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      What’s on the Minds of 12 Young Voters

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      Whether they are marching against gun violence, advocating stronger action against climate change or pushing for or against abortion rights, young Americans of all political stripes have been engaged in some of the prominent social movements of the 21st century.Electorally, however, they have often struggled to make their voices heard, despite turning out in increasing numbers in 2018 and 2020.A New York Times/Siena College poll found that likely voters younger than 30 planned to support a Democrat for Congress by a 12-point margin in next month’s elections, compared with a narrow advantage for Republicans among likely voters at large. But, compared with older generations, they were less likely to say they would vote at all.Twelve voters in their 20s, living in states with competitive Senate or governor’s races, spoke with photographers for The New York Times about the issues they considered most important. Though President Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan had been in the news, none said it was a top issue. Instead, they discussed their views on abortion, climate, the economy and immigration — or a search for, as one 24-year-old Wisconsin woman put it, “what’s best for the collective versus the singular.” — Maggie AstorGeorgiaSeeking ‘the Least Worst Options’Nicole Craine for The New York TimesJayda Priester, 25, lives in Atlanta and sells life insurance. She said she had no political affiliation and had not decided whom she wanted for governor.“There is no one who made me feel I have to vote for them yet. I am looking at the least worst options.” “The most important issue for me is defunding the police. I am hugely for defunding the police and putting other resources available for crisis management, de-escalation.”—WisconsinFixing Tractors, Worried About FuelJamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesKyle Moore, 28, lives in Poynette. He is a tractor technician who identifies as a Republican and who wants “to see the fuel prices go back down” to ease the strain on farmers and ranchers.“I feel like the 20s generation does not express or voice their opinion as strongly as they should, like the older generations. They hold back more and don’t come out and voice or vote clearly enough to see the country succeeding.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With elections next month, a Times/Siena poll shows that independents, especially women, are swinging toward the G.O.P. despite Democrats’ focus on abortion rights as voters worry about the economy.Georgia Governor’s Race: A debate between Gov. Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams produced a substantive hour of policy discussion. Here are five takeaways.Aggressive Tactics: Right-wing leaders are calling on election activists to monitor voting in the midterm elections in search of evidence to confirm unfounded theories of election fraud.Jill Biden: The first lady, who has become a lifeline for Democratic candidates trying to draw attention and money in the midterms, is the most popular surrogate in the Biden administration.—PennsylvaniaA Nurse With Dreams of Health Care EquityHannah Beier for The New York TimesKadie Mercier, 29, of Philadelphia is a registered nurse in the emergency department of a hospital in her city. She is a registered Democrat.“As an emergency-department nurse, we see people come in all the time that are in very poor health because they’re unable to afford their medications or find a primary care provider. And so it’s something that I’m really passionate about, making sure these people can avoid coming to the emergency department.”—WisconsinBipartisan and Hoping for Change on ImmigrationJamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesChris Ahmann, 18, of Madison is a first-year mechanical engineering student at the University of Wisconsin and a first-generation Filipino American.“I like something that’s a little more bipartisan. Maybe more independent. Because there’s more variety than limiting yourself, because it’s more of a spectrum than just binary.”“Immigration is really close to me. I’m one of the only people in my family who is in the U.S. right now. I was born here, but they want to come here to the U.S. I’d like to see it easier for people.”—PennsylvaniaAgainst Abortion, Concerned About JobsHannah Beier for The New York TimesEmily McDermott, 27, of Lansdowne works from home as a seamstress. She has a daughter and is pregnant. She is a registered Democrat but plans to vote for Doug Mastriano, a hard-right Republican, for governor.“Life begins in the womb, and I think that that is an inalienable right. And I don’t think it’s up to us to decide who lives and dies.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Regarding Mr. Mastriano: “It was during the shutdown, and I lost my job because of the pandemic. And so, he was the only one kind of fighting to get everybody to reopen back jobs.”—New HampshireVoting to Slow Climate Change, a ‘Time Bomb’John Tully for The New York TimesGriffin Brunette, 24, lives in Hampton and works in marketing. He is a registered Democrat.On climate change: “It’s a ticking time bomb. We do have the power to make a form of change and make our voices heard, and it all starts with voting.”“I think a huge issue in getting people on board with what is going on is that it’s become a political thing, and I think that people on both sides should realize the future is in our hands. And we can do something about that by setting these Democrat/Republican things aside.”—MichiganKeeping It Personal and Not Ruling Out TrumpEmily Elconin for The New York TimesJared Tate, 28, left, and Derrick Whitehead, 29, of Ypsilanti are high school friends who produce a podcast. Mr. Tate is a registered Democrat and works at Target while studying communications at Eastern Michigan University.“If Trump runs again, I will consider voting for him, mainly because of the financial aspect of it. Trump did a lot for small-business owners that a lot of people don’t know about. I voted for Biden last time and wanted to give him a chance.”Mr. Whitehead is not affiliated with a party and voted to re-elect President Donald J. Trump in 2020.“I honestly don’t know if I am going to vote or not.”“I look at it more as personal. If it doesn’t have anything to do with me and my inner circle or family, it doesn’t concern me.”—Wisconsin‘What’s Best for the Collective Versus the Singular’Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesEmily Matzke, 24, lives in Prairie du Sac. She does not identify with a political party and works in agricultural marketing.“I just wish people just had more of an ability to compromise and know that not everything will be perfect for everyone, but if it could be better for the majority, then it’s at least what is best for all.”“I feel we can only move forward as kind people and a country if we can figure out a way to be kind. What’s best for the collective versus the singular.”—ArizonaSeeing a Future in an ‘Immigrant-Friendly’ PastRebecca Noble for The New York TimesAngel Martinez, 20, of Tempe is studying political science with a minor in Spanish at Arizona State University and works as a night desk attendant at his apartment complex. He is a Democrat, with immigration, climate and voting rights his biggest issues.“We just need to get back to our roots of being immigrant-friendly in this country. A lot of people have a really bad sentiment towards immigrants, especially immigrants from Latin American countries. Especially Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, all those countries, just because there’s this notion that jobs are being stolen or welfare is being stolen.”—PennsylvaniaBelieving in Abortion Rights: ‘How I Was Raised’Hannah Beier for The New York TimesJake Heller, 26, of Philadelphia is a registered Democrat who works as a cheesemonger at Reading Terminal Market.“What issues are most important to me? Probably the classics: abortion, you know, bodily autonomy, the environment and I’d say gun regulation.”On abortion rights: “I think it’s important to kind of be on the forefront of voting for that and just having a strong opinion on that. And that’s just kind of how I was raised.”—WisconsinProviding for a Son and His EducationTaylor Glascock for The New York TimesKelly Ocotl, 28, of Milwaukee is an executive assistant who attended a rally where Senator Ron Johnson appeared with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.“We have a son, so education is a big one. But the economy as well, you know, just trying to provide for our family is really important and how it’s kind of tanking right now.”—PennsylvaniaHuman Rights, and Food for a City’s HomelessHannah Beier for The New York TimesKish Williams, 25, of Philadelphia works as a dog handler and supervisor, is not affiliated with a party.“I know everyone’s, you know, talking about L.G.B.T. politics, trans rights, trans issues, trans protection and medication, and, being a trans individual myself, that’s a concern for me. And also, for Philadelphia specifically, I’m really interested in seeing what people are doing with the food and homelessness crisis we’re having right now.” More

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      Meet Mandela Barnes, the 35-Year-Old Candidate Working to Oust Ron Johnson

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      MILWAUKEE — Millennials came of age at a time of crisis. They are the first generation in American history positioned to be worse off than their parents, their economic trajectory forever altered by the economic meltdown of the late 2000s, as the ladders to the middle class were pulled up or broken by the crushing burden of student debt, the decline of unions and skyrocketing health care and housing costs, and as rapid technological changes proved more calamitous than democratizing.Mandela Barnes — who won the Democratic Senate primary in Wisconsin on Tuesday night — understands the challenges this era has thrust upon millennials better than most in his position. Serving under Tony Evers as the lieutenant governor of the state, Mr. Barnes is just 35 years old, and if elected could be only the second senator born in the 1980s.In many respects, he embodies both the flaws and the promise of his generation. Running to be the first Black man to represent a Rust Belt state in the Senate since Roland Burris, he is talented, charismatic and passionate, a fresh face entering the national scene in a party still dominated by an aging political establishment. But like many other millennial politicians now considering higher office, his path was a more progressive one. Mr. Barnes came up as a young State Assembly representative on Milwaukee’s liberal North Side. This fall, he will face challenging questions about his record, like his position on bail reform and the Evers administration’s response to the unrest in Kenosha.But he has the tools he needs to overcome them — he can win this race in part because he has endeared himself to mainstream Democrats as a member of the Evers administration, and because he may be able to tap into a new pool of Wisconsin voters.The fault lines in American politics are sometimes generational as well as ideological, and that is certainly part of the story unfolding in the midterm elections in Wisconsin, where Senator Ron Johnson, the incumbent Republican — a vulnerable one — faces a Democrat roughly half his age.Mr. Barnes is more than a decade younger than any of the other swing state Democrats running for Senate this year. If elected, he and Jon Ossoff of Georgia would be the only millennials in the upper chamber.This generation is not especially well represented in Washington. Just 31 people born between 1981 and 1996 are currently serving in the House. And the Senate is the oldest it has ever been. One-third of its members are over the age of 70, and there are roughly as many members of the Senate in their 80s (seven) as there are under the age of 50 (eight).As Jamelle Bouie wrote recently, the older guard lacks “any sense of urgency and crisis — any sense that our system is on the brink.” Democrats have been delivering legislative wins as of late, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, the Senate’s sweeping health and climate bill, but it’s been an arduous process to get there, stalled by filibusters and parliamentarians and everyday D.C. gridlock.Mr. Barnes, for his part, seems to grasp what the old guard does not. He has put eliminating the filibuster front and center in his campaign and has, throughout his career, talked about the need for Democrats to be more bold, both in their messaging and on “bread and butter issues” like health care, environmental issues and racial injustice.As a young Black millennial from a tough part of a large Midwestern city, he can give voice to issues many in the Senate cannot relate to, and he can do it through lived experience. He’s the son of a United Auto Workers father and a public-school teacher mother, who was born in a troubled, high-poverty area of Milwaukee.Of course, Mr. Barnes has his flaws as a candidate. He has encountered several mini controversies. He was once photographed holding an “Abolish ICE” T-shirt and has worked alongside Representative Ilhan Omar from neighboring Minnesota and called her “brilliant” — the type of thing that could irk centrist swing voters.But some of Mr. Barnes’s controversies are actually reasons that he may understand where younger voters are coming from. He was delinquent on a property tax payment and had an incomplete college degree (both since rectified). He also drew negative headlines for being on BadgerCare (Wisconsin’s Medicaid program) while he was running for lieutenant governor in 2018. But encountering financial challenges and making some early career mistakes sounds like a typical millennial experience. Perhaps if more of our elected officials faced similar challenges, they’d have a better idea of how to help others find solutions to them.Of course, one does not need to be a millennial to understand their problems, and age alone does not guarantee support from younger voters. Many in the demographic gravitated to Bernie Sanders over other, younger candidates in the last two presidential primaries. But Mr. Sanders’s popularity was rooted in the fact that the country he described mirrored the one that millennials had experienced — one in which economic precarity and wealth inequality had transformed the American dream into pure fantasy.To be fair, plenty of other Democratic candidates are harnessing this kind of rhetoric. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania is one example. But because of his relative youth, Mr. Barnes is uniquely well positioned to give voice to the anxieties and problems of his generation: We millennials were introduced to the horrors of school shootings through the massacre at Columbine in our adolescence; now our children go through active shooter drills in pre-K. Our country is not doing enough to address climate change, economic inequality, systemic racism, rapidly eroding reproductive rights, diminishing voting rights or the skyrocketing costs of health care, child care and housing. The list goes on.Wisconsin is more politically complex than it can sometimes appear. The idea that the state can’t stomach a politician as progressive as Mr. Barnes is pure fiction. Liberal candidates have won 10 of the last 11 statewide elections. Like Mr. Barnes, Senator Tammy Baldwin was also accused of being too far left for Wisconsin when she first ran for statewide office a decade ago, and in 2018, she was re-elected by an almost 11-point margin. And while slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the Police” have become unpopular, the Black Lives Matter movement — which Mr. Barnes is a vocal supporter of — is still quite popular in Wisconsin, with a higher favorability rating than almost any state or national politician, according to the most recent Marquette University Law School poll.What’s more, Mr. Barnes has chosen his moment wisely: The state Republican Party is in disarray, riven with bickering over their nominee for governor, mired in an endless battle over the results of the 2020 election and saddled with Mr. Johnson, whose chaotic and conspiratorial comments are already alienating swing voters, tanking his favorability rating to just 21 percent among moderates.If Mr. Barnes can deliver a new kind of message that both speaks to the anxieties of younger generations and harnesses their hope, he has a fighting chance. Wisconsin is one of the nation’s most closely contested swing states, where elections are often decided by tenths of a point.If Mr. Barnes can turn out just a few thousand voters with promises to enact big, bold changes in Washington, he may be able to pull off an upset, beating Mr. Johnson in November. Colleges will be seeing their most normal returns to campus since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and students could be more directly engaged in these midterms than they were in other pandemic elections, especially with heightened activism around abortion. And in Milwaukee, turnout has never reached the levels it did during Mr. Obama’s second presidential election. If Mr. Barnes can reach a sliver of young Black voters and turn them out to the polls, it could be enough to tilt the race in his favor.Wisconsin can often be a bellwether of political change. The Tea Party wave of 2010 made the state a Republican testing ground for hard-right conservative policies that would soon go national. The 2018 election of Tony Evers was in many ways predictive of President Biden’s win two years later. A victory for a young Black millennial politician in this of all states could be a sign that a generational shift in American politics is well on its way.Dan Shafer (@DanRShafer) is a reporter based in Milwaukee. He writes a newsletter about Wisconsin politics, The Recombobulation Area.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Young Americans Are Stressed. They Are Angry. And They Can Swing Congress.

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      Millions of newly minted college graduates are about to enter a scorching job market, but many are still held back by feelings of hopelessness and depression. Less than one in 10 Americans between 18- and 29-years-old describe ours as a “healthy democracy.” Most are convinced that both political parties cater to elites over people like them and that our politics cannot meet the challenges of the times. More than anything, “happiness and stability” are what youth seek, but even that appears out of reach at a time when they’re readying to launch.These headwinds, identified by our Harvard Youth Poll, combined with untamed inflation and declining approval of President Biden, should be of significant concern to Democrats who relied on young millennials’ and Generation Z’s historic participation to win the House in 2018, the White House in 2020, and the Senate in Georgia’s 2021 special election. Without both record-breaking turnout and the 20-point margins that teenage and 20-somethings put up for Mr. Biden in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Donald Trump would be a two-term president.Yet there’s a reason to believe that Democrats can run their own once-in-a-century, Rich Strike-style derby and maintain control of Congress in November’s elections. A trifecta of events and likely developments create a narrow window for Mr. Biden and Democrats to regain their footing and shock the world.The growing presence of Mr. Trump’s voice back on the national stage; the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion on abortion and the likely fall of Roe v. Wade; and the opportunity for Mr. Biden to make good on a campaign commitment to address the student debt crisis have formed ideal conditions for Democratic renewal. While older voters will prioritize each party’s pledges to reduce inflation this fall, younger voters will additionally weigh the broad set of values and vision for the future held by Democrats and Republicans.Young Americans are more likely to vote when they see a tangible difference between the parties and feel the consequences of election outcomes. As Generation Z and young millennials were tuning into politics more closely, millions watched Mr. Trump roll back climate policy, undermine the Affordable Care Act, deliver tax breaks for the wealthy and pave the way for white nationalist theorists to enter the public square — all moves that were antithetical to the values of reducing inequality and standing up for those without a voice. These are values that we’ve found in young Americans across most points on the ideological spectrum. As Mr. Trump’s regressive MAGA message gains newfound traction through Republican primaries and in Elon Musk’s vision for Twitter, the fear of Trumpism on the march can be weaponized by Democrats to motivate young voters, as it was in the last midterms.Not long after Mr., Trump’s inauguration in 2017, young Americans from Boston to Bakersfield began describing to me how fear was a unifying force of their generation. “Fear of death. Fear of our rights being infringed upon. Fear of the future for our kids. Fear for our family. Fear for our health” is how a college student summarized it for me in an Ohio focus group. Polling that I conducted earlier this year for Snapchat underscored these views and their relevance once again to midterm elections. “Preserving individual rights and freedoms,” “ensuring that health care is a right,” and “safeguarding the rights of vulnerable populations” are viewed by at least two-thirds of likely Democratic-leaning and undecided young voters as “very” important issues in the coming congressional contests.The Alito draft opinion will only heighten these concerns. Three-quarters of adults under 35 disagree with the likely court ruling and believe Roe v. Wade should stand. Nearly half describe their reaction as “angry” in a recent CNN poll, and abortion policy was rated the most important midterm issue among this cohort by 10 points in a recent Monmouth University Poll.Criminalizing abortion with a new precedent that could jeopardize other constitutional rights is a clarifying political issue that — if harnessed effectively by Democratic candidates — will inspire a new class of values-first voters centered on protecting the rights of women and the vulnerable. I heard these views first hand, and raw, in Gen Z focus groups I conducted in Houston, Atlanta and Columbus, Ohio last week — especially among young women of color. These are issues of both morality and practicality for this generation. The urgency reflected in the conversations I am having with young voters today is reminiscent of what I heard after the Parkland shooting in 2018 and George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Both events helped fuel record-setting youth participation at the polls.Later this month, when President Biden delivers the commencement address at his alma mater in Delaware, he can do something that will boost the financial standard of two generations while also giving another reason for young people to vote. Already relieving nearly $20 billion of federal student loans and pausing repayment until August, Mr. Biden can honor his commitment to Gen Z and millennials and immediately cancel $10,000 in student loan debt for every American. Accordingly, this executive action will help millions of Gen Z and millennials commit to their careers, family, and communities like their parents and grandparents did at a similar life stage. Beyond the essential economic bottom line, this action will begin to materially rebuild the fractured relationship between the leader of the Democrats and a voting bloc that was integral to his party’s most recent successes.With Gen Xers in their 40s and 50s turning more conservative, and Hispanic Americans more aptly described today as a swing vote than a reliable Democratic-voting bloc, maintaining historic levels of participation and securing a 60 percent youth vote threshold is no longer a “nice to have” but an indispensable component of Democratic competitiveness in this moment.Younger Americans are a notoriously tricky population for anyone to reach; the challenge for government and politicians is even more significant as a growing number choose to turn away from the daily news for their mental wellness. Instead, they prefer to “check in” at specific points throughout the year. The State of the Union was one such moment when youth viewership increased; commencement season is another such opportunity.Building on the substantial youth participation from the last midterm election is no easy feat. When baby boomers, Gen Xers, and older millennials were under 30, they often voted at roughly half the level that Gen Zers did in 2018. By understanding the drivers of Gen Z’s and young millennials’ hopelessness, and the circumstances that have shaped their worldview, Democrats will empower young voters and continue to reshape the electorate.The best chance for Democrats’ success in the Senate starts with three states where younger Americans already have higher-than-average voter registration rates:Pennsylvania, where John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor who was once dubbed “America’s coolest mayor” in an earlier role, is the favorite to win the party’s nomination for Senate in Tuesday’s primary;North Carolina, where Cheri Beasley, who was the first Black woman to serve as the state’s Supreme Court chief justice, is the front-runner in her Senate primary, also being held Tuesday;and Wisconsin, where Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican and an increasingly unpopular misinformation peddler, is seeking his third term.In Arizona and Georgia, young African Americans and other voters of color played critical roles in 2020 and 2021 and can do so again — but the challenge for Democrats is steeper. The Phoenix and Atlanta regions are suffering the highest rates of inflation in the country, putting even more pressure on the incumbent Democratic senators up for re-election, Mark Kelly of Arizona and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, to prioritize young voters and speak to their values.Capturing three tossup House seats in California, including one once held by Devin Nunes, as well as winning or holding youth-friendly seats in Washington State, Iowa, Maine and Colorado, are among the best shots for Democrats to mobilize young voters in hopes of hanging on to the House in November.Gen Z and young millennials hold the fate of Congress in their hands. Their message to all of us is clear: the systems we have built cannot meet the challenges of our times and guarantee even basic rights to many of its people. Young voters are stressed. They are angry. In 2018 and 2020, they elected Democrats but in 2022 they need to see more before they commit with similar zeal again.The pathway is narrow, but the race is far from over.John Della Volpe (@dellavolpe) is the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics and has overseen its Youth Poll since 2000, and the author of “Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America.” He was a pollster for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Older Americans Fight to Make America Better

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      Neil Young and Joni Mitchell did more than go after Spotify for spreading Covid disinformation last week. They also, inadvertently, signaled what could turn out to be an extraordinarily important revival: of an older generation fully rejoining the fight for a working future.You could call it (with a wink!) codger power.We’ve seen this close up: over the last few months we’ve worked with others of our generation to start the group Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for progressive change. That’s no easy task. The baby boomers and the Silent Generation before them make up a huge share of the population — more nearly 75 million people, a larger population than France. And conventional wisdom (and a certain amount of data) holds that people become more conservative as they age, perhaps because they have more to protect.But as those musicians reminded us, these are no “normal” generations. We’re both in our 60s; in the 1960s and ’70s, our generation either bore witness to or participated in truly profound cultural, social and political transformations. Think of Neil Young singing “four dead in O-hi-o” in the weeks after Kent State, or Joni Mitchell singing “they paved paradise” after the first Earth Day. Perhaps we thought we’d won those fights. But now we emerge into older age with skills, resources, grandchildren — and a growing fear that we’re about to leave the world a worse place than we found it. So some of us are more than ready to turn things around.It’s not that there aren’t plenty of older Americans involved in the business of politics: We’ve perhaps never had more aged people in positions of power, with most of the highest offices in the nation occupied by septuagenarians and up, yet even with all their skills they can’t get anything done because of the country’s political divisions.But the daily business of politics — the inside game — is very different from the sort of political movements that helped change the world in the ’60s. Those we traditionally leave to the young, and indeed at the moment it’s young people who are making most of the difference, from the new civil rights movement exemplified by Black Lives Matter to the teenage ranks of the climate strikers. But we can’t assign tasks this large to high school students as extra homework; that’s neither fair nor practical.Instead, we need older people returning to the movement politics they helped invent. It’s true that the effort to embarrass Spotify over its contributions to the stupidification of our body politic hasn’t managed yet to make it change its policies yet. But the users of that streaming service skew young: slightly more than half are below the age of 35, and just under a fifth are 55 or older.Other important pressure points may play out differently. One of Third Act’s first campaigns, for instance, aims to take on the biggest banks in America for their continued funding of the fossil fuel industry even as the global temperature keeps climbing. Chase, Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo might want to take note, because (fairly or not) 70 percent of the country’s financial assets are in the hands of boomers and the Silent Generation, compared with just about 5 percent for millennials. More

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      South Koreans Now Dislike China More Than They Dislike Japan

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      There is growing anti-China sentiment in South Korea, particularly among young voters. Conservative politicians are eager to turn the antipathy into a presidential election issue.SEOUL — The list of election issues set to define South Korea’s presidential race next year is long. The runaway housing prices, the pandemic, North Korea and gender inequality are a start. But an unlikely addition has also emerged in recent weeks: China.South Korea’s decision ​​to let the American military deploy a powerful antimissile radar system on its soil​ in 2017 has been the subject of frequent criticism from China. And last month, a presidential hopeful, Yoon Seok-youl, told the country to stop complaining, unless it wanted to remove its own ​radar systems near the Korean Peninsula.Political elites here are usually careful not to antagonize China, the country’s largest trading partner. But Mr. Yoon’s blunt rhetoric reflected a new phenomenon: a growing antipathy toward Beijing among South Koreans, particularly young voters whom conservative politicians are eager to win over.Anti-Chinese sentiment has grown so much this year that China has replaced Japan — the former colonial ruler — as the country regarded most unfavorably in South Korea, according to a ​joint ​survey by ​the polling company ​Hankook Research​ and the Korean newsmagazine SisaIN. In the same survey, South Koreans said they favored the United States over China six to one.Over 58 percent of the 1,000 respondents called China “close to evil” while only 4.5 percent said that it was “close to good.”Yoon Seok-youl, a conservative politician, on television during a press conference in Seoul in June. He has been openly critical of China.Ahn Young-Joon/Associated PressNegative views of China have deepened in other advanced countries as well, but among the 14 nations surveyed last year by Pew Research Center, South Korea was the only one in which younger people held more unfavorable views toward China than previous generations.“Until now, hating Japan was such a part of Korean national identity that we have a common saying: You know you are a real Korean when you ​feel hateful toward Japan for no particular reason,” said Jeong Han-wool, a chief analyst at Hankook Research​. “In our survey, people in their 40s and older still disliked Japan more than China. But those in their 20s and 30s, the generation who will lead South Korea in the coming decades, tipped the scale against China.”South Korea elects its next president in March, and observers are watching closely to see how younger people vote on the country’s policy toward Beijing.Conservatives in South Korea have called anything less than full-throated support of the alliance with Washington “pro-North Korean” and “pro-Chinese.” Progressives usually support reconciliation with North Korea and calls for diplomatic “autonomy” between the United States and China. Younger South Koreans have traditionally voted progressive, but millennials are breaking that pattern, and possibly turning into swing voters.An American military vehicle that was part of an antimissile radar system arriving in Seongju, South Korea, in 2017. China railed against South Korea over the deployment of the system.Reuters“We feel frustrated when we see our government act spineless while Beijing behaves like a bully,” said Chang Jae-min, a 29-year-old voter in Seoul. “But we also don’t want too much tension with China or North Korea.”For decades, South Korea has benefited from a military alliance with the United States while cultivating trade ties with China to fuel economic growth. But that balance has become increasingly difficult to maintain as relations between Washington and Beijing deteriorate.President Moon Jae-in’s conservative rivals, like Mr. Yoon, have complained that South Korea’s ambiguous policy on the United States and China made the country the “weakest link” in the American-led coalition of democracies working to confront Chinese aggression.“We cannot remain ambiguous,” Mr. Yoon told JoongAng Ilbo, a South Korean daily, last month during an interview in which he made his critical remarks about China.The conservative opposition has long accused Mr. Moon of being “pro-China.” His government has maintained that South Korea — like other American allies, including those in Europe — should avoid alienating either power. While South Koreans overwhelmingly support the alliance with Washington, the country’s trade with China is almost as big as its trade with the United States, Japan and the European Union combined.Chinese tourists in a shopping district in Seoul last year.Jean Chung for The New York Times“We cannot pick sides,” Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong has said.Yet when Mr. Moon met with President Biden in Washington in May, the two leaders emphasized the importance of preserving “peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” and vowed to make their alliance “a linchpin for the regional and global order.” Many analysts saw the statement as a sign that South Korea was aligning itself more closely with Washington at the risk of irritating China, which has called Taiwan a red line.The main conservative opposition, the People Power Party, has already begun harnessing young voters’ anti-China sentiment to secure electoral wins.In April, young voters helped deliver landslide victories for the party in the mayoral races in South Korea’s two largest cities. Last month, the party’s young leader, Lee Jun-seok, 36, said his fellow South Korean millennials would fight against Chinese “cruelty” in places like Hong Kong and Xinjiang, where China has been accused of genocide.Older Koreans, while often anti-Communist, tend to respect Chinese culture, which influenced the Korean Peninsula for millenniums. They have also looked upon the country as a benign giant whose rapid economic growth was a boon for South Korean exporters. Younger South Koreans tend not to share that perspective.President Moon Jae-in of South Korea with President Biden during a press conference at the White House in May.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMost of them grew up proud of their homegrown economic and cultural successes. And as China’s foreign policy became more assertive under President Xi Jinping, they began to see the country’s authoritarianism as a threat to free society. They have also been critical of China’s handling of the coronavirus, its expansionism in the South China Sea and fine-dust pollution from China that regularly blankets Seoul.“They have grown up in a liberal environment the earlier generations built through sweat and blood, so they hold an inherent antipathy toward illiberal countries,” said Ahn Byong-jin, a political scientist at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. “They root for politicians who criticize China.”Nowhere has South Korea’s dilemma between Washington and Beijing been magnified more dramatically than over the deployment of the American antimissile radar, known as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD.When South Korean officials agreed to the deployment, they called it a necessity in defending against North Korea. China saw it as part of a continuing threat from the United States military presence in the region, and retaliated by curbing tourism to South Korea and boycotting the country’s cars, smartphones, shopping malls and TV shows.South Korean students demonstrated in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, outside the Chinese Embassy in Seoul, in 2019.Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHa Nam-suk, a professor of Chinese politics and economy at the University of Seoul, has monitored how deepening animosity toward Beijing has played out on and off campuses in recent years, as cash-starved South Korean universities began accepting more Chinese students.South Korean and Chinese students clashed over whether to support young pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, he said. They have also gotten into spats online over K-pop and kimchi. In March, many young South Koreans forced a TV station to cancel a drama series after it showed an ancient Korean king dining on Chinese dumplings.“As they watched what China did in places like Hong Kong,” Mr. Ha said, “Koreans began asking themselves what it would be like to live under a greater sphere of Chinese influence.” More

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      in Elections

      Elise Stefanik and the Young Republicans Who Sold Out Their Generation

      by

      Once upon a time, a shiny new trio of young conservatives — Ryan Costello, Carlos Curbelo and Elise Stefanik — wanted to help build a modern, millennial Republican Party. The 30-somethings, all sworn into Congress in 2015, understood that millennials often agreed on many of the nation’s core problems, and believed it was up to them to offer conservative solutions. They were out to create a new G.O.P. for the 21st century.“Whether it’s environmental policy or immigration policy, the younger generations are more open to the America of tomorrow,” Mr. Curbelo told me in 2018, when I interviewed him for a book about millennial political leaders. “We certainly have a lot of work to do on all those issues. The good news is that we have a lot of younger Republicans in Congress, and they all get it.”It was clear, even then, that millennial voters across the political spectrum cared more about issues like racial diversity, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and college affordability than their parents did. Polls showed that young Republicans were more moderate on some issues than older ones, particularly on questions of immigration and climate change.So Mr. Curbelo and Ms. Stefanik teamed up to fight for immigration reform, particularly for protections for young immigrants. They refused to join the right wing’s fight against marriage equality, likely recognizing that most young people embraced L.G.B.T.Q. rights. And Ms. Stefanik introduced a 2017 resolution, along with Mr. Costello and Mr. Curbelo, calling for American innovation to fight climate change — one of the strongest climate change statements to come out of the Republican Party in years. (Some octogenarian Republicans remained skeptical of climate science; just two years earlier, Senator Jim Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove that global warming was a hoax.)But their visions of the “America of tomorrow” hadn’t foreseen Donald Trump.By 2018, Mr. Trump’s antics had helped lead Mr. Costello to opt for early retirement. That fall Mr. Curbelo, a sharp critic of the president, lost his re-election bid. Mia Love, the only Black Republican woman in Congress, was also defeated in the Democratic wave that year. Another young House Republican, Justin Amash, left the party in the face of Trumpism and dropped his bid for re-election in 2020. And Will Hurd, a young moderate and one of the few Black Republicans in the House in recent years, also decided not to run again.Ms. Stefanik is one of the few of this set who survived, but only by transforming into a MAGA warrior. By 2020, she was co-chairing Mr. Trump’s campaign and embracing his conspiracy theories about a stolen election. Her pivot paid off: This month, she was elected to the No. 3 position in the House Republican Party. She is now the highest-ranking woman and most powerful millennial in the House G.O.P.But a comparison of her past goals and present ambitions makes clear that Ms. Stefanik has morphed from optimist to operator, choosing short-term power over the long-term health of her party.When I interviewed Ms. Stefanik in 2018 and 2019, she seemed to understand that the Republican Party was in trouble with young people. “The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.Ms. Stefanik’s rise — and her colleagues’ fall — is not just a parable of Trumpism. It’s a broader omen for a party struggling to reach a 21st-century electorate. She ascended by embracing a movement that is all about relitigating the past rather than welcoming the future. Now she and other new Trump loyalists in Congress are caught between their party and their generations, stuck between their immediate ambitions and the long-term trends. The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.Of course, the road to political obsolescence is littered with the bones of political analysts like me who predicted that demographics would be destiny. But Mr. Trump didn’t just devastate the G.O.P.’s fledgling class of up-and-coming talent. He also rattled the already precarious loyalty of young Republican voters; from December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of Republicans under 30 left the party, according to Pew. Many returned, but by 2017, nearly a quarter of young conservatives had defected.Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden. His youth vote margin was sufficient to put him over the top in key states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to an analysis by Tufts University, and young voters of color were particularly energized.Contrary to conventional wisdom that young people are always liberal and older people are always conservative, most voters form their political attitudes when they’re young and tend to stay roughly consistent as they age. And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,” said Benji Backer, the president of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative climate action group. He told me that Ms. Stefanik had “distanced herself from the youth conservation movement,” after years of being one of the most climate-conscious Republicans in Congress. Now, he said, “peddling misinformation about the election and Jan. 6 has made it harder for young people to look up to her as a future voice in the party.”The new G.O.P. of 2015 has been replaced by a newer G.O.P.: a cohort of young Republican leaders who seem far more concerned with owning the libs on social media than with proposing conservative solutions to issues that matter to young people.This cohort includes millennials like Representative Matt Gaetz and Representative Lauren Boebert as well as Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Gen Z-er, all Trump loyalists who voted to overturn the electoral vote result. Mr. Gaetz introduced a bill to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency, Ms. Boebert introduced a bill to designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” and Mr. Cawthorn has so embraced the Trumpian ethos of rhetoric as leadership that he once said he “built my staff around comms rather than legislation.”It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.Charlotte Alter is a senior correspondent at Time and the author of “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More