen that
went to people's houses. We knocked on their doors, We
(03:02):
said are you registered? And if they said yes, we said,
is there anyone else in the house? You know, kind
of like you know Jehovah's witnesses were going to We're
gonna convert everybody there. And I think that's one piece
that was really important that we didn't expect people to
spontaneously decide that they wanted to participate. We went to
them and said, how can we help you?
Speaker 1 (03:22):
And political science people call this expanding the electorate, right,
it's just getting.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
New, first time voters.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
What was the guarantee or maybe there wasn't one, but like,
how do you process Let's say, okay, you hit eight
hundred thousand, you were obviously running as a Democrat for governor.
How did you know what the split like was that
all eight hundred thousand Democrats. Did you register people without
knowing where their politics lie? How does that work?
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Yeah? So, And I want to be clear, this was
a gradual architecture. So if you're in Texas, we didn't
do it on Thursday. Yeah, they could, but it took
some time. Yeah, you know, it was ad voters. In Georgia,
you cannot vote. You don't register by party, you just register. We, however,
(04:05):
were targeting underrepresented populations, and that meant people of color
and young people. Those are the two most light the
two communities most likely to not be registered. Every year
across the country, four million young people graduate from high school,
but roughly only thirty percent of them are registered to vote.
So you've got a whole lot of ground to cover
(04:27):
if you want to add those voters. Likewise, for people
of color in the South, we had a huge surfeit
of people who had simply never been asked to register.
And for those of us who grow up thinking about,
you know, expanding the electorate and political science jargon, that
makes sense if you grew up in a civically engaged household,
(04:47):
registering to vote's part of what you do. But if
you grow up in generational poverty, if you grew up
in a rural community. If you grow up in a
place where you are in the minority, they're unlikely to
come to you and say, oh, by the way, here's
the key to your democracy and here's what you need
to do. So a big part of what we were
able to do on the registration front was not just
(05:08):
register voters. We then did the work of saying, okay,
and here's how voting works. We did this was back
before social media had really taken off. We did the
DVDs that we gave out where we had little animation
explaining how to cast a ballot. Because we know men
are unlikely to vote if they don't know what they're doing,
because they don't like making a mistake in public.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Oh well, women are.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
More likely not to vote if they think that the
choice they make will cause harm. So women need more
information about who they're voting for. Men need really good
information about how to do it. But if you don't
know those things, you're not going to transform them into voters.
And so we really tried to think about all of
these pieces. But I don't want it to feel like
(05:52):
you have to do all of this stuff. We just
have to know that these are the things that need
to get done, and we've got enough groups doing stuff
that if we coalition, we can do it.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
You're so good at eloquently explaining what really boils down to,
Like we had to address dudes insecurity, like just like
the deep seated insecurity of what it means to be
a man. We're like, we just had to find a
polite way of explaining to you how voting works. That's
so good. So this episode, I want to focus on
you vote. When I was Obama's aid on young Americans,
I remember feeling the frustration that young people weren't getting
(06:27):
the credit that they deserved. This was the only demographic
group that's not a constant, so like, the thirty two
percent of them who voted in two thousand are not
the same forty seven percent of the humans who voted
in twenty four It's like the only demo that changes, right,
you're old, you're black, you're api like sort of for
(06:49):
life once you're in that group, and everyone who votes
is more likely to vote in the future. So I
kind of wanted to start with the basic question, but
a really important one. What's your pitch on why it
matters if young people vote or don't vote, and why
should we all care.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
So, if I'm making the pitch to a young person,
here's what I say. You may not be into politics,
and I understand why, But politics is into you, and
it is a stalker. It is going to find you
when you get ready to try to drive a car.
It's going to find you when you try to get
a job. It's going to decide whether or not when
(07:27):
you get pulled over, whether you get a ticket, or
whether you get arrested. It's going to determine whether or
not you can breathe the air where you live. Politics
pretty much touches every part of your life, but for
most young people, we never connect at the dots. So
why be into politics If all you know of politics
are adults arguing over why they can't solve problems, that's
(07:50):
their general experience. If you are a young person who
has seen a mass shooting or has lived through mass shootings,
and you've watched the adults in the country absolutely refuse
to take action, that's your understanding of politics. We don't
explain very effectively what it means to have politics impact
(08:11):
your life. And so when I talk to young people,
I talk about here's what it actually looks like. It's
not about whether these old people decide something. It is
what kind of world do you want? And the only
way we can hear you is if you vote. Now,
if I'm talking to the people making the choices, what
I point out is what you've alluded to. We keep
(08:33):
acting as though it's a static population. Again, four million
young people graduate from high school every year, but about
thirty percent of eighteen year olds get registered to vote,
and so we've got a whole missing population that we
don't go after. Young people don't vote because we don't ask.
They don't vote because we don't do the work of
(08:55):
actually engaging them, and we don't use the levers that
we have available to ensure or that they do participate.
Why shouldn't every student who graduates from high school get
registered to vote as a condition of graduation. But it's
not on them to do it, it's on us to
make it happen. And so then we discount them or
we call them apathetic. They're not apathetic. They are under educated,
(09:17):
which is a condemnation of the adults, not a condemnation
of eighteen to twenty four year old And so that population,
I say you're leaving a lot of opportunity on the
table because we don't want to do the work.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
What do you make of the low levels of trust
in our public and private institutions? And I'm asking that
in conjunction with like the whether youth vote is fluctuating people,
young people saying they're disenchanted with our politics, especially these days. Rightfully,
so it seems like it all boils down to, yes,
we distrust government. Congress has a horrifically low approval rating.
(09:55):
That's nothing new, that's been going on for decades. What
is new seems to be a distrust of public institutions
as well as the private ones. So can I believe
what I'm reading in the paper? Who are the people
that I'm actually listening to on social media? How do
you get people to vote when they don't believe the
system actually works?
Speaker 3 (10:13):
So I'm going to do again two parts, So January
twenty twenty five there's an answer, and then there's a
post January twenty twenty five. So pre January twenty twenty five,
if you are a young person, you have grown up
with mass shootings, with COVID, with climate in action, you
have watched stories about the public leaders railing against your race,
(10:41):
your class, your gender, your identity, your rights, and you
have watched the adults who are responsible for helping you
abdicate their obligation. Horrific things happen. There is a blip
of conversation, and then nothing changes. People have always been
(11:01):
skeptical of government. We've always been distrustful of power. It's
sort of part of the human condition. But in the
last decade we have seen very clear examples of the
most egregious behaviors go unpunished. You watch January sixth happen,
and that's why I'm going to jump to what's happening now.
(11:22):
But I have six nieces and nephews who are all
under the age of twenty, and they grew up watching
mass shootings happen with alarming regularity. They had to do
active shooter drills as children, and instead of the government
that they're supposed to trust saying we're going to do
(11:43):
everything in our power to protect you, they were told
to throw their notebooks at a shooter and use that
time to hide under the desk. That's going to break trust,
and that's not going to engender a sense that things
can get better. But these are the same kids who
live in housing that's really expensive, and they hear their
parents talk about whether or not they can afford to
(12:04):
stay there. These are the same kids who worry about
food insecurity. A quarter of them have to worry about
whether they're going to have enough to eat. And so
the institutions they've been told were supposed to solve the
problems not only didn't solve the problems but blamed the victims.
So that's one piece. But then if you fast forward
to January twenty twenty five and the inauguration of the
(12:26):
current president and the rise of an authoritarian regime, we
have seen all of the reasons to distrust government put
on steroids. When you break democracy, when you discount its efficacy,
when you talk about government as only a cesspool, everyone
can hear you. And so it's hard to build trust
(12:48):
when the people in charge are saying, don't trust us,
when they are undertaking behaviors that say not only should
you not believe me, you should be afraid of me.
Those have very real impacts on whether someone decides they
want to get involved.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
How does that impact affect people, especially young people across
the political spectrum. Because I'm and some of this data
comes out monthly, right, but Democrats.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Are losing young people. There are all these.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Conservative influencers who have been very attractive to especially young men,
but young voters period. The trend has been Obviously, young
people don't necessarily identify as Democrat or Republican. But the
gravitation towards the right, I think was surprising for for
somebody like me. I had very limited experience in government, obviously,
But what do you make of that? What are the
(13:37):
reasons that you're seeing that happening on the left too?
Speaker 3 (13:40):
As an avowed democrat, I will take responsibility first on
our side. When you hear a constant drumbeat of the
fall is nigh and then nothing changes, it is difficult
to believe that the people who you thought were going
(14:01):
to help you and they didn't. It's hard to understand
why not. And that goes again back to education. If
people don't understand how a system is supposed to work,
failures of that system get attributed to everyone. On the right.
There has been an assiduous and very sophisticated attempt to
(14:22):
blame others for what's happening. And you add into that
what was really as much a vote against the status
quo as it was for the right, and I think
if you're looking at the same data i'm looking at,
we're seeing a migration away from the right, and so
I think it's also important and I really appreciate how
(14:43):
you framed the top of this conversation. This is a
dynamic population that basically recreates itself every four years, and
so I don't want us to extrapolate from a moment
in time in twenty twenty four a permanence of behavior.
But what we can see are warning signs. MAHA is
a warning sign. MAHA is make America healthy again, and
(15:06):
it's the corollary to make America great again. It's really
been pioneered by Robert Kenney Junior, who is the Secretary
of Health. But when it manifests itself, it's actually in
a lot of tiktoks. It's usually coming from tradwives or
from cottage core and it basically says, if you want
to be healthy, if you want to take care of yourself,
these are the things to believe. But there's a lot
(15:28):
of propaganda and bad information that gets embedded in that dynamic.
And this comes back to politics, because politics is nothing
more than voting for the things you need in your life,
and if what you're told you need is for your
rights to be taken away, for your opportunities to be impinged,
but it's framed as though it's liberty. You can't blame
(15:51):
young people for believing it. But undergirding all of that
is what is democracy supposed to do. If you want
people to vote, they've got to know what they're voting for,
which you mean, we've got to know who's supposed to
be doing what. And that comes back to our failure
as a society to connect the dots and make sure
that people understand not only the truth, but how to
(16:12):
navigate the information they get.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
I know, the party from everything you read is still
kind of looking at what happened in the last presidential election,
but also looking ahead to the midterms and obviously local elections.
What do you make of the left flank of the party,
like the Bernies, the aocs, the Xorans, who have significantly
increased youth voter turnout very similar to what you did.
(16:42):
They all expanded the electorate, especially are on in New
York in the primary. What do you think is behind
that and how do you think that differs from the
national parties, both the National Democrats and the National Republicans,
because all of these are sort of little pockets, right.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Yeah. So I think the through line is how honest
are you you with young people about what's happening, about
the power they have, and about the impediment to what
they desire. What Zora Mandami has done is activate young
people by talking about the things that they see. It's
(17:16):
the it's the anti it's antithetical to nineteen eighty four.
When you know the propaganda say you don't believe the
evidence of your eyes, like Zora is like, believe, believe
the truth. You've seen it, So let me tell you
why it's happening this way. And I think what goes
underreported about how he has run his campaign is how
intentional he has been about explaining why things are the
(17:38):
way they are. Young people are smart, they are inquisitive,
they are curious, they're not dumb, and so the tendency
is to gloss over what caused the problem, but also
then to offer either way too complicated a solution, because
that complicated solution usually is why we can't do anything
(18:01):
about it. So I think if you're looking at all
of the folks that you mentioned, and I tried to
do this in my campaign as well. I'm going to
explain why it is why we are where we are,
because if you can understand that, then you might journey
with me to where we can go. On a national
level that is rife with peril because you got to
(18:23):
talk to everybody at the same time, and there is
a fear that if you tell the truth to too
many people at the same time, someone's not going to
like you. But if you're a political consultant, you get
down to brass tacks when you're trying to win an election.
The safest way to win an election is to get
the people who vote it last time to vote again
(18:45):
and to shift just enough the people who voted against
you and to people who voted for you. Well, young
people are again only thirty percent of them are registered,
and on a good day, forty seven percent of them
show up, So they are the most risky population. Cater too,
because you don't know if it's going to work. My belief,
(19:07):
and I would argue on behalf of those of us
in that ILK could do this, is that I'm willing
to risk it because I think there's some people in
the other cohort who are also hungry for that. I
talk about not just the seventy five million who voted
for Kamala Harris or the seventy seven million who voted
for Donald Trump. I want to know how do we
get the ninety million who didn't vote. And that ninety
(19:30):
million is comprise of a lot of young people, and
they didn't vote because we didn't talk to them. We
talked about them. But if we don't talk to them
and give them honest answers, then we'll never add them
to the roles. And I have enough faith in those
who are already with us that if we tell them
what we believe, most of them will stick. But if
(19:50):
they do defect, we've got a whole universe, a blue
sky of opportunity. Let's go and get those folks too,
and we can replace the ones who decide they don't agree.
But it takes courage to risk an election, and you know,
in my case, didn't quite work. But I don't regret
it because two years later we saw a dramatic turnaround,
(20:12):
and even beyond that, we saw people who didn't believe
that voting was for them stay engaged.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
A lot of this reminds me of I'm going to
date myself here with my politics and nerddom. But I
think it was was it Howard Dean who had like
a fifty state strategy for Democrats that you shouldn't just
focus on particular state like I mean, you're a great
example of this. You your programs had flipped and you
you're expanding the elector at flipped Georgia from being read
to being blue. Is that ninety million figure is that
(20:42):
the number of unregistered voters eligible unregistered voters?
Speaker 3 (20:47):
No, it's not, underd I think it's a combination of
Ye's the universe of eligible voters who did not turn out.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Wouldn'turn out? Okay, so they're they're registered, but they didn't
show up.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Well, some are registered, some are not so eligible simply
means would they be allowed to vote if they if
they went through the process. And I don't know how
much of that accounts for those who, especially in the South,
are permanently disenfranchised because we make terrible decisions about that
that disproportionately affect young people as well. But we can
talk about that too.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Yeah, do you remember when you first voted as an
eighteen year old, Like, what was I like for you?
Speaker 3 (21:21):
I first, my first election was actually the year that
Bill Clinton ran, so I was eight I turned eighteen.
I actually registered people to vote at my college. I
went to Spelman College. I had a little table in
our quad. I was the loneliest freshman in America because
nobody stopped at that table. I turned eighteen that December,
(21:42):
and I, in nineteen ninety two was old enough to
vote in the primary and vote in the general election
to elect Bill Clinton as the president.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Awesome, I have a vivid memory. I think you outlined
it very well. I grew up in a suburb of
New York City, so we were literally handed a voter
registration for um, when you turned eighteen. It's here, you
should do this. And a lot of kids of immigrants.
My parents are immigrants. I was born and raised in
New Jersey. A lot of immigrant households don't vote right,
and the cultural expectation is like, well, that's not for us.
(22:14):
For whatever reason, that was not the case in our house.
It was like, yes, you turned eighteen, that form that
you came home with, fill it out right now and
then and then go and vote. You also reminded me
of you know that the numbers that you were talking
about and that ninety million. In two thousand and eight,
I was on a multi state bus tour with Howard
Dean for the general election, so for Obama's first first term,
(22:38):
trying to get him elected. And Dean says to me
one day, hey, can you walk me through what a
successful movie box.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Office looks like?
Speaker 1 (22:47):
And I'm like, well, you know, it's similar to when
you poll test political ads. Right, You've got your dial
and you have a focus group and all of that.
And I said, you know, so if the focus group
says that, you know, ninety percent of people thought that
that movie was funny, then you know you're in a
great place. And the studio might spend X amount of
dollars on your advertising. And he just goes ninety percent
(23:08):
of people ninety You need to appeal to ninety percent
of people? You know what I have to appeal to,
cal fifty one percent. That's the number I'm after, just
fifty one percent. Is there a path forward?
Speaker 2 (23:21):
You think?
Speaker 1 (23:22):
I mean, I think I have a good grasp on
the expanding the electric and registering people to vote. Is
there a way forward using social media? Using you helped
create this civics for the culture video series Right with
Young Celebrities. Is there any evidence that a lot of
that stuff actually moves the needle and makes a difference
in registering to vote. I know that the jury seems
(23:43):
to be quite out on whether that actually turns people
out to vote when you have surrogates who are helping campaigns,
But in terms of getting people registered to vote, how
does that work?
Speaker 3 (23:53):
So one, you said something about your family, about being
the child of immigrants, and I think that goes to
your larger question. The reason a lot of immigrants don't vote.
It's either because their experience of democracy doesn't deliver or
because it is fraught with potential harm. If you live
in a mixed statust family, then one person registering could
(24:17):
expose everyone else. And so part of the issue is
that voter registration is not uniform in this country. It
depends the quality of your democracy depends on where you live.
If you live in Georgia, the hurdles you have to
jump through to register are different than what you face
in Washington State, which is very different than what happens
(24:38):
in Florida. Georgia used to be a really easy place
to register, so many of us registered that they made
it harder. In fact, with credit to Republicans, they were
part of how we got so many more people on
the roles because we had automatic voter registration. The problem
was it worked, and so they've been clawing it back.
And so what we have to recognize is that voter
(24:59):
registration is not a uniform process, and so it depends
on where you live. If young people believe that it's
worth it. So if you're in Minnesota in twenty twenty two,
Minnesota had either twenty two or twenty four. Minnesota had
like a sixty two percent youth turnout rate, extraordinary. Well,
(25:20):
they also lived in a state where the governor made
universal lunch available for all the kids there. So the
issues matter. If you want people to care about the process,
they have to care about the issues. If you want
someone to run the gauntlet of getting registered and voting,
they've got to believe it's that it's worth it. On
the other side, and so yes, things like civics for
(25:42):
the culture help, surrogates help, but none of them serve
as silver bullets. They're aggregated successes. And I think that's
the part where we get ourselves into trouble. If you're
only trying to get to fifty one percent, you're not
likely to take risks, you're not likely to work harder
(26:04):
because you use what worked the last time. Most campaigns,
much like Hollywood, as I've discovered, runs on what worked
the last time.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
But if you want young people to vote, you got
to think about what works the next time. And so
social media, I think, is an extraordinary tool, but it's
a tool that has to be combined with other tools.
Civics for the culture existed because we knew that people
didn't vote in part because they didn't know what they
were voting for. They didn't know how the process worked.
(26:37):
And Americans we really like to pretend we know stuff.
So you meet people where they are and say, okay,
here's here's something for you to know, and nobody has
to know you didn't know it before, and you can
sound super smart the next time you have this conversation.
If people don't register to vote, instead of making them
jump hurdles at the age of eighteen to figure it out,
(26:59):
pre register every young person at sixteen. Have a federal
law that says that everyone gets preregistered, so that all
you do when you turn eighteen is get your card.
One of the proudest moments in my life was my
niece who lived with me for the last four years.
She was indoctrinated by me, and it was a glorious
(27:19):
thing to see because when she turned seventeen and a half,
she came running down the stairs and she showed me
an email that she got because we preregistered her, and
it said in six months, you will get your registration card,
and she was so excited. It was such a nerdy moment.
(27:39):
But that should be something children look forward to that
youth believe that that's a part of it. It should be
celebratory and not traumatizing. And then the other piece of
it is once you're registered, how hard is it to vote?
We know that in New Hampshire because too many young
people were showing up at the polls, they changed the
law New had I'm sure to make it harder for
(28:01):
young people to vote. They've done the same thing across
the country Florida, Georgia, Texas. You can vote with an
ID card that is your gun license, but you cannot
use your student ID to vote.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
That's wild.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
We get more young people in the process when we
make the process easier. But we also, to your point
about social media, we have to make sure we're using
the avenues of information that they use to explain why
they matter.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Wow. Do you have other examples of how it's been
made harder for young people to vote? I am remembering flashbacks,
and I'm certainly not trying to equate the left and
the right on the successful or not successful codification of
(28:52):
voter suppression. But I do remember the Democratic primary in
two thousand and seven leading up to the Await election.
I was flo because we would see states where you
had campaigns. You know, I'm obviously invested in a lot
in youth out regents. We were on every college campus
with disproportionately large numbers, expanding the electorate that way. And
(29:14):
we had other Democratic campaigns who were trying to run
ads in school newspapers and via surrogate saying if you're
a college student here, you actually can't vote here on campus,
you have to vote in your home state, which was
obviously bullshit, and they knew that it was bullshit, and
so we had to then explain what voter suppression was,
why somebody was trying to tell you that, and yes,
you actually can legally register to vote, and you, in
(29:35):
fact should if you spend most of your year on
a college campus, do you have a sense of why
things like this keep happening and maybe examples of that.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
And I'm not asking you to so that we can
be like, oh, look, how bad this is.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
I'm actually asking you for the opposite reason, which is like, hey,
we should flag this and make sure that we can
rise above that.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
Yeah, okay. So if you think about how voting works,
and going back to our examples, if you're trying to
get fifty one percent, and the best way to guarantee
your outcome is to get the same people who vote
it before to vote the way you need them to vote.
The most dangerous voter is a young voter. They have
no history, You have no idea what they're going to
(30:17):
do now. The law of averages and most information says
that young people tend towards being more liberal in their
belief systems, especially in this generation. They are more racially diverse,
they are more aware of civil rights and human rights.
As a construct, they are the most information heavy generation ever.
(30:41):
But information is not the same as knowledge, and so
one of the dangers that we face if we don't
connect the dots, is that you've got people with lots
and lots of content, but not a lot of capacity
to process that content. Okay. What happens with people who
trying to gain the system, which is what voter suppression is,
(31:03):
is that the easiest target to go after is the
targets you can't predict, and so you go after young
people because if you can keep them from participating, you're
not giving yourself anything, but you're taking an unknown off
the board. So if you're playing chess, you're just trying
to get rid of as many ponds as you can,
and that's how young people are seeing. So what you
(31:24):
described the difference between the behaviors is that typically on
the Democratic side there's a lot of gamesmanship between campaigns.
On the Republican side, there's actual changing of the law itself.
So I might run some disinformation in an ad to
(31:45):
distract you from voting from my opponent. They change the
law to make it illegal for you to cast your ballot.
So in North Dakota they passed a law that said
that if you were Native American, you could not cast
a ballot unless you had an address on your ballot
that matched your local community. Well, if you lived on
(32:06):
a reservation in North dakota't you can only get an
address from the county. The reservation can't give it to you.
It has to be given by the county. Well, the
counties were refusing to give addresses, which meant that an
ID you had from the reservation was not lawful for
the purposes of voting. So if you're a young person
(32:27):
who went to college or who turned eighteen living on
that reservation, you were legally disallowed from participating in elections
because voter ID laws were changed to keep you from voting.
And the Supreme Court said it was okay because they
said that it wasn't that the law didn't have a
disproportion effect on the majority because Native Americans are a
(32:49):
minority in the population, so they will never hit the threshold.
You have the Voting Rights Act when it got eviscerated.
So the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five created
a lot of rules to people of color, namely African Americans,
participate in elections. But those protections benefited everyone. It meant
that you could get information in multiple languages. It meant
(33:10):
that polling places had to be accessible. Well, when colleges
when states get rid of college polling places. So when
you were on those college campuses, a lot of those
college campuses allowed you to go to your dorm, go
grab lunch, and cast your ballot in between. Well after
twenty eighteen, a lot of states started disallowing college campus
(33:33):
polling places, intentionally trying to discourage those voters. And so
usually what you've seen on the right is a very
intentional architecture that stops anything from happening. Will They don't
just try to distract you, they make it illegal for
you to participate, and that is deeply problematic.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
What does the country look like if you had a
zero percent youth turn out? How would things change? What
would happen to society? I guess what I'm asking for
is what are some what are some policy wins right
because young people have voted.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
I'm going to go at the state level because that's
where a lot of youth vote has some of its
deepest impact. If you lived in Florida when Florida re
enfranchised thousands of ex offenders, if there had been no
youth vote, that would not have passed. Now the governor
then orchestrated with the state legislature an entire behavioral change
(34:33):
to change to basically not have to comply. And the
reason they did it was that youth vote was high
in that state wide election. But they know young people
don't vote in midterms. They know young people don't vote
in certain elections, and so they were able to game
the system. And so it's a perfect corollary. Young people
made it possible for ex offenders to get the right
to vote, but because they did not participate at high
(34:55):
enough levels, that never became the law of the land.
In places where we have seen material change for human life,
in Kansas, when young people voted in that election to
restore the right to reproductive freedom and abortion. If young
people had not voted, if college age young people hadn't voted,
(35:17):
Kansas would not have the right to an abortion, and
so across the country, especially in recent years, when you
see our rights protected, it's when young people show up.
And when those rights are eviscerated, it's often because young
people don't participate in the elections that hire the state legislators,
because it's usually state legislators doing this stuff. If you
(35:39):
don't vote in those elections, that's where ninety percent of
the stuff that sucks comes from It doesn't come from
congresscause Congress barely gets anything done. It comes from your
state legislature.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Those examples blew my mind a little bit because they're
so immediate. And know, a couple of years ago, I
was a guest hosting The Daily Show after Trevor left,
and Joe Biden was my first guest, and I asked him,
I remember, okay, So I was like, you know, how
do you how did you get your climate built passed?
(36:10):
And I was just genuinely curious about what he was
going to say and all the puppet strings and what
favor trading and whatever actually had to happen. And he said, honestly,
the number one thing that kept us alive and let
us push for this is twenty years of youth advocacy
on climate And it's very difficult. Obviously, if you're forty
now and you spent two years in your twenties fighting
(36:34):
like hell for climate change legislation that didn't get done
for twenty years, it's not like you're feeling that as
a victory, but you should because it took. It's also
part of the whole, Like you know, you age out
of the demographic thing. But so you're giving us like concrete,
like real time examples as well, which you're right, they
happen on the local and state level even more. Okay,
(36:55):
to close it out, I want to read you a
couple of social media posts about voting in elections. Some
are from young people, some are just about young people
are the atmosphere. Some are thoughtful or troubling or funny.
But they're all kind of conversation starters that when I'm
doom scrolling, I always like to have a response and
think of myself as like, how can I elevate? So, okay,
(37:16):
this one's actually kind of funny. So what would you say?
This person says? On October first, the account the Democrats
posted a video about the government shutdown featuring cats. It's
actually pretty clever, And then someone replied like, y'all suck
at memes and no wonder y'all are losing the youth vote.
What would you tell this person? Do you think, in
fact that the Democrats do suck at memes? Does that
(37:37):
even matter? Are these conversation starters for people to understand
something like a government shutdown?
Speaker 3 (37:43):
The question is who's the audience? The audience can never
be eighteen to twenty four year olds unless they are
in charge of the message, because I don't know what
they want, and if someone claims they do, they are
a magician. So I think we often have to assume
that social media posts from institutional actors are designed for
(38:04):
the absolute middle of the road, which means it's going
to work just as well as anything in the middle
of the road does. It's going to miss a lot
on both sides, but it might hit somebody who's going
down the center.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
There's a guy named at Matt van Swoll said, my
personal take is that mail in ballots should be banned
for any able bodied American. They should only be granted
in extremely rare cases. Force all Americans to show up
to vote in person, and declare a national holiday and
give everyone the day off.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
To do it.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
I see some things in here that I agree with,
like a national holiday, But what are your thoughts on
something like this?
Speaker 3 (38:43):
So mail in balloting is, first of all, was pioneered
by Republicans who now are the most visceral objectors to it,
because it works. And the whole point is that back
when it made sense for everyone to vote on a Tuesday,
we lived in an agrarian economy and there were like
seven of us. Okay, we're f three hundred and thirty
million people now. We live a very diverse life. But
(39:06):
people have different schedules, and so you should be able
to vote within a period of time that allows you
to cast your ballot and be heard. But male in
voting is absolutely secure. People didn't get mad until people
started voting with them. They got mad when people they
didn't like started winning with them. And when I say people,
I mean Republicans. And when I say the ones who
(39:27):
were using it were people of color, young people, and
the disabled. Those communities are very, very problematic when you
have a uniformity goal. And so mail in ballots allow
a diverse population to participate in a pluralistic democracy. They
are a native good and when we have them, the
world gets better.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
This one was kind of odd to me.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
Somebody tweeted hot take, people dependent on social welfare shouldn't
be allowed to vote because they can be leveraged to
support policies that go against the greater good for their
own immediate interest. I obviously thought that was a parody
of something. It seems like it's not. How do you
talk to somebody who really believes something like.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
This slowly, and I would point out three things. One,
what do you consider social welfare? Because social welfare means
my food isn't poisoned? And are you telling me you
want to fire all the food inspectors? Doosee does? But
(40:35):
is that what you're going for?
Speaker 2 (40:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Two, I like having the police show up and the
fire department show up, and those are both social welfare
behaviors because I can't afford private security to be at
my beck and call who exactly are you carving out?
And are you saying no one over sixty five can
do this? Because social Security and Medicare are social welfare programs,
(40:58):
So exactly who who gets to vote in your scenario.
But I think instead of arguing the point you start with,
let's make sure we're using the same words in the
same definitions. You can't change people's minds in arguments. What
you can do is offer additional information that, in the
privacy of their own minds, they can start to process
(41:21):
without ever having to give you credit for having actually
said something smart.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
That's that is I'm going to add that to Usually
my advice is like, yeah, go go have a beer
or two with somebody you disagree with. Don't have twelve
because that doesn't end well, but have a couple of
yours is obviously more insightful. Before we end, I just
want to ask, is there anything I didn't ask you
that you think I should have asked for that you
wanted to talk about?
Speaker 3 (41:44):
So I really want young people to understand their power.
And I was recently I had a new book come
out and we were doing a book tour. It's called
Coded Justice. It's about AI Dei and veterans anyway, But
in the midst of this, a young person came up
to me. She was probably eight or nine, and she
went up to the mic to ask a question. She said,
(42:04):
how can young people save democracy? And I talked about
a program I've just launched. It's called the ten Steps Campaign.
It is nonpartisan. The only dividing line is do you
believe in democracy or do you believe in authoritarianism. If
you believe in democracy, we want you to be a
part of it. If you go to ten Steps campaign
dot org you can participate. Because I want young people
(42:28):
who are eighteen to twenty four to know they have
the right to shape the world they need. But I
also want there to be a democracy for those who
are thirteen and fourteen and eight. Because have an eight
year old ask you if there's going to be a
democracy is chilling. But to know that she had enough
(42:48):
sense of her own power and agency to ask that
question gives me absolute hope and a fundamental belief that
we've got to get this right.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Awesome. Thank you so much, Thank you for having Here
We Go Again as.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
A production on iHeart Podcasts and Snaffoo Media in association
with New Metric Media.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Our executive producers.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Are me Calpen ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Melissa Martino, Andy Kim,
Pat Kelly, Chris Kelly, and Dylan Fagan. Meghan tan Is
our producer and writer. Dave Shumka is our producer and editor.
Our consulting producer is Romin Borsolino. Tory Smith is our
associate producer. Theme music by Chris Kelly, logo by Matt Gosson,
(43:31):
Legal review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline Johnson and Megan Halson.
Special thanks to Glenn Bassner, Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein,
and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie
Lieberman and Nikki Etour, thanks for listening. Everybody, tell your friends,
write a review. All of this helps. I appreciate you listening,
(43:52):
and until we go again, I'm Calpen
Ever since eighteen year olds gained the right to vote
in nineteen seventy one, they've been the most underrepresented group
at the polls, which is a little bit misleading because
it's not the same group of young people that turn
eighteen every cycle.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Right, that's obvious.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
I remember when I turned eighteen, I registered to vote immediately.
We just sort of lived in one of those civically
minded towns. But lately something's changing. Youth turnout is climbing.
Political affiliations are definitely shifting, and the generation that grew
up with social media in their hands is starting to
flex their electoral muscle in ways we haven't seen before.
(00:33):
So what's actually driving young people between eighteen and twenty
four to show up?
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Now?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
What's changed since the seventies and eighties from rock the
Vote campaigns to TikTok activism? How are these forces shaping
youth perspectives on politics.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
You may not be into politics, and I understand why
the politics is into you, and it is a stalker.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Today we ask Stacy Abrams, what's at stake if young
people don't vote?
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Here we go again, again, again again.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Hey, I'm Kal Penn and this is here we go
again again, A show that takes today's trends and headlines
and asks why does history keep repeating itself?
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Here we go.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
To dig into the past, present, and future of the
youth vote. I knew only one person would do.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
I'm Stacy Abrams and I am the host of the
Assembly Required podcast and the founder of the Ten Steps campaign.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
She's a best selling author, an entrepreneur, a former tax attorney,
a political powerhouse, and a voting rights icon who literally
helped flip Georgia blue by registering eight hundred thousand new voters.
She's run for governor and somehow still finds time to
write romance novels under the name Selena Montgomery. I am
talking about the singular Stacy Abrams.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Thank you, and I want to tell folks I write
under both my name and Selena Montgomery. We are friends.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
So do you ever have beef?
Speaker 3 (02:18):
We don't. Well. Selena writes for romance, Stacy writes legal thrillers.
Stacey has a higher body count, so Selena is nice
to her.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
In twenty twenty, you famously got eight hundred thousand people
registered to vote by building a huge grassroots network, And
I'm wondering if you can just tell us about that
work and what it was like.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Part of that came about from my run for governor
in twenty eighteen, but even before then, it was really
about gradually engaging voters where they were, and instead of
waiting for voters to come to us saying I want
to register, I launched a project in twenty fourteen that
went to people's houses. We knocked on their doors, We
(03:02):
said are you registered? And if they said yes, we said,
is there anyone else in the house? You know, kind
of like you know Jehovah's witnesses were going to We're
gonna convert everybody there. And I think that's one piece
that was really important that we didn't expect people to
spontaneously decide that they wanted to participate. We went to
them and said, how can we help you?
Speaker 1 (03:22):
And political science people call this expanding the electorate, right,
it's just getting.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
New, first time voters.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
What was the guarantee or maybe there wasn't one, but like,
how do you process Let's say, okay, you hit eight
hundred thousand, you were obviously running as a Democrat for governor.
How did you know what the split like was that
all eight hundred thousand Democrats. Did you register people without
knowing where their politics lie? How does that work?
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Yeah? So, And I want to be clear, this was
a gradual architecture. So if you're in Texas, we didn't
do it on Thursday. Yeah, they could, but it took
some time. Yeah, you know, it was ad voters. In Georgia,
you cannot vote. You don't register by party, you just register. We, however,
(04:05):
were targeting underrepresented populations, and that meant people of color
and young people. Those are the two most light the
two communities most likely to not be registered. Every year
across the country, four million young people graduate from high school,
but roughly only thirty percent of them are registered to vote.
So you've got a whole lot of ground to cover
(04:27):
if you want to add those voters. Likewise, for people
of color in the South, we had a huge surfeit
of people who had simply never been asked to register.
And for those of us who grow up thinking about,
you know, expanding the electorate and political science jargon, that
makes sense if you grew up in a civically engaged household,
(04:47):
registering to vote's part of what you do. But if
you grow up in generational poverty, if you grew up
in a rural community. If you grow up in a
place where you are in the minority, they're unlikely to
come to you and say, oh, by the way, here's
the key to your democracy and here's what you need
to do. So a big part of what we were
able to do on the registration front was not just
(05:08):
register voters. We then did the work of saying, okay,
and here's how voting works. We did this was back
before social media had really taken off. We did the
DVDs that we gave out where we had little animation
explaining how to cast a ballot. Because we know men
are unlikely to vote if they don't know what they're doing,
because they don't like making a mistake in public.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Oh well, women are.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
More likely not to vote if they think that the
choice they make will cause harm. So women need more
information about who they're voting for. Men need really good
information about how to do it. But if you don't
know those things, you're not going to transform them into voters.
And so we really tried to think about all of
these pieces. But I don't want it to feel like
(05:52):
you have to do all of this stuff. We just
have to know that these are the things that need
to get done, and we've got enough groups doing stuff
that if we coalition, we can do it.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
You're so good at eloquently explaining what really boils down to,
Like we had to address dudes insecurity, like just like
the deep seated insecurity of what it means to be
a man. We're like, we just had to find a
polite way of explaining to you how voting works. That's
so good. So this episode, I want to focus on
you vote. When I was Obama's aid on young Americans,
I remember feeling the frustration that young people weren't getting
(06:27):
the credit that they deserved. This was the only demographic
group that's not a constant, so like, the thirty two
percent of them who voted in two thousand are not
the same forty seven percent of the humans who voted
in twenty four It's like the only demo that changes, right,
you're old, you're black, you're api like sort of for
(06:49):
life once you're in that group, and everyone who votes
is more likely to vote in the future. So I
kind of wanted to start with the basic question, but
a really important one. What's your pitch on why it
matters if young people vote or don't vote, and why
should we all care.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
So, if I'm making the pitch to a young person,
here's what I say. You may not be into politics,
and I understand why, But politics is into you, and
it is a stalker. It is going to find you
when you get ready to try to drive a car.
It's going to find you when you try to get
a job. It's going to decide whether or not when
(07:27):
you get pulled over, whether you get a ticket, or
whether you get arrested. It's going to determine whether or
not you can breathe the air where you live. Politics
pretty much touches every part of your life, but for
most young people, we never connect at the dots. So
why be into politics If all you know of politics
are adults arguing over why they can't solve problems, that's
(07:50):
their general experience. If you are a young person who
has seen a mass shooting or has lived through mass shootings,
and you've watched the adults in the country absolutely refuse
to take action, that's your understanding of politics. We don't
explain very effectively what it means to have politics impact
(08:11):
your life. And so when I talk to young people,
I talk about here's what it actually looks like. It's
not about whether these old people decide something. It is
what kind of world do you want? And the only
way we can hear you is if you vote. Now,
if I'm talking to the people making the choices, what
I point out is what you've alluded to. We keep
(08:33):
acting as though it's a static population. Again, four million
young people graduate from high school every year, but about
thirty percent of eighteen year olds get registered to vote,
and so we've got a whole missing population that we
don't go after. Young people don't vote because we don't ask.
They don't vote because we don't do the work of
(08:55):
actually engaging them, and we don't use the levers that
we have available to ensure or that they do participate.
Why shouldn't every student who graduates from high school get
registered to vote as a condition of graduation. But it's
not on them to do it, it's on us to
make it happen. And so then we discount them or
we call them apathetic. They're not apathetic. They are under educated,
(09:17):
which is a condemnation of the adults, not a condemnation
of eighteen to twenty four year old And so that population,
I say you're leaving a lot of opportunity on the
table because we don't want to do the work.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
What do you make of the low levels of trust
in our public and private institutions? And I'm asking that
in conjunction with like the whether youth vote is fluctuating people,
young people saying they're disenchanted with our politics, especially these days. Rightfully,
so it seems like it all boils down to, yes,
we distrust government. Congress has a horrifically low approval rating.
(09:55):
That's nothing new, that's been going on for decades. What
is new seems to be a distrust of public institutions
as well as the private ones. So can I believe
what I'm reading in the paper? Who are the people
that I'm actually listening to on social media? How do
you get people to vote when they don't believe the
system actually works?
Speaker 3 (10:13):
So I'm going to do again two parts, So January
twenty twenty five there's an answer, and then there's a
post January twenty twenty five. So pre January twenty twenty five,
if you are a young person, you have grown up
with mass shootings, with COVID, with climate in action, you
have watched stories about the public leaders railing against your race,
(10:41):
your class, your gender, your identity, your rights, and you
have watched the adults who are responsible for helping you
abdicate their obligation. Horrific things happen. There is a blip
of conversation, and then nothing changes. People have always been
(11:01):
skeptical of government. We've always been distrustful of power. It's
sort of part of the human condition. But in the
last decade we have seen very clear examples of the
most egregious behaviors go unpunished. You watch January sixth happen,
and that's why I'm going to jump to what's happening now.
(11:22):
But I have six nieces and nephews who are all
under the age of twenty, and they grew up watching
mass shootings happen with alarming regularity. They had to do
active shooter drills as children, and instead of the government
that they're supposed to trust saying we're going to do
(11:43):
everything in our power to protect you, they were told
to throw their notebooks at a shooter and use that
time to hide under the desk. That's going to break trust,
and that's not going to engender a sense that things
can get better. But these are the same kids who
live in housing that's really expensive, and they hear their
parents talk about whether or not they can afford to
(12:04):
stay there. These are the same kids who worry about
food insecurity. A quarter of them have to worry about
whether they're going to have enough to eat. And so
the institutions they've been told were supposed to solve the
problems not only didn't solve the problems but blamed the victims.
So that's one piece. But then if you fast forward
to January twenty twenty five and the inauguration of the
(12:26):
current president and the rise of an authoritarian regime, we
have seen all of the reasons to distrust government put
on steroids. When you break democracy, when you discount its efficacy,
when you talk about government as only a cesspool, everyone
can hear you. And so it's hard to build trust
(12:48):
when the people in charge are saying, don't trust us,
when they are undertaking behaviors that say not only should
you not believe me, you should be afraid of me.
Those have very real impacts on whether someone decides they
want to get involved.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
How does that impact affect people, especially young people across
the political spectrum. Because I'm and some of this data
comes out monthly, right, but Democrats.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Are losing young people. There are all these.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Conservative influencers who have been very attractive to especially young men,
but young voters period. The trend has been Obviously, young
people don't necessarily identify as Democrat or Republican. But the
gravitation towards the right, I think was surprising for for
somebody like me. I had very limited experience in government, obviously,
But what do you make of that? What are the
(13:37):
reasons that you're seeing that happening on the left too?
Speaker 3 (13:40):
As an avowed democrat, I will take responsibility first on
our side. When you hear a constant drumbeat of the
fall is nigh and then nothing changes, it is difficult
to believe that the people who you thought were going
(14:01):
to help you and they didn't. It's hard to understand
why not. And that goes again back to education. If
people don't understand how a system is supposed to work,
failures of that system get attributed to everyone. On the right.
There has been an assiduous and very sophisticated attempt to
(14:22):
blame others for what's happening. And you add into that
what was really as much a vote against the status
quo as it was for the right, and I think
if you're looking at the same data i'm looking at,
we're seeing a migration away from the right, and so
I think it's also important and I really appreciate how
(14:43):
you framed the top of this conversation. This is a
dynamic population that basically recreates itself every four years, and
so I don't want us to extrapolate from a moment
in time in twenty twenty four a permanence of behavior.
But what we can see are warning signs. MAHA is
a warning sign. MAHA is make America healthy again, and
(15:06):
it's the corollary to make America great again. It's really
been pioneered by Robert Kenney Junior, who is the Secretary
of Health. But when it manifests itself, it's actually in
a lot of tiktoks. It's usually coming from tradwives or
from cottage core and it basically says, if you want
to be healthy, if you want to take care of yourself,
these are the things to believe. But there's a lot
(15:28):
of propaganda and bad information that gets embedded in that dynamic.
And this comes back to politics, because politics is nothing
more than voting for the things you need in your life,
and if what you're told you need is for your
rights to be taken away, for your opportunities to be impinged,
but it's framed as though it's liberty. You can't blame
(15:51):
young people for believing it. But undergirding all of that
is what is democracy supposed to do. If you want
people to vote, they've got to know what they're voting for,
which you mean, we've got to know who's supposed to
be doing what. And that comes back to our failure
as a society to connect the dots and make sure
that people understand not only the truth, but how to
(16:12):
navigate the information they get.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
I know, the party from everything you read is still
kind of looking at what happened in the last presidential election,
but also looking ahead to the midterms and obviously local elections.
What do you make of the left flank of the party,
like the Bernies, the aocs, the Xorans, who have significantly
increased youth voter turnout very similar to what you did.
(16:42):
They all expanded the electorate, especially are on in New
York in the primary. What do you think is behind
that and how do you think that differs from the
national parties, both the National Democrats and the National Republicans,
because all of these are sort of little pockets, right.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Yeah. So I think the through line is how honest
are you you with young people about what's happening, about
the power they have, and about the impediment to what
they desire. What Zora Mandami has done is activate young
people by talking about the things that they see. It's
(17:16):
the it's the anti it's antithetical to nineteen eighty four.
When you know the propaganda say you don't believe the
evidence of your eyes, like Zora is like, believe, believe
the truth. You've seen it, So let me tell you
why it's happening this way. And I think what goes
underreported about how he has run his campaign is how
intentional he has been about explaining why things are the
(17:38):
way they are. Young people are smart, they are inquisitive,
they are curious, they're not dumb, and so the tendency
is to gloss over what caused the problem, but also
then to offer either way too complicated a solution, because
that complicated solution usually is why we can't do anything
(18:01):
about it. So I think if you're looking at all
of the folks that you mentioned, and I tried to
do this in my campaign as well. I'm going to
explain why it is why we are where we are,
because if you can understand that, then you might journey
with me to where we can go. On a national
level that is rife with peril because you got to
(18:23):
talk to everybody at the same time, and there is
a fear that if you tell the truth to too
many people at the same time, someone's not going to
like you. But if you're a political consultant, you get
down to brass tacks when you're trying to win an election.
The safest way to win an election is to get
the people who vote it last time to vote again
(18:45):
and to shift just enough the people who voted against
you and to people who voted for you. Well, young
people are again only thirty percent of them are registered,
and on a good day, forty seven percent of them
show up, So they are the most risky population. Cater too,
because you don't know if it's going to work. My belief,
(19:07):
and I would argue on behalf of those of us
in that ILK could do this, is that I'm willing
to risk it because I think there's some people in
the other cohort who are also hungry for that. I
talk about not just the seventy five million who voted
for Kamala Harris or the seventy seven million who voted
for Donald Trump. I want to know how do we
get the ninety million who didn't vote. And that ninety
(19:30):
million is comprise of a lot of young people, and
they didn't vote because we didn't talk to them. We
talked about them. But if we don't talk to them
and give them honest answers, then we'll never add them
to the roles. And I have enough faith in those
who are already with us that if we tell them
what we believe, most of them will stick. But if
(19:50):
they do defect, we've got a whole universe, a blue
sky of opportunity. Let's go and get those folks too,
and we can replace the ones who decide they don't agree.
But it takes courage to risk an election, and you know,
in my case, didn't quite work. But I don't regret
it because two years later we saw a dramatic turnaround,
(20:12):
and even beyond that, we saw people who didn't believe
that voting was for them stay engaged.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
A lot of this reminds me of I'm going to
date myself here with my politics and nerddom. But I
think it was was it Howard Dean who had like
a fifty state strategy for Democrats that you shouldn't just
focus on particular state like I mean, you're a great
example of this. You your programs had flipped and you
you're expanding the elector at flipped Georgia from being read
to being blue. Is that ninety million figure is that
(20:42):
the number of unregistered voters eligible unregistered voters?
Speaker 3 (20:47):
No, it's not, underd I think it's a combination of
Ye's the universe of eligible voters who did not turn out.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Wouldn'turn out? Okay, so they're they're registered, but they didn't
show up.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Well, some are registered, some are not so eligible simply
means would they be allowed to vote if they if
they went through the process. And I don't know how
much of that accounts for those who, especially in the South,
are permanently disenfranchised because we make terrible decisions about that
that disproportionately affect young people as well. But we can
talk about that too.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Yeah, do you remember when you first voted as an
eighteen year old, Like, what was I like for you?
Speaker 3 (21:21):
I first, my first election was actually the year that
Bill Clinton ran, so I was eight I turned eighteen.
I actually registered people to vote at my college. I
went to Spelman College. I had a little table in
our quad. I was the loneliest freshman in America because
nobody stopped at that table. I turned eighteen that December,
(21:42):
and I, in nineteen ninety two was old enough to
vote in the primary and vote in the general election
to elect Bill Clinton as the president.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Awesome, I have a vivid memory. I think you outlined
it very well. I grew up in a suburb of
New York City, so we were literally handed a voter
registration for um, when you turned eighteen. It's here, you
should do this. And a lot of kids of immigrants.
My parents are immigrants. I was born and raised in
New Jersey. A lot of immigrant households don't vote right,
and the cultural expectation is like, well, that's not for us.
(22:14):
For whatever reason, that was not the case in our house.
It was like, yes, you turned eighteen, that form that
you came home with, fill it out right now and
then and then go and vote. You also reminded me
of you know that the numbers that you were talking
about and that ninety million. In two thousand and eight,
I was on a multi state bus tour with Howard
Dean for the general election, so for Obama's first first term,
(22:38):
trying to get him elected. And Dean says to me
one day, hey, can you walk me through what a
successful movie box.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Office looks like?
Speaker 1 (22:47):
And I'm like, well, you know, it's similar to when
you poll test political ads. Right, You've got your dial
and you have a focus group and all of that.
And I said, you know, so if the focus group
says that, you know, ninety percent of people thought that
that movie was funny, then you know you're in a
great place. And the studio might spend X amount of
dollars on your advertising. And he just goes ninety percent
(23:08):
of people ninety You need to appeal to ninety percent
of people? You know what I have to appeal to,
cal fifty one percent. That's the number I'm after, just
fifty one percent. Is there a path forward?
Speaker 2 (23:21):
You think?
Speaker 1 (23:22):
I mean, I think I have a good grasp on
the expanding the electric and registering people to vote. Is
there a way forward using social media? Using you helped
create this civics for the culture video series Right with
Young Celebrities. Is there any evidence that a lot of
that stuff actually moves the needle and makes a difference
in registering to vote. I know that the jury seems
(23:43):
to be quite out on whether that actually turns people
out to vote when you have surrogates who are helping campaigns,
But in terms of getting people registered to vote, how
does that work?
Speaker 3 (23:53):
So one, you said something about your family, about being
the child of immigrants, and I think that goes to
your larger question. The reason a lot of immigrants don't vote.
It's either because their experience of democracy doesn't deliver or
because it is fraught with potential harm. If you live
in a mixed statust family, then one person registering could
(24:17):
expose everyone else. And so part of the issue is
that voter registration is not uniform in this country. It
depends the quality of your democracy depends on where you live.
If you live in Georgia, the hurdles you have to
jump through to register are different than what you face
in Washington State, which is very different than what happens
(24:38):
in Florida. Georgia used to be a really easy place
to register, so many of us registered that they made
it harder. In fact, with credit to Republicans, they were
part of how we got so many more people on
the roles because we had automatic voter registration. The problem
was it worked, and so they've been clawing it back.
And so what we have to recognize is that voter
(24:59):
registration is not a uniform process, and so it depends
on where you live. If young people believe that it's
worth it. So if you're in Minnesota in twenty twenty two,
Minnesota had either twenty two or twenty four. Minnesota had
like a sixty two percent youth turnout rate, extraordinary. Well,
(25:20):
they also lived in a state where the governor made
universal lunch available for all the kids there. So the
issues matter. If you want people to care about the process,
they have to care about the issues. If you want
someone to run the gauntlet of getting registered and voting,
they've got to believe it's that it's worth it. On
the other side, and so yes, things like civics for
(25:42):
the culture help, surrogates help, but none of them serve
as silver bullets. They're aggregated successes. And I think that's
the part where we get ourselves into trouble. If you're
only trying to get to fifty one percent, you're not
likely to take risks, you're not likely to work harder
(26:04):
because you use what worked the last time. Most campaigns,
much like Hollywood, as I've discovered, runs on what worked
the last time.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
But if you want young people to vote, you got
to think about what works the next time. And so
social media, I think, is an extraordinary tool, but it's
a tool that has to be combined with other tools.
Civics for the culture existed because we knew that people
didn't vote in part because they didn't know what they
were voting for. They didn't know how the process worked.
(26:37):
And Americans we really like to pretend we know stuff.
So you meet people where they are and say, okay,
here's here's something for you to know, and nobody has
to know you didn't know it before, and you can
sound super smart the next time you have this conversation.
If people don't register to vote, instead of making them
jump hurdles at the age of eighteen to figure it out,
(26:59):
pre register every young person at sixteen. Have a federal
law that says that everyone gets preregistered, so that all
you do when you turn eighteen is get your card.
One of the proudest moments in my life was my
niece who lived with me for the last four years.
She was indoctrinated by me, and it was a glorious
(27:19):
thing to see because when she turned seventeen and a half,
she came running down the stairs and she showed me
an email that she got because we preregistered her, and
it said in six months, you will get your registration card,
and she was so excited. It was such a nerdy moment.
(27:39):
But that should be something children look forward to that
youth believe that that's a part of it. It should be
celebratory and not traumatizing. And then the other piece of
it is once you're registered, how hard is it to vote?
We know that in New Hampshire because too many young
people were showing up at the polls, they changed the
law New had I'm sure to make it harder for
(28:01):
young people to vote. They've done the same thing across
the country Florida, Georgia, Texas. You can vote with an
ID card that is your gun license, but you cannot
use your student ID to vote.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
That's wild.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
We get more young people in the process when we
make the process easier. But we also, to your point
about social media, we have to make sure we're using
the avenues of information that they use to explain why
they matter.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Wow. Do you have other examples of how it's been
made harder for young people to vote? I am remembering flashbacks,
and I'm certainly not trying to equate the left and
the right on the successful or not successful codification of
(28:52):
voter suppression. But I do remember the Democratic primary in
two thousand and seven leading up to the Await election.
I was flo because we would see states where you
had campaigns. You know, I'm obviously invested in a lot
in youth out regents. We were on every college campus
with disproportionately large numbers, expanding the electorate that way. And
(29:14):
we had other Democratic campaigns who were trying to run
ads in school newspapers and via surrogate saying if you're
a college student here, you actually can't vote here on campus,
you have to vote in your home state, which was
obviously bullshit, and they knew that it was bullshit, and
so we had to then explain what voter suppression was,
why somebody was trying to tell you that, and yes,
you actually can legally register to vote, and you, in
(29:35):
fact should if you spend most of your year on
a college campus, do you have a sense of why
things like this keep happening and maybe examples of that.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
And I'm not asking you to so that we can
be like, oh, look, how bad this is.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
I'm actually asking you for the opposite reason, which is like, hey,
we should flag this and make sure that we can
rise above that.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
Yeah, okay. So if you think about how voting works,
and going back to our examples, if you're trying to
get fifty one percent, and the best way to guarantee
your outcome is to get the same people who vote
it before to vote the way you need them to vote.
The most dangerous voter is a young voter. They have
no history, You have no idea what they're going to
(30:17):
do now. The law of averages and most information says
that young people tend towards being more liberal in their
belief systems, especially in this generation. They are more racially diverse,
they are more aware of civil rights and human rights.
As a construct, they are the most information heavy generation ever.
(30:41):
But information is not the same as knowledge, and so
one of the dangers that we face if we don't
connect the dots, is that you've got people with lots
and lots of content, but not a lot of capacity
to process that content. Okay. What happens with people who
trying to gain the system, which is what voter suppression is,
(31:03):
is that the easiest target to go after is the
targets you can't predict, and so you go after young
people because if you can keep them from participating, you're
not giving yourself anything, but you're taking an unknown off
the board. So if you're playing chess, you're just trying
to get rid of as many ponds as you can,
and that's how young people are seeing. So what you
(31:24):
described the difference between the behaviors is that typically on
the Democratic side there's a lot of gamesmanship between campaigns.
On the Republican side, there's actual changing of the law itself.
So I might run some disinformation in an ad to
(31:45):
distract you from voting from my opponent. They change the
law to make it illegal for you to cast your ballot.
So in North Dakota they passed a law that said
that if you were Native American, you could not cast
a ballot unless you had an address on your ballot
that matched your local community. Well, if you lived on
(32:06):
a reservation in North dakota't you can only get an
address from the county. The reservation can't give it to you.
It has to be given by the county. Well, the
counties were refusing to give addresses, which meant that an
ID you had from the reservation was not lawful for
the purposes of voting. So if you're a young person
(32:27):
who went to college or who turned eighteen living on
that reservation, you were legally disallowed from participating in elections
because voter ID laws were changed to keep you from voting.
And the Supreme Court said it was okay because they
said that it wasn't that the law didn't have a
disproportion effect on the majority because Native Americans are a
(32:49):
minority in the population, so they will never hit the threshold.
You have the Voting Rights Act when it got eviscerated.
So the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five created
a lot of rules to people of color, namely African Americans,
participate in elections. But those protections benefited everyone. It meant
that you could get information in multiple languages. It meant
(33:10):
that polling places had to be accessible. Well, when colleges
when states get rid of college polling places. So when
you were on those college campuses, a lot of those
college campuses allowed you to go to your dorm, go
grab lunch, and cast your ballot in between. Well after
twenty eighteen, a lot of states started disallowing college campus
(33:33):
polling places, intentionally trying to discourage those voters. And so
usually what you've seen on the right is a very
intentional architecture that stops anything from happening. Will They don't
just try to distract you, they make it illegal for
you to participate, and that is deeply problematic.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
What does the country look like if you had a
zero percent youth turn out? How would things change? What
would happen to society? I guess what I'm asking for
is what are some what are some policy wins right
because young people have voted.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
I'm going to go at the state level because that's
where a lot of youth vote has some of its
deepest impact. If you lived in Florida when Florida re
enfranchised thousands of ex offenders, if there had been no
youth vote, that would not have passed. Now the governor
then orchestrated with the state legislature an entire behavioral change
(34:33):
to change to basically not have to comply. And the
reason they did it was that youth vote was high
in that state wide election. But they know young people
don't vote in midterms. They know young people don't vote
in certain elections, and so they were able to game
the system. And so it's a perfect corollary. Young people
made it possible for ex offenders to get the right
to vote, but because they did not participate at high
(34:55):
enough levels, that never became the law of the land.
In places where we have seen material change for human life,
in Kansas, when young people voted in that election to
restore the right to reproductive freedom and abortion. If young
people had not voted, if college age young people hadn't voted,
(35:17):
Kansas would not have the right to an abortion, and
so across the country, especially in recent years, when you
see our rights protected, it's when young people show up.
And when those rights are eviscerated, it's often because young
people don't participate in the elections that hire the state legislators,
because it's usually state legislators doing this stuff. If you
(35:39):
don't vote in those elections, that's where ninety percent of
the stuff that sucks comes from It doesn't come from
congresscause Congress barely gets anything done. It comes from your
state legislature.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Those examples blew my mind a little bit because they're
so immediate. And know, a couple of years ago, I
was a guest hosting The Daily Show after Trevor left,
and Joe Biden was my first guest, and I asked him,
I remember, okay, So I was like, you know, how
do you how did you get your climate built passed?
(36:10):
And I was just genuinely curious about what he was
going to say and all the puppet strings and what
favor trading and whatever actually had to happen. And he said, honestly,
the number one thing that kept us alive and let
us push for this is twenty years of youth advocacy
on climate And it's very difficult. Obviously, if you're forty
now and you spent two years in your twenties fighting
(36:34):
like hell for climate change legislation that didn't get done
for twenty years, it's not like you're feeling that as
a victory, but you should because it took. It's also
part of the whole, Like you know, you age out
of the demographic thing. But so you're giving us like concrete,
like real time examples as well, which you're right, they
happen on the local and state level even more. Okay,
(36:55):
to close it out, I want to read you a
couple of social media posts about voting in elections. Some
are from young people, some are just about young people
are the atmosphere. Some are thoughtful or troubling or funny.
But they're all kind of conversation starters that when I'm
doom scrolling, I always like to have a response and
think of myself as like, how can I elevate? So, okay,
(37:16):
this one's actually kind of funny. So what would you say?
This person says? On October first, the account the Democrats
posted a video about the government shutdown featuring cats. It's
actually pretty clever, And then someone replied like, y'all suck
at memes and no wonder y'all are losing the youth vote.
What would you tell this person? Do you think, in
fact that the Democrats do suck at memes? Does that
(37:37):
even matter? Are these conversation starters for people to understand
something like a government shutdown?
Speaker 3 (37:43):
The question is who's the audience? The audience can never
be eighteen to twenty four year olds unless they are
in charge of the message, because I don't know what
they want, and if someone claims they do, they are
a magician. So I think we often have to assume
that social media posts from institutional actors are designed for
(38:04):
the absolute middle of the road, which means it's going
to work just as well as anything in the middle
of the road does. It's going to miss a lot
on both sides, but it might hit somebody who's going
down the center.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
There's a guy named at Matt van Swoll said, my
personal take is that mail in ballots should be banned
for any able bodied American. They should only be granted
in extremely rare cases. Force all Americans to show up
to vote in person, and declare a national holiday and
give everyone the day off.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
To do it.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
I see some things in here that I agree with,
like a national holiday, But what are your thoughts on
something like this?
Speaker 3 (38:43):
So mail in balloting is, first of all, was pioneered
by Republicans who now are the most visceral objectors to it,
because it works. And the whole point is that back
when it made sense for everyone to vote on a Tuesday,
we lived in an agrarian economy and there were like
seven of us. Okay, we're f three hundred and thirty
million people now. We live a very diverse life. But
(39:06):
people have different schedules, and so you should be able
to vote within a period of time that allows you
to cast your ballot and be heard. But male in
voting is absolutely secure. People didn't get mad until people
started voting with them. They got mad when people they
didn't like started winning with them. And when I say people,
I mean Republicans. And when I say the ones who
(39:27):
were using it were people of color, young people, and
the disabled. Those communities are very, very problematic when you
have a uniformity goal. And so mail in ballots allow
a diverse population to participate in a pluralistic democracy. They
are a native good and when we have them, the
world gets better.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
This one was kind of odd to me.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
Somebody tweeted hot take, people dependent on social welfare shouldn't
be allowed to vote because they can be leveraged to
support policies that go against the greater good for their
own immediate interest. I obviously thought that was a parody
of something. It seems like it's not. How do you
talk to somebody who really believes something like.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
This slowly, and I would point out three things. One,
what do you consider social welfare? Because social welfare means
my food isn't poisoned? And are you telling me you
want to fire all the food inspectors? Doosee does? But
(40:35):
is that what you're going for?
Speaker 2 (40:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Two, I like having the police show up and the
fire department show up, and those are both social welfare
behaviors because I can't afford private security to be at
my beck and call who exactly are you carving out?
And are you saying no one over sixty five can
do this? Because social Security and Medicare are social welfare programs,
(40:58):
So exactly who who gets to vote in your scenario.
But I think instead of arguing the point you start with,
let's make sure we're using the same words in the
same definitions. You can't change people's minds in arguments. What
you can do is offer additional information that, in the
privacy of their own minds, they can start to process
(41:21):
without ever having to give you credit for having actually
said something smart.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
That's that is I'm going to add that to Usually
my advice is like, yeah, go go have a beer
or two with somebody you disagree with. Don't have twelve
because that doesn't end well, but have a couple of
yours is obviously more insightful. Before we end, I just
want to ask, is there anything I didn't ask you
that you think I should have asked for that you
wanted to talk about?
Speaker 3 (41:44):
So I really want young people to understand their power.
And I was recently I had a new book come
out and we were doing a book tour. It's called
Coded Justice. It's about AI Dei and veterans anyway, But
in the midst of this, a young person came up
to me. She was probably eight or nine, and she
went up to the mic to ask a question. She said,
(42:04):
how can young people save democracy? And I talked about
a program I've just launched. It's called the ten Steps Campaign.
It is nonpartisan. The only dividing line is do you
believe in democracy or do you believe in authoritarianism. If
you believe in democracy, we want you to be a
part of it. If you go to ten Steps campaign
dot org you can participate. Because I want young people
(42:28):
who are eighteen to twenty four to know they have
the right to shape the world they need. But I
also want there to be a democracy for those who
are thirteen and fourteen and eight. Because have an eight
year old ask you if there's going to be a
democracy is chilling. But to know that she had enough
(42:48):
sense of her own power and agency to ask that
question gives me absolute hope and a fundamental belief that
we've got to get this right.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Awesome. Thank you so much, Thank you for having Here
We Go Again as.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
A production on iHeart Podcasts and Snaffoo Media in association
with New Metric Media.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Our executive producers.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Are me Calpen ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Melissa Martino, Andy Kim,
Pat Kelly, Chris Kelly, and Dylan Fagan. Meghan tan Is
our producer and writer. Dave Shumka is our producer and editor.
Our consulting producer is Romin Borsolino. Tory Smith is our
associate producer. Theme music by Chris Kelly, logo by Matt Gosson,
(43:31):
Legal review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline Johnson and Megan Halson.
Special thanks to Glenn Bassner, Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein,
and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie
Lieberman and Nikki Etour, thanks for listening. Everybody, tell your friends,
write a review. All of this helps. I appreciate you listening,
(43:52):
and until we go again, I'm Calpen
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Betrayal Season 5
Saskia Inwood woke up one morning, knowing her life would never be the same. The night before, she learned the unimaginable – that the husband she knew in the light of day was a different person after dark. This season unpacks Saskia’s discovery of her husband’s secret life and her fight to bring him to justice. Along the way, we expose a crime that is just coming to light. This is also a story about the myth of the “perfect victim:” who gets believed, who gets doubted, and why. We follow Saskia as she works to reclaim her body, her voice, and her life. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at betrayalpod@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.