Presidential election in the United States: 2020, the year of the great mobilization of young voters?
Early voting operation in Sumter, South Carolina on October 9, 2020. REUTERS / Micah Green
Text by: Carlotta Morteo Follow
6 min
The 18-35 year olds represent almost 40% of American voters today.
Historically, it's a cohort that rarely goes to the polls, but this year, they seem to be much more engaged than usual.
Already, for the mid-term elections, four out of ten young people had voted, which is double that in the last presidential election.
And they are visibly scalded by the current political climate.
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From our special correspondent,
“
Capitalism is not sustainable.
The two big parties in this country are both sold to the big business lobbies that are destroying forests, polluting the oceans and warming the planet, because their only goal is to make a profit.
Joe Smiley, 28, is calm but incisive.
A bookseller in Louisville, she is also secretary of the local chapter of the Socialist Democrats of America (DSA) party, which has existed since the 1980s but has never been so successful.
“
People are joining us at an unprecedented rate in our history.
There should be 100,000 at the national level at the end of the year, and here alone, we are three times more numerous than two years ago, around one hundred activists
, ”she explains.
Joe herself joined the party after
Donald Trump was
elected
.
“
I had worked for Bernie Sanders' primary campaign when I was a student at the University of Missouri.
I was also very involved in the creation of a union of young teachers on campus, we were underpaid and without any rights.
These experiences had thrilled me, but when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I had the feeling that a leaden hat was falling on me, and I needed to find a group of people with whom I could really share my ideas.
"
The Socialist Democrats of America are the ones she saw on the ground near her home in support of teacher strikes, alongside gays at Louisville Gay Pride, fielding candidates for councilor positions municipal, in the districts or arcana of the local judicial administration.
“
If you really want to change things, you have to start at the bottom, at your scale,
” she concludes.
If she will vote
Joe Biden
, it is without any illusions about her ambition to overturn the table, but it is absolutely necessary to "
cut the rug from under the foot of the white supremacism which is resurfacing in our country, and which is currently the most danger. pressing,
”she said.
A position that has not officially taken the party of the Socialist Democrats of America, whose labor rights and the constitution of unions are the main fights.
No doubt they know that the popular class they defend is seduced by Donald Trump.
"They are playing good old politics"
In the bus that takes me to Saint-Louis, I meet Bratt, a 21-year-old medical student, for whom this is the first presidential election.
“
Honestly, I could not even have been registered this year!
It was thanks to my girlfriend who got involved in a civic education group on campus that I made the effort.
They set up a table for several weeks next to the library, where they explained how to do it, because it's not that simple
!
You know, young people and the paperwork,
”
he smiles.
Behind the window, fields of dried corn as far as the eye can see.
He tells me that he grew up in the countryside and that “
of course
” his parents are conservatives.
He doesn't really have an opinion, “
neither of them really inspires me… they're very different but they're both old, and they play
good old politics,
” he says.
"
But hey, Donald Trump has a vocabulary less extensive than mine, he's a dangerous buffoon, so ... go for Biden."
We can tell that it bothers him.
Even less enthusiastic, Jenay Manley, 26-year-old ball of energy who works in a gas station and who will go to the polling station backwards.
This Métis, already a mother of two twins, is struggling to make ends meet and has trouble paying the rent.
She joined a tenant advocacy organization, KC Tenants, made up mostly of precarious African Americans.
“
We have no expectations from politicians up there.
There is too much money involved, shenanigans, opportunism, announcement effects
, ”she said.
“
Joe Biden?
It is at least going in the right direction of history!
"
Democrat, Republican… she can see more or less the differences but does not particularly lean towards one of the two.
"
I don't see any changes in my life whether you're under one presidency or another,
" she says.
In a whisper, she says she voted for Joe Biden, as if we risked blaming him for the opposite.
We are sitting on the porch of a tiny house in a leafy neighborhood in Kansas City.
It is the HQ of KC Tenants which does not take sides but is "
very clearly the most left that one can be in the American political system
", smiles its founder, Tara Raghuveer, 31 years old.
“
You know, when one of our members, Tania, who is black, tells me that she went to the administrative services in charge of housing, and that she had a fight with another black woman in line to get her housing assistance… Tania said to herself:
"we shouldn't be fighting among ourselves, we should be fighting the people in power who created this corrupt system and of which we only taste the crumbs".
Well, this criticism is anti-capitalist in essence, but it didn't have to read Marx to do it.
"
Maybe they will soon be doing it?
Tara Raghuveer does not hide the fact that they organize every Saturday, for their members, training sessions in civic education, activism and political history.
“
Joe Biden?
It is at least going in the right direction of history!
She exclaims.
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