Like millions of other Americans, Mayer expressed himself, uncensored, on Twitter. “The asshole in the White House just shut down the issuance of green cards, he issued a xenophobic Muslim ban, and is on the verge of appointing two more judges to the SCOTUS,” he posted. When Trump denied that he’d been playing golf instead of responding to the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Mayer wrote, “There’s pictures you fucking idiotic corrupt ignoramous orange fascist dictator son of a bitch.” (There weren’t.)
Looking back, Mayer said, “There’s things that I would express differently now. Largely because of my job, I’m trying to be more adulty. But my feelings about most things haven’t changed.” His incessant tweets got him noticed by Democratic activists, who were perhaps heartened to learn that Mayer wasn’t a radical; he just wanted a functional government. “I did not support Bernie Sanders,” he told me.
He got involved with March for Our Lives after the massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, then interned with a California state legislator and “saw the impact of actually organizing.” The next year, he started Voters of Tomorrow, first as a Twitter account, then as “an actual thing,” but with a “zero-dollar, zero-cent budget,” he recalled. It would be like NextGen, but run entirely by young people, and would “advocate for what the majority of Gen Z believes.” He soon left for college, at Cal State Long Beach, and launched Prom at the Polls, an invitation for students who’d missed their proms because of the pandemic to get dressed up and post pictures while voting in 2020. Thousands of teens and twentysomethings—and middle-aged celebrities, including the cast of “Grey’s Anatomy”—took part.
That year, two-thirds of eligible voters cast ballots in the Presidential election, “the highest rate for any national election since 1900,” according to Pew Research. Young voters went for Democrats at Obama-like levels. This mattered in battleground states that will be critical again this year. For instance, in Michigan, in 2020, Biden won by a hundred and fifty-four thousand votes; among young people, his advantage over Trump, in exit polls, was a hundred and ninety-four thousand. Voter-registration drives and outreach at colleges proved essential in every state that the Democrats won.
Surprisingly, only half of young people today identify strongly as either red or blue. They are issue voters, not partisans. Morley Winograd, who has written widely on millennial politics, told me that what distinguishes Gen Z-ers from members of previous generations is their multiple, overlapping identities and commitments—a pluralism that has tilted them Democratic, at least so far. For Biden, he told me, “The question of how to turn them out must therefore consider the extent to which you’re willing to scare the shit out of them, to talk about what a next Trump Presidency could be like.”
But some first-time voters may have no recollection of Trump’s first term. Others, who feel disenchanted with stereotypically “woke” ideas, might be drawn to Trump and other conservatives. “Looking at Trump and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, I’m hearing about the church, the family. I’m hearing about how they’re going to incentivize having children and keeping families together,” James Hart, who was raised in a Black religious household in Detroit and now leads the Turning Point chapter at Tallahassee Community College, in Florida, told me. “From the Democratic side, I was hearing, ‘How can we be more inclusive to L.G.B.T.Q.+?’ ”
Hart is an outlier, generationally speaking, but polls suggest that the Democrats should emphasize health care and economic mobility over identity in order to stanch the outflow of young men: in 2020, among likely voters, men under thirty preferred Biden to Trump by twenty-six points; in the latest Harvard poll, they preferred him by only six points. The Party has leaned increasingly on its Zoomer envoys, including Mayer and the rest of V.O.T., to prove that it is listening to youth and delivering improvements—on jobs, health care, abortion, the environment, gun control.
Although V.O.T. is relatively new and small (it incorporated as a nonprofit in 2021 and now has a multimillion-dollar budget), its willingness to amplify the good news of Joe Biden and “play the inside game,” in Mayer’s words, has led to regular collaborations with members of Congress and the White House, and now the Biden-Harris campaign. “I genuinely believe that the Administration sees us as partners, not annoying kids,” Mayer said. A White House spokesperson told me that the Office of Public Engagement has been hosting biweekly meetings with “young leaders and organizations,” including Mayer and V.O.T., “to talk about the issues most relevant to young people and insure their voices are heard in the Biden Administration.” V.O.T. is widely seen as “the youth group most affiliated with the Biden camp,” Gabe Fleisher, the author of the “Wake Up to Politics” newsletter and a recent Georgetown graduate, told me.
For V.O.T., Gen Z is just the start. Mayer is already focussed on Generation Alpha: he is training a successor, Hoehne, who joined V.O.T. at fourteen as a volunteer “executive assistant” before becoming the chief of staff. “He sat me down one day and said, ‘Hey, within our org, I don’t want to be running this until I’m thirty,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I want you to be on calls with donors and lawyers so I can eventually pass you the torch.’ ”
Hoehne was fourteen when she joined V.O.T. “Other youth orgs are more anti-establishment than we are,” she said. “But, in order to make stuff happen, you have to start in the room where it’s happening.”
In the fall, I visited Hoehne at her home in Torrington, Connecticut, a former mill town with a quiet Main Street, a growing immigrant population, and an opioid problem. Her brick house was hard to miss: a giant banner endorsing the local Democratic slate in an upcoming election stretched across the front lawn. (Torrington went for Obama, then for Trump.) Hoehne has blue eyes and corn-silk hair; she’s a foot shorter than Mayer, but confident and fast with her punch lines. “The fact that I have to act like I’m twenty-six in politics speaks to the problem,” she told me. “I code-switch.”
She had just started her junior year in high school, and classes commanded only some of her attention. She had persuaded her parents, high-school sweethearts who grew up in town, to let her move from public school to a private online program so that she’d have more time to work and travel for V.O.T. In her bedroom, there was a Taylor Swift concert poster and a fig-scented candle. Also: a plastic figurine of Kamala Harris in a gray suit, campaign signs (Biden-Harris, Jahana Hayes), programs from fund-raising dinners, a crocheted Bernie Sanders doll, and memoirs by Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Chris Murphy. C-SPAN played silently on a monitor. “I’m literally two different people,” she said. “One night, I’m hanging out with friends, and, at 4 A.M. the next day, my dad drives me to the airport to come to D.C.” Her best friend in Torrington, whose dad backs Trump, has no interest in politics. Her two younger sisters are busy with their own activities: dance practice, xylophone lessons.
One afternoon, Hoehne tuned in to a virtual algebra class while checking multiple e-mail accounts, the V.O.T. Slack (favorite channel: VOTaylor, for the Swifties in the group), and a Google Calendar displaying appointments in four different colors. She uses Beltway abbreviations such as “D Trip” (the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) and suffers bouts of anxiety when her commitments pile up. (“We worry because she knows so much,” her mom told me.) “I’m also sixteen years old,” Hoehne said. “I love the little girly things.” She showed me her closet. “This is the dress I wore to the governor’s inauguration. This is the suit I wore to see Biden.” A TJ Maxx price tag dangled from a recent acquisition.
