Four days to go, they took a detour to Harvard for two of them. It was an inconvenient time, but a hell of an opportunity: a crash course on their primary objective, not just from Harvard, but the guy who specialized in their target cohort. The diversion seemed crazy to me, because I still didn’t understand. If it had come the first week of November, they would have taken a rain check. The midterms were the mission, not the march.
They came for a two-day seminar on young Americans’ attitudes toward politics, led by an authority on that topic: John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard’s Kennedy School Institute of Politics. The seminar was packed with concepts, strategies, and data, but one paramount idea: “Young Americans vote when they believe their efforts have tangible results.”
That was the headline of the most important slide in a presentation titled “7 Things Everyone Should Know About Young Americans in 2018.” That’s the whole ball game with young voters, Della Volpe said—with potential young voters, because so few of them vote. And that’s why they don’t vote. The data demonstrates that overwhelmingly, he said. Because they don’t see tangible results from politics. They roll their eyes at adult fascination with a process totally unrelated to their lives. You can drive canvassers weary trying to register them; you can cajole them on Snapchat and Instagram; you can rock the vote until their ears bleed—and all that is necessary but woefully insufficient, Della Volpe said. You’re never going to get them to vote until you make that direct connection to their lives.
And that usually fails, Della Volpe told the MFOL kids. Most of the things most politicians run on are just not this demographic’s prime concerns. That was the bad news. The good news was that every now and then, perhaps once in a generation, that changed. And it was changing now, he said. A companion slide laid it out in huge block letters filling the entire screen:
Once-in-a-generation
attitudinal shifts about [the]
efficacy of political
engagement [are] now underway
For two decades, the Harvard institute had been polling young voters (under thirty) on the key question: Does political involvement have any tangible results? The results were generally miserable—with two exceptions: immediately after 9/11, and immediately after the inauguration of President Trump. The Trump administration woke the Parkland generation up. Young people saw exactly what elections could do to them, and they were overwhelmingly displeased. Pollsters tend to focus on the displeasure—a president’s approval rating. That’s the lesser indicator, Della Volpe said. It was the recognition that politics affects them, directly—that was the radical change.
After 9/11, when young voters saw the connection, they voted more—particularly when someone reached out to them directly, Della Volpe said. It was that one-two combination that’s required: demonstrating that voting matters, and then a candidate emerging who can win them over. And then that candidate has to do the groundwork: create a powerhouse operation to reach this group and turn voting into a habit. So all that canvassing the MFOL kids were revving up, that mattered, too. You still have to find the kids, sign them up, and cajole them—after you demonstrate why they should.
That latter point was a huge and overlooked lesson of the Obama campaign, Della Volpe said. Young voter turnout increased in 2008 and 2012 because Obama was on the ticket, and because his team went out and found them. Many political scientists have written off the Obama increases as fairly modest, but they are missing a huge point, Della Volpe said. Young turnout increased dramatically in the so-called battleground states, where the election was contested, and where the Obama campaigns concentrated most of their organizing to reach young people. Because that was fewer than a dozen states, the impact is diluted if you just look at national numbers, he said. It’s actually a one-two-three punch that’s required: convince young voters politics matters, field candidates who address their concerns, and then do the grunt work to get to them.
Della Volpe shared an anecdote that surprised me—and explained an unusual argument I heard from the kids repeatedly in the three months after they met with him. Della Volpe had been talking to a teenager, asking whether gun control would be a major factor in his first vote. “And he said to me, ‘Well, I don’t think guns are on the ballot,’” Della Volpe said. “I said I could make the case that they are on the ballot in every city and town across America, because every member of Congress is up for reelection.” To take full advantage of the Parkland kids, Della Volpe pointed out, voters should make it their business to know where every member of Congress stands on the Parkland agenda. “It took me a couple of minutes to kind of make that case to a first-time voter,” he said. “That’s the kind of effort it’s going to take in order to really take full advantage of the Parkland kids.”
I had heard the Parkland kids hammer that point repeatedly and I had found it a little odd. Didn’t it go without saying? No. For a lot of new voters and nonvoters it did not. Young voters have long been a sleeping giant of American politics, because most of them stay home. If they ever turned out in percentages to match their older counterparts, they could swing many elections. And over the past year, young people had been turning out to vote in special elections. Della Volpe said there were signs that year really could be different. The MFOL movement came at exactly the right political moment. “The attitudinal shift has already happened,” Della Volpe said. MFOL was tapping into an energy that was already boiling on Valentine’s Day. It was waiting to be activated. MFOL stepped up.
Della Volpe said Harvard’s research indicates that young voters were 50 percent more likely to say politics matters than they were pre-Trump. Democrats were particularly charged up. In the spring of 2018, Della Volpe found that the number of registered Democrats between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine who said they intended to vote surged to 51 percent, from just 28 percent in 2014. On the Republican side, the number rose from 31 to 36 percent.
The Parkland kids were having a major impact—building on the energy already in play.
Della Volpe was impressed that these kids understood they had launched a generational campaign. Even if they devoted their lives to the fight, ultimately they would hand the baton to kids who had not yet been born. They also understood that they had to motivate people, especially young people, to vote.
The public has bought into the NRA’s air of invincibility and won’t rally behind gun safety candidates because it doesn’t believe they can win. Most of the public refuses to push their candidates too far into the gun debate. Most Democrats, and lots of moderate and even conservative legislators, back the MFOL agenda. But they won’t go near gun legislation. They don’t want to vote on it, and you’ll rarely hear it in a stump speech, almost never in a campaign ad.
“You have to begin to slowly build momentum because most voters don’t have a lot of faith in anyone outmaneuvering the NRA,” Della Volpe said. “You need to believe there’s an opportunity that you can win. It gives voters, especially young voters, faith. And the Parkland students, they’ve had more success already than many others have in many years. And I believe that has to be part of their narrative. ‘We’ve done this, we’ve done that: help us take it to the next level.’” Jackie Corin had come to the same conclusion by day two.
An entourage of journalists, academics, activists, and fans followed this story with fascination. Most experienced the kids electronically first. And the burning questions once they finally got to spend a day or two with them in person were always: Are these kids real? Are they the same in person as they are online? Or is that all rehearsed or manufactured? Can they spout all those statistics or sling those clever zingers on the fly? Yes, yes, no, yes. Most came away stunned that the kids were even more poised, informed, and charismatic in person. Their TV/Twitter personalities were authentic, but wildly incomplete.
Of all the people I discussed them with, the one who captured them best was Della Volpe. He encountered groups of the MFOL kids at several conferences throughout the year, as well as the Harvard seminar. That began with a breakfast at Harvard’s central dining hall. “One minute they’re like any other fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds—being goofy, playing with their food,” he said. “And then, they step outside and we have a conversation and they turned into some of the most inspirational leaders in the world today.”
Della Volpe found Emma entrancing, but not at first. He sat beside her at breakfast, and his first big impression was “What was she doing with her eggs? She put two packs of mayonnaise on her eggs, which I found really odd.” She told him how excited she was to be heading to New College of Florida in Sarasota in the fall. He said she described it as small and kind of hippie-like and inexpensive enough for her to afford. “She looked forward to sitting under a tree and reading and hanging out and being a kid,” he said. Ordinary. And then she turned to business, and she seized the room. And held it.
As one of the movement’s brightest stars, Emma projects determination, authenticity, and candor through any screen—just as she would when she’d stare silently into the lens for four and a half minutes and bring the house down at the DC march. But it’s such a different vibe in person, where she exudes a sense of tranquility. Others see her as absorbing anxiety so that all the tension in the room fades. “A sense of calmness,” Volpe said.
The one-two combination of the head and the heart was especially powerful in person. Della Volpe marveled at their symbiotic relationship at the National Conference of Mayors a few months later. Alfonso went first. That was vital. He painted a portrait of ordinary life for a fifteen-year-old in America: homework, silly fights, and friendships—and a gunman down the hallway. “I came home, I told my friends,” Della Volpe said. “About sixty kids in a ten-foot closet with a seven-foot wall, cuddling with them, and crying, and then the look on his friend’s face, she knew she was going to die. I get chills just thinking about it. I had never had anyone describe what it was like to have a gunman run around the hallway, what it’s like to see one of your best friends die. Cool, composed, caring.” The room was captivated, he said. “And then David takes it bigger: ‘OK now, America. This is what we need to do about it.’”
Della Volpe observes politicians for a living. He sees hundreds of speeches a year and couldn’t recall a more powerful combination of speakers in the past several decades. He’d wondered if they had choreographed it that way, so I asked them later, and they had a good laugh. They were just thrown together that day, but they realized Alfonso had to lead off: heart first, then head. Reignite the imperative to act, and then map out how we get there.