MILWAUKEE – Young people provided a glimmer of hope on the sidelines of the 2024 Republican National Convention, which was dominated each night by speeches full of doom, inaccuracies and fearmongering.
Half a mile from Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, where the RNC is taking place, a few dozen high school and college students gathered Wednesday to discuss how to communicate and organize their vision for the future.
The “issue- and party-neutral” Youth VoteFest, hosted by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, aimed to provide a space for teens and juvenile adults to learn about civic engagement and voter mobilization without partisan rhetoric, said Zeenat Rahman, the institute’s executive director.
“We want our young people participating today to know that they have a role to play in the political process,” Rahman said.
Predominantly Republican programming
Former Democratic U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp, who represented North Dakota from 2013 to 2019, opened the event.
But the later program included a fiery speech by a conservative environmentalist, remarks about a Republican official from Indiana’s challenging career move, a pep talk by a conservative sports talk show host and a question-and-answer session with former U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a Republican who now hosts “Sunday Night in America” on Fox News.
The organization plans to repeat the event in August with a fresh slate of speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Myiah Waddy, a 17-year-old Milwaukee native who recently graduated from the Obama School of Career and Technical Education, said she came to the event to “raise her voice” for the changes she wants to see in her community.
“I want to make a difference in my community. By that I mean violence, education and empowering us young people. I don’t see many people my age getting involved,” said Waddy, who plans to study early childhood education at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Heitkamp addressed this issue, telling the students attending the event that they represented thousands of disinterested juvenile people.
“They don’t know why they should care. They certainly don’t see two people at the top of the ballot who look anything like you, who in any way go through your experiences every day. And so I think there’s a certain amount of cynicism there. And you know, we can’t be successful in this democracy if we don’t all participate,” Heitkamp said.
Student vote
Clarissa Unger, co-founder and executive director of the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, said “student voices have never been more important.” Citing a statistics from Tufts University, which shows that voter turnout among college students is actually increasing — in 2020 it rose to 66% — Unger said students have the opportunity to make change.
Unger laid out the ground rules for the day: political divisions would not be tolerated during discussions.
“We understand and appreciate where we are and what will happen in the future, and we are not asking anyone to give up their personal partisan identity, but today’s activities in this area will be bipartisan,” Unger said.
Students participated in three workshops on strengthening bipartisan voter movements on campus, making democracy fun and celebratory, and dealing with polarization in the 2024 presidential election.
Oscar Allen, a 17-year-old 12th-grader at Bronx High School of Science in New York City, said he and a friend launched their own voter outreach campaign last year for 18-year-old high school students.
“We found that because of the upcoming election in 2024, many high school students are actually coming of voting age and don’t even realize it. And these people would have missed their chance to vote and actually do their civic duty for the first time in their lives,” said Allen, who called the project VOTE (Vote of Teens in Elections).
Allen said he considers himself a political moderate after watching his father, a staunch Republican, and his mother, a progressive immigrant from Japan, argue over political discussions.
“There were family conflicts that I had to go through since I was nine years old, without knowing what was going on. And I really just wanted to promote harmony and happiness in our family as a whole. And I think I’ve taken that perspective into my adult life, despite my own ideologies,” Allen said.
“Political conflicts are devolving into violent confrontations full of rhetoric and vitriol that is simply unnecessary because at the end of the day, everyone wants the same kind of harmony,” Allen said, adding that he feared further violence following Saturday’s assassination attempt in Pennsylvania that killed former President Donald Trump.
Standing up to politicians
Benjamin “Benji” Backer, the 26-year-old founder and CEO of the American Conservation Coalition, encouraged students to question the rhetoric of today’s politicians.
“We call for unity after the horrific events in Pennsylvania, but it is politicians who have brought us to this point of division in the first place,” Backer said.
Backer said the system needed to be rebooted.
“We have reached a point where issues such as the environment and climate change are being discussed along party lines. The dangers of partisanship, of the two-party system that is leading us to ruin, must be over,” said Backer.
At the end of the show, Gowdy spoke about the friendships he made with the other caucuses during his time in the House of Representatives, as well as his long-standing friendship with former Democratic U.S. Representative Joseph Kennedy of Massachusetts and his current ties with Democratic U.S. Senator Peter Welch of Vermont.
“I’m just a moment away from changing my mind,” Gowdy said. He gave students examples of cases in which former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii changed his mind about the need for a citizen’s attorney on the foreign intelligence court. He also told students of his “great affection” for Hakeem Jeffries, now the House minority leader.
“We have to get away from the idea that the fact that we disagree about the size and scope of government or its role is the only thing that matters in life,” Gowdy said. “There are many things that are more important than that.”
Conservative groups and youth vote
Other organizations targeting the youth vote were present on the sidelines of the convention and at the RNC.
The Young America’s Foundation distributed informational materials at a table outside a Moms for Liberty town hall on Tuesday at the Bradley Symphony Center, five blocks from the convention center.
The group’s homepage reads in huge letters: “Do you feel out of place as a conservative at your school? There is room for you here.”
The group did not respond to an interview request on Wednesday.
Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA, was given an opportunity to speak at the conference on Monday evening.
Kirk, whose organization advocates for constrained government and free markets in high schools and college campuses, said Generation Z does not have to accept a “mutilated version of the American dream” that he said was caused by President Joe Biden.
“Donald Trump is on a rescue mission to revive your birthright that your grandparents and the people before them passed down to you,” he said. “And listen up, folks, this is why young men are more conservative than they have been in 50 years. To all the Gen Zs watching this convention on TikTok right now, I have a message just for you: You don’t have to stay poor.”
Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told In June, CNN wrote that there was “not much evidence that young men are more likely to identify as conservative, but there does appear to be a growing affinity for the Republican identity.”
Kirk is the author of “Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West.”