Kathy Willens/AP Photo
A volunteer working for New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez waits in line to meet the congresswoman at a Pledge to Vote event, October 2020.
“The Final Countdown” warbled over Zoom. More than a thousand people, mostly Gen Z, were logged on. With 13 days to the election, the Sunrise Movement was mobilizing the way they do best—online. In their October 21 webinar “The Final Countdown: The Election of Our Lifetime,” members and organizers laid out their plan to elect a presidential candidate whom they don’t particularly like but have concluded that they need.
Youth voter turnout is key to this election, and Sunrise aims to mobilize young voters using climate change as a primary motivator. Typically, Sunrise’s organizers have rallied around progressive candidates and pushed the Green New Deal. But this election, they’re turning out for Joe Biden.
Even so, early voting indicators, which are significantly up from 2016, may not tell the whole story. As The Washington Post put it in a recent analysis, “The critical question for Democrats is whether these 2020 early ballots are additional voters or just people who would have voted on Election Day anyway.” That question is key for young voters, who are voting early in high numbers but still at a lower rate than other age groups. Data from Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) found that a week out from the election, early youth voting was up from 2016 in most states, though not for 18- and 19-year-olds.
For many young voters, climate change is the closest thing to a defining issue they have.
Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, CIRCLE’s director, is optimistic about youth turnout. These youngest voters, she says, may not have been contacted by campaigns because their information is not in a voter file. Overall, she sees early numbers as an “indicator of strong commitment” for young voters. Sunrise says it had contacted two million voters—many of them young—as of two weeks out from the election.
Kawashima-Ginsberg attributes some of this spike in political engagement by young people to the idea of belonging to a movement rather than affiliating with a party. For many young voters, climate change is the closest thing to a defining issue they have. Fifty-nine percent of millennial and younger voters say they would vote for a candidate because of their position on global warming, according to a 2019 study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
Sunrise is known for its youth mobilization efforts and for its very young organizers, many of whom are not old enough to cast their own ballots. Climate change is the rallying cry for its members, and its organizers believe a Biden presidency presents a far better opportunity than a Trump one to push for the radical policies required to arrest it.
On the “Final Countdown” call, organizer Nikayla Jefferson said, in impassioned tone, that if Biden wins— “please, please, if Biden wins”—it will be time “to ring in the decade of the Green New Deal.”
To be sure, Sunrise’s signature policy proposal, the Green New Deal, has been downplayed in Biden’s rhetoric and by most centrist Democrats. For Sunrise, which endorsed Bernie Sanders and has been a consistent thorn in the side of establishment Democrats, settling for Biden wasn’t the easiest of choices.
As Jerusha Conner, a Villanova University professor and the author of The New Student Activists: The Rise of Neoactivism on College Campuses, puts it, youth support for Biden “is best described as tepid.”
For 25-year-old organizer Alex Lines, Sunrise is about supporting candidates who understand that “climate change is part of this web of injustice.” Bernie Sanders embodied that promise for them, and it took some time for Lines and others to adjust to supporting—but not endorsing—Biden.
Lines’s reasoning typifies Sunrise’s. Their support for Biden, she says, “is about the Green New Deal. It’s about the movement. And [Biden] needs to win, because if Donald Trump wins again, there’s really no chance of federal action on climate change.”
Courtesy of Chanté Davis
Chanté Davis, a 16-year-old Sunrise organizer
Conner says that this orientation to movements and causes is key to understanding young people generally and Sunrise, and its Biden support, in particular. A recent study of youth activists, she adds, found “youth articulating a strong sense of belonging to movement organizations and deep commitments to a host of interconnected issues, but not voicing strong party affiliation.”
Kawashima-Ginsberg notes that young people see voting as only one of many ways to make change. Particularly for people under 18, she says, “voting just becomes one of those streams of everything that they do around issues that they care about.”
Nonetheless, turning out the vote has become a cause for many of Sunrise’s “high-capacity volunteers.” One such volunteer, 16-year-old Houstonian Chanté Davis, joined Sunrise after two hurricanes—Katrina and Harvey—blew through her young life, and the movement brought her to teach-ins in Washington, D.C. Though Davis can’t cast her own ballot this year, she’s excited to “throw down” for green policy. She’ll be working the polls on November 3.
On the October 21 call, participants were as young as a 13-year-old named Laney who organized her soccer team into a phone bank to elect Biden. Past Sunrise phone banks have helped congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and congressional candidate Jamaal Bowman win their contested primaries; both Tlaib and Bowman appeared on the call. Bowman, flanked by a Zoom background from Star Wars, touted his primary victory, for which Sunrise made 865,000 calls, as proof of the power of the movement.
Leading up to next week’s election, Sunrise is centering action around organizing principles, including nonviolence, a commitment to having every vote be counted, and a posture of hopefulness.
Despite the call to be hopeful, one attendee utilized Zoom’s question-and-answer box to ask, “Biden said that he does not support the Green New Deal. How much of a setback is this really?” An organizer answered, “Politicians respond to movements—we’re gonna pressure him to take bold action on day one of a Biden administration.”
Indeed, youth mobilization remains key to Sunrise’s strategy should Biden win. “No matter what the outcome is,” says Chanté Davis, “we plan to protest and just throw down, stop going to school, stop the world as it is normally” until Biden pledges support for the Green New Deal—a youth strike intended to force Dems’ hand on climate policy.
In that spirit, organizer Jeremy Ornstein closed the call with a promise: “Once we elect you to the White House, Joe Biden, we’re coming for you.”
