Kamala Harris’ fate in North Carolina rests with young voters

By Nia-Malika Henderson

At nearly every campaign appearance she makes, Vice President Kamala Harris shouts out Gen Z voters, saying they are impatient for change and ready to take the baton.

Polls consistently show that she leads former President Donald Trump among younger voters by double digits, powered by her strength among young women.

But, for Harris, who at 60 is running on the idea that she represents a new generation of leadership, a routine Democratic win among young voters isn’t enough.

She needs a statement win, particularly in swing states, that will decide the election and shape her party’s future. North Carolina, a state that then-candidate Barack Obama narrowly won on the strength of young voters in 2008, provides one of Harris’ best opportunities to do just that.

When Anderson Clayton, who at 26 is the youngest Democratic state party chair in the country, looks at Joe Biden's 75,000 vote loss in the Tar Heel state in 2020, she sees a missed opportunity among Gen Z voters, who voted for Biden over Trump by 17 points, 57 per cent to 40 per cent.

“The young people in this state are genuinely ready for change. They are a huge part of what we have to do to win this state,” Clayton said as she drove to an event in Charlotte where Obama was the headliner.

Clayton, who took over the state party in 2023, has been at the forefront of efforts to bolster youth turnout, overseeing an expansion of engagement with young voters, particularly on college campuses.

The party now has a campus organising director and nearly 40 leaders on campuses across the state. The University of North Carolina system has its biggest enrollment ever, with 248,000 undergraduate and graduate students, a population both parties have been trying to reach with on-campus events and organizing.

North Carolina also boasts the second most Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the country, with 12.

“Young voters are trending Democratic when they vote, but we have to help them understand what the party has fought for and how they fit in,” Clayton said.

The “when they vote” is the hard part for Harris, who is deadlocked with Trump in polls in North Carolina, which offers 16 electoral votes. While younger voters in North Carolina had a higher participation rate than the national average in 2020, they still lagged behind other age groups, a persistent issue for Democrats.

Polls show that Harris closed Biden's overall gap with young voters, which has kept her competitive with Trump. However, according to some polls, she is still running behind Biden’s final 2020 tally.

Among these voters’ concerns are abortion, student debt, the cost of housing, climate change, gun violence, and immigration.

“They are the potential big dogs in this state; when you look at their turnout rates, that’s when they don’t punch up to their political weight,” said Michael Bitzer, chair of the political science department at Catawba College, speaking of millennials (ages 28-43) and Gen Z (ages 18-27). “You have this one generational cohort, the Boomers, that is overperforming and two that are underperforming.”

Bitzer has spent time crunching North Carolina’s early voting numbers and said that as a precinct sees a larger bloc of younger voters, the overall GOP share drops, and the opposite holds for Boomer (ages 60-78) voters.

(A significant unknown is how the devastation of Hurricane Helene will complicate voter turnout for both sides as residents recover from the storm.)

Democrats believe the state provides the right mix of dynamics and demographics to yield a victory, an upset that would likely block Trump’s path to the White House. They are banking on a multimillion-dollar investment by the party that has bolstered the presence of Democrats on college campuses across the state.

“They are trying to do everything humanly possible. I’m just not sure, at this point, folks are responding,” Bitzer said. “If trying to light the fire requires a new spark, I’m not sure we know what that spark is right now.”

Still, Democrats are trying to make it as lit as possible. Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz appeared on the campus of Duke University, joining basketball coach Jon Scheyer in Cameron Indoor Stadium as part of the campaign’s “Vote for Our Future” tour.

The student group Duke Democrats rebooted after a period of inactivity and disinterest once Harris replaced President Biden at the top of the ticket.

(Duke College Republicans was also revived recently, citing the need for “genuine ideological diversity” on the campus of roughly 6,500 undergraduates.)

The campaigns are using social media to reach and energize voters. According to a Pew poll, 39 per cent of adults under age 30 get their news from TikTok.

The Harris campaign, which got the full-throated endorsement of Beyonce on Friday, has a veritable army of young content creators on her campaign who have broad leeway to post rapid reaction videos, many of which have gone viral.

A post where Trump says at a rally, “I don’t care about you, I just want your vote,” has 4.8 million views. Another TikTok video featuring spliced clips of Harris and Walz, on the phone, seemingly making lunch plans, has 3.5 million views.

Among the most-viewed posts is one featuring Obama arguing that the economy that Trump is running on was his economy. Still, it is unclear whether these kinds of pitches are breaking through to their target audiences. Obama recently appeared on the NBA-themed podcast, “The Young Man & the Three,” to try to reach young men of color, a weakness for Harris.

“The idea that we wouldn’t just spend half an hour to vote,” Obama said. “So, let me get this straight: You’re not going to vote, which means old people decide your future… You’re going to let them decide that? You’re going to just opt out? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Still, the problem with reaching young voters is that even the most Tik-Tokified, podcast-heavy approach might seem very, “How do you do, fellow kids?”

Azhyia Clemons, a junior at North Carolina Central University in Durham, said she likes to keep her social media fun. She isn’t among the possible Harris or Trump voters who follow campaign accounts or listen to many podcasts — she said she hadn’t heard Charlamagne than God’s interview with Harris, for instance.

“I don’t enjoy seeing politics on my timeline,” Clemons, 19, said. “I would rather just go to their website.”

Clemons, who voted for Harris, said she would spend the weekend, however, mixing business with fun. During homecoming activities, she planned to continue efforts to get her classmates to head to the campus polling place to vote as part of an on-campus student group that has hosted informational pizza parties and campus activities to raise awareness about the election’s stakes.

It was young people, who are more racially and ethnically diverse than any other previous generation, that gave Harris her online swagger in the early days of her campaign this summer, dubbing her “brat” and remixing what had been seen as awkward flubs into cool auntie memes.

For the final days of her bid, connecting with young people means bringing back the joy and the hope for change, which is one of the central messages of her campaign. Should she win, she will need this vibe and this constituency — as will the country — to power the nation into the future.