American gen Z voters share how they feel about Kamala Harris’s presidential bid, why they like or dislike her as a candidate and whether they think she could beat Donald Trump, as the vice-president races towards winning the Democratic nomination for November’s election.
‘I think she’s just what we need’
“I think [Kamala Harris] is the only one that makes sense. She will get the votes Biden couldn’t. She could get the Black, Asian, Latino, women’s, LGBTQ+ and youth votes. She stands more for progress and equality than an old white dude and if she wins it will be historic. The Democrats need a bold move and I think she’s just what we need.
“I hope the Democrats realize what an opportunity this is for them.” Will, 22, construction worker from Portland, Oregon
…
Look what happens when the party listens. Maybe they’ll keep listening if they see this works.
Maybe Biden stepping down heralds the tipping point away from arrogant, ineffective, conservative gerontocracy within the Democratic party and toward a more progressive future.
Don’t hold your breath.
It doesn’t, sorry. That won’t happen with FPTP voting.
Trump shows that FPTP doesn’t have to result in a closest-to-center career politician. The DNC likes to pretend that it does in order to prop up their most centrist candidates, but as long as there is a large group of radicals and non-voters, a candidate who appeals to those voters can defeat a candidate who appeals to the center.
There were people who switched from Bernie to Trump. There were people who didn’t want to vote Biden because he supported Palestinian genocide too much. Those people are idiots, but they still vote. Lower class workers tend to vote left-wing if they trust that fair competent government is possible and right-wing if they don’t, with most of them in the US voting right-wing, especially in rural areas.
She stands for Blacks and Latinos eh?
Tell us more about her excellent work in California.
Don’t trust right wing talking points without researching them. Don’t spread information before you check it.
In seven years as a DA, overseeing more than 1900 cases, only 45 misdemeanor drug possession charges resulted in jail time. Convictions for such misdemeanor charges went down by about half during her time there.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/09/11/kamala-harris-prosecuting-marijuana-cases/
By CASEY TOLAN | Bay Area News Group UPDATED: July 23, 2024 at 7:00 a.m.
The only source, interestingly bumped all the way to the top of Google search results too… that tries to deny the allegations.
Yeah good luck with that.
Do you hear the people sing?
Gen Z is about to have their Obama moment like how millenials did, I’m taking bets for it now. Everything has happened before, time is a flat circle, I’m willing to bet.
I get very frustrated when I see a few voters clinging to their “uncommitted” status even now. And the ones who do this often look like the kinds of people that the Trumpists will put into camps if he gets re-elected. Stop acting precious about it and commit to the obvious choice. The election is not about you, it’s about the future of the country and whether or not we want to embrace or reject fascism.
I’m incredibly suspicious of anyone who still calls themselves uncommitted. And I’m convinced that anyone who makes that claim is more likely to vote for Trump or to not vote at all than to ultimately vote for Harris. If someone is reasonable enough to end up voting for Harris in November, I highly doubt they’re genuinely undecided about it now.
My best guess is that they’re just afraid to admit that they’ve already committed to Trump.
If the choice isn’t clear as day, maybe they’re nocturnal.
In many cases I think you’d be right. But not in all cases. Here’s an example of what I was talking about:
People talking to the press will say anything to get on TV.
No one is 50/50 on Trump.
Centrists don’t exist.
If you weren’t voting before you have already announced that you are a moron. Chasing 22 year old votes has limited utility. Most of them just don’t turn out. We should avoid putting too much stock in the words of morons who rarely bother to show up.
If you want to fight voter apathy in later years, getting young people tuned in and engaged is probably the best way to do it. Sure, there’s always the chance they still might not show up now, but showing you are listening to young people still helps solidify your party as worth supporting and can lead to stronger support when they get older and are more likely to find the time to get out and vote. 22 year olds don’t stay 22, and the recent trend of people not becoming more right-leaning as they hit middle age might be in part due to Obama and others making young people feel heard 15 years ago. Saying “young people don’t vote, don’t listen to them” is short-sighted at best.
I didn’t say don’t listen to them I said don’t over-weigh the importance of people who haven’t shown up in the past
It’s Kamala all the way!!! 😁😂😁 Let’s just vote now to lock it in! I can do without the 12 weeks of YouTube ads.
Also don’t pay YouTube for ads, they are now evil.
Ok good but if you planned to not vote against trump in any case, you’re with the fascists.
you could also just be stupid
For many late Gen Z’ers, this will be the first election they even get to vote. I remember being in high school and I couldn’t wait to vote when I was 18 because I followed politics very closely. My peers on the other hand, not so much. For every kid at my school who was politically active enough to care about issues that mattered to them, there were about 4-5 more that were completely and utterly apathetic or didn’t have a clue about the candidates or the issues.
The danger in assuming that people who are making the decision to vote now were somehow complicit with having Trump is that they may not have been aware of the problem to begin with. A lot of young eligible voters miss their first few elections because they haven’t developed a political opinion beyond whatever their parents might think, they haven’t taken the time to properly educate themselves on the issues, or there’s still a disconnect between how the election results might affect them in their daily lives.
A fresh new candidate that is pumping energy into the race is getting young people motivated to vote, and that’s a good thing. Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth.
Don’t overcomplicate a very obvious and easy matter.
All they have to get the gen Z votes is create an anime featuring Kamala doing cute chuckle stuff, expressing her love for venn diagrams and doing other geeky stuff. done.
The other danger to avoid (again) is the assumption that because polls and news looks good for a candidate, a single vote won’t matter, which results in a lapse of not voting. Repeat a few million times. Lead suddenly gone.
Vote, even if everyone is claiming it’s a solid win. Vote as if your vote does matter, don’t even debate if that’s true or not.
Well said. Even if you are in a solid-whatever state, the degree to which that is true is important. A 5 point lead is different from a 10 point lead, is different from a 20 point lead. The closer you can make it, the more you force people to pay attention to you.
At the same time, if you know your candidate is going to win and you live in a shitty two-party system, then the only means you have to protest about the policies of the party you primarily support is to give them a no vote when they’re guaranteed to win.
Example, everyone knew the Labor party was going to win in the UK election, it was guaranteed after the 14 years of incompetence from the Tories. That being said, Labor really wasn’t promising much. The only party that were offering any real change were the Greens.
So what do you, knowing that Labor are going to win but not agreeing with their policies? You let them know by voting for other parties, and then Labor reassesses their policies on the votes they lost.
The only means? How about writing a letter? Attending a town hall? How about protest? We have far more influence than a single vote.
Also, I don’t think anyone in Labour is reassessing any policies on votes they lost to the Greens in this example, due to how few votes the Greens got. That said, I do believe people should vote for whatever they think will do the most good. If someone is a single-issue voter on environmental issues, voting Green is a sound way to support the policies they care about. Not to push dems, that is unlikely to happen, but to actually support the policies they care about.
And then a bunch of people do that because “my guy is going to win anyway so it doesn’t matter” and you end up losing. Remember Brexit? never be too confident.
And vote blue to the bottom of the ticket! Let’s take the whole government and then push them hard to fix this broken system!
Local is always as important, if not more, than the Presidential race. Midterms as well. In a world so highly interconnected and real time, we should be so much more democratically inspired, and yet apathy reigns.
and yet apathy reigns.
Part of that has been a directed effort. Oil lobbyists, russian and chinese bots, other corporations, etc all have a vested interests in spreading disinformation and doomerism to encourage apathy.
They also keep everyone poor and stressed so we don’t have time or energy to think about anything else… Let alone something as nuanced and important as politics/democracy
That is absolutely a part of it as well.
Fuckin Battlestar…
It’s going to take real effort for me start reading her name as KAmala and not KaMAla
In politics it’s the opposite of “devil you know”. It’s why Congress flips so much after a presidents first election.
People know Biden know, and the more people know Biden the less they like him.
I don’t think Harris will be great, but there is a chance she will be. That’s enough to get a lot more votes than Biden.
If she hits the ground running we could even gain seats in 2026 for once. But she can’t just “look into” shit to run down the clock. She needs a list of shit they can accomplish, and how many votes in Congress to accomplish each.
Be totally upfront about what we can do, and actually try to accomplish what we can do on day 1.
People will remember that come midterms.
Campaign finance reform to stop unlimited money into politics and voting rights protections would be a huge win. If election day was a national holiday, that’s something people would feel.
The former sounds like an impossible get, but it would be a huge huge win. The latter sounds like something that she could actually accomplish.
That’s funny, I see it the exact other way around. Since the Supreme Court declared monetary contributions are essentially a form of speech, campaign donations have been protected by the first amendment. This is difficult to overturn, since it’s a SC ruling based in the constitution itself. Any law trying to say otherwise could be declared unconstitutional and completely struck down by this even more extreme court.
Main workaround I see is mandating more thorough transparency to at least be able to track it all. There’s probably other strategies too though.
A federal holiday just takes a bill through congress. Won’t be an easy one, would be filibustered for sure. But possible.
This is why I keep repeating “vote for the administration, not the candidate”. Just look at the damage the Trump administration circus did futing the shit show that was his term. Now look at the good that the Biden administration has done in its term. Harris would likely keep a large portion of the team.
The only real deep blemish on the Biden administration has been its support of the Palestinian genocide. If Trump was president, he would has encouraged Netanyahu to be far more brutal. You can also kiss Ukraine, human rights, and democracy goodbye under a Trump second term. But sure…don’t vote.
These people are voting. Biden is no longer the candidate. You no longer have to lecture people into voting for him.
These people *are* voting.
These people are saying they are going to vote. Everyone needs reminding of the consequences of a second Trump term. Also, the “Kamala is a cop” narrative is also in full swing.
Lecturing people who are already excited to do what you want is a great way to piss them off. But given a choice between being self-righteous scolds and winning, Democrats will choose sanctimony every last time.
Unlike you, who is not giving any self righteous lectures about the DNC at all, right?
I’m glad the DNC listened. The prevailing attitude from centrists on this thread is “Oh my GOD, is nothing good enough for you?!” when it’s obvious that for the people in the article, Kamala is.
the “Kamala is a cop” narrative is also in full swing.
Good for attracting Republicans?
I’m sure that will get balanced out by all the “back the blue” conservatives lining up to support her, right?
…right?
But muh inflation /s
If Trump was president, he would has encouraged Netanyahu to be far more brutal.
I can’t imagine there is a higher level of cruelty than what is currently occurring right now. They’re being denied food and water and being shot for fun.
Rest of your point aside,as far as Gaza is concerned it’s already at “worst”.
Sure we can imagine hypotheticals but bibi is doing whatever he wants already.
If Trump were pres we’d probably have troops there helping with the genocide.
We definitely would be helping out Russia against Ukraine.The sad truth is no US president can go against the Israeli lobby unless some major changes are made.
But I agree with you, Trump would have happily and loudly complied with Bibi’s Government.
The only real deep blemish on the Biden administration has been its support of the Palestinian genocide.
Definitely the biggest, but not the only. Two others that stand out to me are his breaking of the rail strike, and his border policies.
But of course, this all comes with the caveat that all of this, under Trump, would be unimaginably worse
Biden got the union workers their largest demands after ending the strike. People are stuck on the headlines immediately after ending the strike and apparently missed this fast follow a few weeks later IIRC
It doesn’t matter what happened after. The optics of breaking the strike set unions back decades. That damage can’t be undone just by doing then a few favors later.
It doesn’t matter what happened after.
It absolutely does. The administration fought to get the workers what they wanted. That’s more effective than a strike.
Unions have not been set back decades either. In fact, they’re more powerful than they’ve ever been. UAW brought auto manufacturers to their knees. SAG joined forces with writers to get their due from Hollywood and secure worker protections against AI.
This is what a pro union administration emboldens. Let’s not pretend that the rail strike was a simple black and white issue. It could’ve caused delays that would make water undrinkable in cities, prevent electricity or heating in winter, and delay crucial medication shipments.
Congress broke the strike with a veto-proof majority, Biden didn’t have much choice in the matter.
At least Biden was able to negotiate and apply pressure to get most of the demands met for the rail workers after the strike was prevented. The unions were largely grateful for the administration’s efforts on the issue.
my emotions in this chain have been so far:
- outrage
- pleasant surprise
- outrage again
- confusion
I think I’ll settle on the idea that whatever Biden did, it was at least better than what Trump would’ve. Then again it’s this exact same blind logic that Trump supporters say about Biden.
Ahhh while Biden has generally supported Ukraine he has handicapped them and extended the war by the constant wishy-washy support.
“You can have these weapons but not these better ones that you actually need” 6 months later they get the weapons they actually need anyway
“Okay you can have the good weapons but you can’t use them inside Russia” a year later they can use the good weapons in some areas of Russia
Constant weak minded actions like this from Biden are a big problem.
Vote for the administration AND JUDGES!
we’ve had a front row seat to what happens when idiots don’t vote (for Hillary because butterymales or whatever) because they’re too focused on the personality of the candidate… Who picks the judges matters!
Alito and Thomas have both signalled that they’ll retire if Trump wins. I find forcing them to either remain in a job they both clearly dislike or get replaced with a judge who’ll reverse the harm they’ve done to be pretty motivational.
Hope they fucking croak from the stress of being investigated by the DoJ.
My hopes aren’t specific about cause of death.
As long as it’s at the end of a long, painful, emasculating blight that visibly withers them every day for all to see. They deserve to be turned into the ghouls they are on the inside, right in front of the public.
Like morphing into Palpatine from shooting all that sith judicial ruling lightning.
Yep. Trump pulled his judge picks right off the wish list of extremist judges the Heritage Foundation hand-picked for him. It’s sickening how many judges he got to appoint, on top of getting to choose 3! 😭 SCOTUS justices (one of the seats was stolen by McConnell).
Of course one of those judges was Aileen Cannon who after delaying the classified docs case against him as long as possible, finally went ahead and tossed it out completely on the ridiculous grounds that there shouldn’t have been a special prosecutor for it.
For sure. I throw judge selection under administration. The President doesn’t know any of these judges, they are presented to the President by the team the President put together.
This is how it is done in Australia by our High Court. A judiciary panel shortlists the candidates and the Government usually takes the first on the list - conservative or liberal government, doesn’t matter. The selection isn’t politicised - the most qualified gets the job.
Our high court has a reputation for annoying governments from either side.
I wish… Our system is the heritage foundation chooses whatever judges align with what they want to accomplish, spend 2 decades calling liberal appointed judges “activist judges that want to legislate from the bench” and then hand the Republican president a list of activist judges who will legislate from the bench because everything Republicans say their opposition does is projecting what they actually intend to do…
I hate that it works… They do it first so when you push back on what they are doing it looks like the childish “no you!” argument so it immediately defuses any resistance…
As a professional circus performer, please don’t bring us down to their level. Most of us are bleeding heart communist hippies, and circuses take a TON of coordination to run.
Good to hear, but if you weren’t voting to oppose obvious fascism before, you’re not a very good/informed citizen.
Most Americans aren’t good citizens, so if you actually want to beat fascism, being able to win over disconnected voters is a huge deal.
Shaming people is an absolutely awful way to convince them to change their ways.
I mean most people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, like MAGA and people who planned to not vote against a fascist.
I do think only after passing a short multiple choice question should the vote count.
Are the USA…
a) a city b) a state c) a country
When the threat of fascism isn’t enough – what else is there?!
Recent events indicate that “better candidates” is the answer to your question.
Like progressives have been saying for years.
People want to vote FOR something, not against something. We want hope for a better future.
Just look at how popular Bernie Sanders and his policy proposals are. People were excited to vote for him, because he was proposing to actually help the average American.
And look how far that went. How Bernie was still unable to turn out massive numbers of young people.
It’s absolutely incorrect to say that voters are blameless. Bernie had a platform that was the dream for young people, and they didn’t show up – and I say that as someone who was 24 at the time and did vote for him in the primary.
we did show up. They literally rigged it against him.
It’s a question of priorities… is it more important to be right or to defeat fascism - if the later is your priority then shaming people for still being wrong makes the fascism more likely.
Yeah really like who are these people who weren’t going to vote for Joe? Are they stupid?
Yes they are also #StopfacismVoteHarris
uninformed/misguided apathetic “i don’t care about politics” kids who saw nothing but ancient white men and can’t/won’t distinguish between them
And then vote because of gender and race and not politics.
It’s another reason Harris would be crazy to go with anyone but Mark Kelly. You’ll get people who never dreamed of voting to just vote for the novelty of an astronaut and fighter pilot.
Mark Kelly would normally be a great choice but Andy Beshear is way better in this election. He balances the west/east and is not that fat from the east. Also he draws from the Appalachia/rust belt area that Baby face Vance was supposed to attract but was a horrible failure.
I love Beau of the Fifth Column, but I have to politely disagree with him here. I’m originally from rural Appalachia and I don’t think you try to combat Vance by one-upping him with someone from that region. To me he makes less of a case for Beshear in this video and just more explains why JD Vance is a terrible pick, which I agree. Recognizing that much of the Presidential election ultimately comes down to a popularity contest, I think you go with the more flashy figure. For instance, I’m a pretty big political junkie and even I don’t know much about Beshear. That’s not to say he won’t skyrocket in name-recognition if the announcement comes that he’s her pick, but it’s just an easier sell to the average voter: “Wow, Mark Kelly is an astronaut and navy fighter pilot veteran!” The mere novelty of that will draw people to vote for him. I think this is powerful enough to draw those same voters away from Vance in itself.
Having someone popular running as VP from a key battleground state is a plus, too. We have to realize that much of rust/bible-belt isn’t particularly in play anyway. We have Whitmer who will help carry Michigan; and we have Shapiro who will help carry Pennsylvania. Seems like Tony Evers is doing well in Wisconsin. These are the three key battleground states while the likes of AZ and NV and so forth are more secondary battleground states.
I want science to win so that’s a good option anyway.
Wow. Americans really say shit like this without a trace of irony 🤷♂️
hahaha — oh please, do enlighten me, good foreigner.
I don’t think that’s possible.
It’s because of those people that you now have another, better, more winnable option. You’re welcome.
No it’s not. It’s because of those people Trump still has a chance.
He had a chance. He’s shaking in his shoes now because he knows she will wipe the goddamn floor with his shitty toupee/combover or whatever the hell that thing is. He thought he was going to have it easy against the old man. Now him and his whole party are fucked, scrambling to throw anything against the wall to see if it sticks, because they have nothing. Not even ancillary shit like Hunter’s laptop.
Come sit down and watch, here’s some popcorn 🍿.
Polls don’t show that at all. Harris isn’t ahead in swing states either. Don’t start taking a victory.
On the other hand, if more people had turned out in 2016 we wouldn’t be here.
Politics shouldn’t be a popularity contest.
If more people had thought they were being listened to, perhaps they would have.
If you want politicians to listen to you, try voting in the primaries.
People need to educate themselves. Look at how Jerry Falwell and his ‘Moral Majority’ took over the GOP. They had one simple trck; if the local Republican clubhouse got 20 people at the regular meeting Falwell’s folks would show up with fifty. They got the little jobs, like county clerk and sheriff, and then the bigger state positions and finally were in a position to control who got the white House.
If you want politicians to listen to you, try voting in the primaries.
Please don’t gloat that the primaries have had a preordained winner for every presidential race since 2012. Particularly not when the most recent preordained winner had to step down, to the acclaim of the vast bulk of the party.
and BotH Sides aRe ThE SAme, right?
If you’re going to tell people not to vote, try coming up with an actual alternative action.
It also shouldn’t be a duopoly game but here we are.
The shorter election cycle is appreciated. This should be a thing. Say, on July 5th of an election year, then it begins.
We’re celebrating the apparent increase in voters that aren’t even following the duopoly policies enough to recognize literal fascism vs imperfect but generally good faith politicians.
If they’re not informed enough to see the face eating leopard party for what it is, adding more parties to the mix won’t improve anything.
I agree that ranked choice voting is desirable. But it won’t help with these kinds of voters.
I don’t get that. I still have relatives trying to tell me trickle down economics works, that it is the way. Really? You think successful trickle down economics is why we all feel squeezed right now? You think that’s why Amazon workers go through hell while Bezos flies around in a penis rocket?
Reality isn’t tracking as reality. I’m not sure how one gets to that point where a confident person in a suit announces that x is the truth and so you just start repeating x is the truth and actually believing it.
Keep the primary results a secret until a couple of weeks before the convention. It’d also help the states with late primaries to not feel irrelevant.
“If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.”
You could also say, if the Democrats had nominated a more likeable candidate in 2016, we wouldn’t be here.
Clinton got less votes than Obama in 2012 and 2008, even though the population had grown during that time.
And it wasn’t the Bernie bros who stayed home. Polling revealed that the Bernie bros showed up.
Blaming the voters is like having your bakery go bankrupt and trying to blame people for not buying your shitty cake.
First, bake a better cake.
“Where are all those advertisers I told to fuck off last year?”
The voters are literally the ones who picked Biden though.
I know, but we were having a conversation about 2016 and the voters didn’t pick Clinton then.
At least, not enough of them in certain swing states.
What part of “I like soldiers who didn’t get captured” and “grab them by the pussy” confused voters?
Count Dracula should have beaten Trump.
I totally blame the voters.
In a democracy. Politics is absolutely a popularity contest. The population votes. If you want better outcomes, do more for the population. When you don’t give the population what they want, you get totalitarianism which is the course we are on.
And for this I am very thankful!
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I can be a bit of a pot stirrer now and then, but I feel compassion makes me happier. Few people wake with the intent to make bad decisions.
This is why they stopped teaching ‘civics’ in middle school.
Yes, most people are not informed. But they sit back and watch an old, crooked, politician call another dude an old, crooked, politician. It was a joke. And while us nerds sitting here in a political sub can say that’s dumb, even though we know Biden wasn’t ideal hes better than the other option, the truth is most people were just sitting back and laughing at how ridiculous the situation was.
I hope everyone gets that. I have voted every election for the last 20 years but I was struggling to get myself to vote for a guy that couldn’t even talk. I was pretty pissed off at the DNC for trying so hard to hide his medical problems and just say “Well, at least he’s not Trump! If you don’t vote you’re a fascist!” ". Taking action to correct it gets rid of that bitter taste in my mouth and I am sure it does for a LOT of people that were NEVER going to vote. While Kamala doesn’t inspire huge waves of grassroots support, at least she isn’t embarrassing and she returns legitimacy to the office.
Side note: Black Lives Matter has turned on the DNC and Kamala.
…to go where? Trump? Stein? Kennedy? To what end?
I have no idea, their Twitter posts and comments are trending.
The internet isn’t real and Twitter is somehow even faker than VR.
