Why is 2024’s Presidential Election a Nailbiter? Ask Gen Z.

On October 23, 2024, VP Kamala Harris said at a town hall that "we have to get past the era of partisan politics."

I understand her strategy. The idea that these times are bigger than partisan politics is easy for disaffected liberals to accept and cast a begrudging vote for Harris. The argument is as simple as it is stark: Trump is far worse. With the intent of overturning Roe v. Wade, Trump appointed justices to the Supreme Court who eventually did just that, removing Americans' constitutional right to get a medically safe abortion. Women voters, especially Gen Z women voters, are preferring by a large margin to vote for Harris, and the Vice President has arguably made abortion her campaign's number one issue.

What about men? Gen Z men are more likely to vote for Trump. Why? His campaign of disinformation is working. Men now see Trump as a symbol of masculinity to celebrate in a world where they feel that "nobody's advocating for them." This is the sentiment that Trump has spent valuable campaigning time to get from young men without college degrees who are largely white, Black, and Latino.

One side of the political dichotomy has Harris with a laser focus on young women and reproductive rights. The other: Trump zeroing in on his rag-tag group of young men. But this isn't a complete picture of the political landscape that will ring in our new president.

Women’s March in Chicago, November 2024 / AP News

Trans voters are mostly voting for Harris, but some feel left behind by her incredibly disappointing response to the question of whether she believes that transgender Americans should have access to gender-affirming care. To be clear, Trump is about as transphobic as it gets. He has released transphobic attack ads that expose his campaign as a clear and present danger to trans people. Yet, Democrats' relative silence on trans issues might be reused when convenient, setting aside trans rights for a more 'politically convenient' time.

Immigrants also have good reason to feel upset about Kamala Harris and her really bad immigration policies. She's done a near-180 from her 2019 pro-immigration stances, threatening to charge those who cross the border illegally with felonies, wanting longer-lasting asylum restrictions, and doing away with temporary protections for asylum-seekers. Yes, Trump again is worse on this issue; at his recent Madison Square Garden rally, Trump said that on “Day One” of his presidency, he would "launch the largest deportation program in American history—to get the criminals out" by "invok[ing] the Alien Enemies Act of 1798." Every part of that statement screams xenophobia.

For those able to rationalize voting for "the lesser of two evils" in yet another election cycle, Harris is the clear choice. Or Trump, according to around half of America.

You see, Trump's campaign is targeting low-information voters. He's harnessing the disillusionment and inherent lack of trust the electorate has in the government to gain favor. Clifford Young and Chris Jackson of Ipsos say 66% of registered Republicans hold (the false belief) that there’s rampant voting by illegal immigrants. 60% of Democrats see the Electoral College as unfair. Distrust in the political system is higher than it's been in nearly 70 years, and that's good for Trump. We may get a chance to get rid of the ridiculously unfair Electoral College in a possible scenario where Trump loses the college (and hence, the presidency) but wins the popular vote. This would make Republicans mad in a historically unique way, and possibly spur long-awaited change.

Remember how Trump's deliberate mismanagement of COVID-19 got hundreds of thousands of Americans killed? We can learn from choosing to consciously remember what that was like, especially in a time of such distrust and collective amnesia.

Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina was chair of the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis. He wrote that, "The Trump Administration’s use of the pandemic to advance political goals manifested itself most acutely in its efforts to manipulate and undermine CDC’s scientific work." This excerpt from Elizabeth Hlavinka's article about post-pandemic amnesia comprehensively describes how hard it was for the average American to feel certain about COVID-19 information:

"The denial, confusion, and misinformation that was so characteristic of the pandemic response also made it more challenging for the public to remember what happened. In many instances, it was left to the individual to determine which political party was telling the truth, rather than being able to rely on objective scientific truths."

This kind of reality (remember alternative facts?) is exactly why I want Ranked Choice Voting and the abolition of the Electoral College. In 2020, American liberals proudly said never again to Trump. Many of us just kept on saying it, with a myopic media profiteering off of our misery and misplaced desire for miraculous, instantaneous change.

This was a mistake. For years now, liberals have needed to focus far more not just on comparing policy, but on actually espousing policies that people actively want to vote for in the first place. The outrage against Trump needed to be about the right things to sustain itself. Franklin Foer of The Atlantic says that just four years ago journalists were acting like "the prospect of a second Trump term was a national emergency." Now, "the Resistance...feels like a relic of another era." The mainstream media has taken Americans' political energy all the way to the bank and left them, especially my fellow Gen Zers, fed up with the two-party system.

Barack Obama ran on getting Americans universal health care back in 2008! It's still not the law of the land. The Kamala Harris campaign recently said Medicare for All was no longer part of her agenda. She is not a progressive, and that's a problem.

Washington Ballot Box / WSNA

Perhaps the biggest political faction causing worry among liberal-minded pundits and pollsters is the Uncommitted. Because of Biden and Harris's complicity in Israel's genocide in Gaza, over 101,000 Michigan voters voted not for Biden, Trump, or any other candidate in their primary; they voted "uncommitted" on their ballots. Around 500,000 other voters followed suit, casting protest votes for neither candidate in states across the country. The Harris campaign has insulted people standing against the Israeli genocide in Gaza and Lebanon by embracing AIPAC and diluting the direct concerns of protestors who show up at her rallies—her strategy is to say that they want Donald Trump to win.

But that's simply untrue. Nerdeen Kiswani is not voting for Harris or Trump. She founded the firebrand activist anti-Zionist group Within Our Lifetime, which believes in the Palestinian right of return and the right to resist occupation. The group is strongly committed to internationalism in helping people struggling for liberation against U.S. imperialism as well. Kiswani spoke to The Intercept about her voting decision, saying, "Constantly voting for the so-called lesser of two evils just paves the way for the greater evil."

Recently, I saw a Bernie 2020 sticker. Scrawled in Sharpie was "SHOULD'VE RUN INDEPENDENT." Bernie Sanders famously said that "establishment Democrats don't generate excitement"; they lead to low voter turnout and Republican victories. Kamala Harris is clearly that kind of establishment candidate. That's partly why this election is so close. In 2018, the 2020 general election, and the 2022 midterms, Gen Z voters were rightly credited as being a major factor in helping the Democrats sweep the country. Now, they're set to sit the election out.

Bernie 2020 bumper sticker: “Should’ve run independent” / The Evergreen Echo

We are constantly told that our vote matters. But in what sense? Why? There is a sense in which one's vote doesn't matter. For one, if you are being bombarded by media messaging that tells you that any vote not for Harris is a vote for Trump, and you want to vote for neither of them, then your vote (in the sense that it’s your specific political desire) is being made not to matter.

Vote shaming doesn't work. Yet, ironically, it has become a mainstay of the Democratic Party. Remember 2016? The DNC colluded to prevent Bernie Sanders from becoming the Democratic nominee. Donors to Sanders, who excited young voters like no other, were cheated. The revelations of "those WikiLeaks emails" actually meant something to politically motivated young people like me. After Sanders sprang to endorse her at the tail end of a grueling primary that all but killed the hope of a progressive U.S. government, Hillary Clinton blamed Sanders supporters for her loss and called them "Bernie Bros,” a phrase Stephen Singer says is "an attempt to use identity politics to minimize the beliefs of people—to paste over their actual identities as real, live women and men, to erase the opinions of diverse people [by] creat[ing] a fake picture of who these people are."

This is an example of a toxic trend rising in America called Anti-Politics, which "collapses everything into a one-dimensional, zero-sum spectrum." Anti-Politics is being employed by both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, albeit in very different ways.

I'm unsure who's going to win this election. But hopefully, it's clear why it's so close. Gen Z is fed up with the two-party electoral system and disillusioned with the current state of politics. What is the solution to this polarization? Some things that would really help would be to abolish the Electoral College and engage our states nationwide to participate in Ranked Choice Voting.

Abolishing the Electoral College is currently part of the national conversation again. Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) was just voted in in Seattle. It's still a question of whether or not the Washington Legislature will join the other five states that currently use RCV in their primaries. If Harris loses, it may be precisely because she didn't do anything whatsoever to win over the Uncommitted. RCV would lead to greater diversity in viable political options and opinions, potentially forcing a future Harris ticket to make more definitive statements on progressive issues. It is, after all, her political problem.

With Gen Z gaining political influence with each passing election and at the same time being so split down the middle, no one can claim that all undecided voters are theirs to take for free. The popular refrain is popular for a reason: You must earn our votes. Doing away with the Electoral College would make everyone’s vote count equally. It could also force candidates to campaign in more places across the country, hopefully increasing the breadth of their policy platforms to keep their viability.

Hopefully, Trump loses today. But if Trump wins, Americans—particularly liberally-minded Americans—must focus not just on the day-to-day horrors of such an administration, nor should they focus on how to best ridicule him for their own personal gain. They must craft combative progressive policies that make people excited to vote.

How can liberals bring young men back into the fold? If Harris wins, we need to immediately start holding her accountable for her clear and disappointing lack of progressivism. We cannot afford to turn our brains off for four years and disconnect from the political process while (for example) Harris creates yet another dog and pony show pretending to care about the environment again.

As a country, we constantly need to be focused on what we can do to make people’s lives better. People at home and abroad are being marginalized, displaced, killed, attacked, experiencing racism or xenophobia, or else the worst humanitarian crises or genocide. I will never pretend that the right amount of political work has ever been done to solve these issues. The answer is to keep doing the work and hold those in power viciously accountable, regardless of political party. The two-party system has long needed to go the way of the dodo.

One thing is clear: progressives know platitudes when we see them, and we can contrast them against history to speak out against the kind of complacency that has stunted American progressivism for decades now.