Panel on Gen Z voters unpacks a disconnect with democracy
The panel discussed how to get young adults engaged and in tune with politics.
By DAHLIA BECK
Students and faculty alike were in attendance, congregating at the end of the panel to meet the speakers and learn more about their views. (Dahlia Beck / Daily Trojan)
Editor’s Note: This article was updated Sept. 17 at 10:26 p.m. to include additional photography.
The USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Center for the Political Future hosted a panel this Thursday at the Ronald Tutor Campus Center discussing Generation Z’s low voter turnout in the 2024 presidential election and the gap in voting tendencies between young men and women.
The conversation was moderated by Diego Andrades, the assistant director of the Center for the Political Future. The speakers were Laura Brill, Maddy Roth and Jahnavi Rao, all of whom hold positions in non-partisan voting organizations that encourage youth political engagement.
Gen Z refers to individuals born from 1997 to 2012 and has been publicly perceived as a politically and socially engaged generation. The panel largely focused on the apparent shift in Gen Z voting patterns in the 2024 election.
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Rao, the president and founder of New Voters, said that disillusionment with democracy turns into a lack of motivation to participate in it and that just a simple vote sometimes doesn’t spur the change that is wanted.
“If you try to attribute the change in Gen Z’s attitude to a partisan difference, you’re missing a point, which is that it’s not a partisan difference,” Rao said. “It’s that democracy just isn’t working for you … what we’re running into now is that young people don’t buy that voting is going to solve your problems.”
The panelists also dissected a belief that has persisted in recent years that Gen Z has become disconnected from the political sphere. Roth, the executive director of I Am A Voter, explained how it is important to present information to youth in a way that is informative and nuanced to demonstrate the potential of their political impact.
“How are we giving young people the resources and information to feel equipped to want to know,” Roth said. “Steering clear from too many acronyms, too much flowery language, too much of the kind of more patronizing tone and really just getting down to, ‘This is what this is. This is why it matters. This is how it impacts.’”
A recent method used to encourage voter registration for teenagers is the implementation of the ability to pre-register to vote as early as age 16. Many high schools have implemented voting pre-registration activities to bring this to the classroom, so students can learn about the process of voting.
Panelists discussed voter registration accessibility and social media as a source for political news. (Teo Gonzales / Daily Trojan)
Brill is the founder and CEO of The Civics Center, a nonprofit organization aimed at educating high school students about voter registration. He believes that voter registration accessibility for students is vital for their participation in democracy.
“[For] most online voter registration systems, you need a state ID in order to use them, and most 17-year-olds or high school students that we work with don’t have that,” Brill said. “Online voter registration systems, they can only be so effective. They can’t be more effective than the systems they’re tying into. And so it has to be something that creates community, that is the best of both worlds.”
The rise of social media has given the world access to various sources for receiving political information. Because Gen Z has grown up in this digital age, they have been given the opportunity to take advantage of these mediums, and use them to fuel their political decision-making.
Ara Yacoubian, the senior associate at the Center for the Political Future, believes that a clue into Gen Z’s source to inform themselves may be a clue into their political patterns.
“We’ve seen a lot of information, a lot of studies that illustrate that younger voters, Gen Z voters, almost exclusively will get their information from third party sources,” Yacoubian said. “From social media, from places that aren’t considered traditional media or traditional sources of news and those are the places where we see high levels of engagement by Gen Z.”
Many students and faculty alike were in attendance, congregating at the end of the panel to meet the speakers and discuss their insights from the event. Maya Torres, a sophomore majoring in philosophy, politics and economics, said the conversation helped her understand Gen Z’s role in politics.
“I was just really interested in learning about how Gen Z has transitioned over time,” Torres said. “There’s a little bit of a disconnect as the years keep going on, so it’s important for us as Generation Z to get our peers involved more in voting registration.”
