Opinion Meet the Gen Zers with a plan to take the fight to MAGA country
Now, if a group of Gen Z political operatives has its way, young people might surprise us in another fashion: by getting involved in those sleepy, unglamorous, decidedly uncool contests known as state legislative races.
This week, David Hogg, the 23-year-old gun-control activist driven into politics by the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., launched a political action committee called Leaders We Deserve, which is devoted to recruiting young candidates for state legislative seats — largely in red states.
The project embodies a generational bet of sorts: In coming years, the most promising arena for young people to have meaningful political impact might rest in state governments. National politics is gridlocked, and the right’s long campaign to capture the Supreme Court and most state legislatures has largely succeeded, leaving this as the way forward.
“The challenge we face is, what are we going to do to undo the harmful legacy left behind by extreme right Republicans and the 50-year chess game they’ve been playing,” Hogg told me.
The importance of legislatures is sometimes lost on Democrats. When Republicans captured many statehouses across the country in the 2010 midterm blowout, it caught Democrats napping. We are still suffering the consequences: GOP legislatures gerrymandered legislative districts (and congressional maps) and passed voter suppression laws, deepening their hold on power.
Though Democrats recaptured much ground in 2022, party operatives still sometimes grouse that donors are reluctant to fund state contests. Yet Gen Z operatives and politicians seem more savvy about their importance.
Gen Z has come of age amid high polarization and grim prospects for serious progress on the national level. At the same time, they’ve watched GOP legislatures escalate the culture-warring in the age of MAGA with antiabortion laws, limits on transgender care, and restrictions on classroom discussion of race and gender. As Hogg put it: “That’s where the worst bills are coming from."
Democratic state legislatures are regulating guns, pursuing decarbonization and raising the minimum wage. Republican state legislators have busily relaxed gun laws after mass shootings, angering young people raised on school lockdown drills.
Meanwhile, young liberals who have gotten elected in red states have already proved adept at employing social-media-friendly political tactics to offset their lack of power. The so-called Tennessee Three legislators who were temporarily expelled from office, and the young state senator who filibustered in the Nebraska legislature on behalf of her transgender son focused the national media on GOP legislative atrocities. More such pols in red legislatures, Hogg insisted, will expose “the rot that’s happening in the swampiest places in our country.”
A model for this is Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), Congress’s first Gen Zer, who has virally skewered GOP absurdities and is expected to consult with Leaders We Deserve. (A top Frost adviser, Kevin Lata, is one of the group’s co-founders.)
Donald Trump is key to this story. The former president’s 2017 inauguration coincided with a marked progressive shift among 18-to-29-year-olds on many issues. What’s more, the Trump-like trolling cruelty and authoritarian delirium driving Republican state initiatives might also be pushing Gen Z. Electing young Democrats in these places would take the fight to MAGA territory — and might inspire more to run, Hogg said.
“Young people are incredibly energized by the MAGA takeover on the state level,” Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D), who went viral lambasting the GOP “groomer” smear, told me. “It’s energizing them to run.”
According to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, more than 100 Democratic legislators aged 35 and under have taken office since the 2022 elections. Similarly, the group Run for Something, which recruits progressives for state and local office, says that since 2017, it has elected nearly 300 people under age 40 to state legislatures across the country.
Yet serious obstacles loom. There is some evidence that millennials are growing more conservative as they age; that could happen with Gen Z. State legislators tend to be poorly paid, making it unattractive and unavailable to some young people. Hogg wants to fix this from the inside.
Gen Z will represent 35 percent of eligible voters by 2036, according to one estimate, and Hogg’s organization is all about the long game. Hogg hopes to build “a strong bench” of candidates for higher office, and the group will seek to elect between 15 and 30 people to strategically chosen seats per cycle, while backing a few congressional candidates.
Consider the view from the vantage point of liberal Gen Zers. They grew up during the Great Recession. The GOP they know, aside from the maniacal culture wars, was hijacked by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich’s scorched-earth politics in the 1990s, launched the Iraq War, nominated Trump, defended his effort to destroy constitutional democracy, and will likely nominate him again. Yet the filibuster and malapportioned Senate give the GOP outsize veto power over national progress.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court handed the GOP a presidential election victory, has overturned a fundamental right, is riddled with institutional corruption, and is thwarting governmental efforts to sensibly regulate guns and combat climate change even as the planet burns. No wonder national politics looks like a train wreck to the youths.
But time might be on Gen Z’s side.
“We’re going to outlive the Supreme Court,” Hogg told me. “And we’re going to outlive most of the people in Congress.”
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