MILWAUKEE — Whitley Yates had hesitations about taking on the role of director of diversity and engagement for the Indiana Republican Party.
“For me, my biggest fear was that I would lead communities of color into a burning building where they would consistently be used, their plight and their poverty would be profited on by politicians, and there would be absolutely no progress,” she said.
She took the role anyway, because “underrepresented communities deserve to be at the table,” she said. “Our voices deserve to be valued in the rooms in which we walk in,” Yates told a group of young Americans at a nonpartisan youth voterfest at the Republican National Convention.
Yates is working to usher in a new generation of leaders into the Republican Party, and those young leaders were taking it all in at the convention in Milwaukee last week.
At the Blue Ribbon Hall in the historic Pabst Brewery, conservative leaders who some may not see as fitting the stereotypical Republican mold encouraged students to get involved and participate in politics at a nonpartisan event to empower the youth vote. The speakers advocated for a new generation of leaders to take the stage and become part of the political discourse.
The event was hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition to help student voters encourage others to vote. A similar event will be held at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
It came the same day the Republican Party nominated a millennial for vice president, 39-year-old Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio. Democrats also are internally debating the likelihood of President Joe Biden winning a second term, and debating whether he should pass the torch to someone else.
Future of the GOP?
The Democratic Party continues to hold a substantial edge among younger voters, with older voters gravitating toward the Republican Party, according to the Pew Research Center. Hispanic, Asian and Black voters continue to lean more Democratic, but there have been some shifts toward the GOP in most groups in recent years, according to the Pew Research Center.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley recently said one of the goals for the party ahead of the 2024 election is to appeal to groups that have been historically underrepresented in the party.
“We’re seeing Black voters and Hispanic voters and Asian American voters that are coming over our way every single day,” he said in early July. “They’re leaving the Democratic Party by the thousands. Why? Because the same economy that’s killing your family is killing their families.”
‘We need more Gen Z’
Benji Backer is a conservative environmentalist who believes nature and the environment are nonpartisan. As he grew up in the political world, he said he became “increasingly frustrated at the lack of environmental leadership that Republicans had basically portrayed.”
His group, the American Conservation Center, is a right-of-center environmental organization that promotes conservative leadership on the environment, focusing on producing clean energy, accelerating innovation for even cleaner energy and making energy production more local.
“We need more Gen Z men and women in the arena right now more than ever, because there needs to be a transformational course of history that was changed by the people who are sick and tired of the people who put themselves first, and not the actual Americans, because they want us to sit on the sidelines,” Becker said.
Alan Hedrick, a 37-year-old Nevada delegate who is on the board of the Clark County Republican Party, said he got more involved in the party after seeing a lack of people under 40.
“I really tried to make that point to people that I’m here, I’m involved,” Hedrick told the Review-Journal. “We should have some younger representation in the party. Nothing against the people who have been part of the party, but, you know, Nevada is a relatively young state, and I feel like our delegation should reflect that.”
Nevada’s median age range is 39, with the largest population bloc between ages 30 and 39, according to Census Reporter.
About 52 percent of Gen Zers and millennials identify as independent, according to Gallup.
In the last few presidential and midterm election cycles, the youth voter rate has increased, according to Purvi Patel, director of civic engagement for the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. There’s a stereotype that young people are lazy and disengaged, but she said she finds that to be the opposite of the case.
‘General sense of futility’
With many young Americans ambivalent or displeased about their choices between Biden and Donald Trump, there is a concern of disillusionment about the election, according to Clarissa Unger, executive director of the Students Learn Students Vote Initiative. The initiative is working on talking about the election to get young people more engaged.
Andrew Jarocki, a 26-year-old Republican from Duluth, Minnesota, thinks there’s a bell curve of both highly educated and lower educated young people who are cynical and apathetic about voting.
“I think the lower educated people say, ‘it never shakes out for me, they never helped me, they never consider me,’ ” Jarocki said. “And the really high educated people say, ‘the system doesn’t really work, voting is not the best way to spend your time, it doesn’t really matter.’ ”
There’s a “general sense of futility” about voting eating away at a lot of the younger generation, he said.
Young people will often say they care about climate change or gun violence as top issues, “but issues like that just take a long time,” Jarocki said. They’re frustrated with the speed of change that happens.
A lot of toxicity is taken up by the top of the ballot, Jarocki said, as people hear what Trump and Biden are doing.
“We live in a weird time where it used to be that all politics is local, but now it seems like all politics is national, right?” he said. People know who is running for president, but they can’t tell you about their county’s board of commissioners, he said.
“I think Americans, especially young Americans, really need to rediscover the down the ballot (races), because that’s the place where there’s a lot of optimism both in the sense of how different it can be,” said Jarocki, who ran for city council in Duluth in 2021.
‘I want to understand’
Chicago resident Xavier Starks turns 18 in August and is still trying to figure out what party he identifies with. He came to the RNC to learn why people are voting for Trump and why they like Republicans, and he’ll do the same thing with the DNC and ask why people like Biden.
“I want to understand,” he said.
Starks said he feels like there’s policies on both sides that he disagrees with. He thinks Republicans are radical about abortion and that people should be able to have an abortion if they need to. He also thinks Biden wants to ban assault rifles, but Starks thinks it would be better to make it harder for people to access an assault rifle.
Yates is often asked what the future of the Republican Party is, and it is “whatever you want it to be,” she said.
“You have to understand that you are who you’ve been waiting for,” she told the group of students last week. “If you look at the political sphere and you don’t see someone that looks like you, it’s because they’re waiting for you. If you listen to the conversations, and you don’t hear your voice amplified, it’s because they’re waiting to hear your voice.”
Contact Jessica Hill at jehill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @jess_hillyeah on X.