An Open Letter To David Hogg
Help Save The Youth Of America
Headline Update: I wrote this piece before the news broke about David Hogg’s PAC planning to support challengers to some older incumbent Democrats. “Democrats Fume at David Hogg’s Plan to Oust Lawmakers” says Political Wire. I’m encouraged that David Hogg has said they won’t compete in battleground districts, nor will they automatically target lawmakers over a certain age, citing his admiration for Jan Schakowsky, 80, and Nancy Pelosi, 85. As Nancy Pelosi always says, no one hands you power, you have to seize it.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez challenged an incumbent who many thought would be the next Democratic Speaker, and Rep. Joe Crowley made the mistake of underestimating her. I’m kind of glad he did.
I worked on Jamie Raskin’s first campaign when he challenged a longtime incumbent Democrat state Senator, and I know you can be a good Democrat and still run in a primary. So my hair isn’t on fire and I’m not fuming about David Hogg’s idea to give young voters more reasons to vote—as I write below, that’s what we need most.
Dear David Hogg:
I’ve been following your career with interest, and was glad to see you run—and win—your race for Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee. I’ve been working in politics since I was in high school, and for a time, when I was advising candidates and leaders of progressive causes, like you, I was the youngest person in the room. I’m not any more.
In a recent speech at the Women’s National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C. you talked about a post-election DNC meeting where the first thing a pollster brought up was the shift away from Democrats among 18–29-year-old voters. You looked around the room and noticed that not a single person looked like you—not even anyone under 40. You said you saw an opportunity to be the change you wanted to see.
“If Congress had the same proportion of 25–30 year-olds as the US general population,” you’ve said, “we would have over 40 members of congress under 30. Currently we have only one member under 30.”
But having the same proportion of the population isn’t the same as the same proportion of voters—and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.
Through your position at the DNC and your Leaders We Deserve PAC, you’re encouraging more young people to run for office, telling audiences to “get involved in any way you can, because nobody is coming to save us.”
Very true. But who else isn’t coming to save us? Sadly, it’s not just the politicians—it’s voters too. Especially the voters you’re talking to.
When that DNC pollster shared data about a 20-point shift to the right among 18-29 year-olds, he was of course talking about the share of those who voted, not the total population.
David, you and other emerging Democratic leaders are saying important things about the party’s need to find new ways to communicate and deliver on our promises, but everything we want to do still depends on that creaky old electoral system you have a chance to help reform from your new position.
Change requires laws, and laws require votes in Congress. To elect members of Congress who will pass those laws, people have to come out and vote in elections.
But too many of them don’t. For you to succeed at the DNC, you’ll need to show young voters why they should.
It’s the 42 percent solution—if you’re trying to “solve” how to keep political power in the hands of billionaires, special interests and oligarchs.
42 percent of young people ages 18-29 turned out to vote in 2024, according to data from the non-partisan research center CIRCLE, down from 50% in 2020.
But voters aged 50 or older were 52 percent of the electorate.
They’re the ones electing officials who won’t vote for gun safety, health care, voting rights, the environment, gender equality and racial justice, and all the other issues that younger voters care about.
You’ve talked about how, when a word cloud is assembled of how Democrats view their party, the biggest word was “weak.” And when they were asked what kind of animal a Democrat and a Republican would be, the most common answer was “turtle” for Democrats and “lion” or “shark” for Republicans.
But you know what? When you don’t have any power, you are by definition “weak.” No one is going to be comparing a Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and a Judiciary Committee Chairman Jamie Raskin to turtles--those lions will roar when you and your colleagues succeed in helping Democrats win back the House.
I have every confidence that we will—and not just because Donald Trump is screwing up so badly. After all, the party out of power traditionally does well in the off-year election, and the current GOP majority is wispier than a thread of cotton candy. But with attention-getting initiatives like Senator Cory Booker’s marathon speech, the DNC’s new “People’s Cabinet” and people like you working the machinery to ensure that no state or district is ignored, Democrats have a good case to make.
But here’s the problem—and apologies to my readers who are not named David Hogg for the repetition from past columns ahead (and behind, now that I look at it again…sorry).
We can talk all we want about what Democrats are failing to say or do now, while they are out of power, but we’re in danger of only talking to ourselves, or to MSNBC audiences. The solutions we’re promoting all depend on people voting, but if they don’t see how voting is important, those solutions will remain out of reach.
Year after year, young people tell pollsters they intend to vote in the next election, and every time, the youth vote is at the back of the turnout race. Before the 2020 election, Polling done by Ipsos showed that 78% of young people said they planned to vote in 2020.
But according to the Census, voter turnout that year was lowest among those ages 18-24, at 51.4%.
Before the 2022 election, 40% of Gen Z voters told Harvard’s Institute of Politics that they intended to vote. The actual turnout was 23%, according to CIRCLE.
And a year before the 2024 election, Harvard’s John Della Volpe released the finding of his Harvard Youth Poll.
Fewer young Americans plan on voting in 2024; most of the decline comes from young Republican and independent voters.
Relative to this point in the 2020 presidential election cycle, the number of young Americans between 18- and- 29 years old who “definitely” plan on voting for president has decreased from 57% to 49%.
But as it turned out, even with Joe Biden’s exit at the top of the Democratic ticket, even that 49% target wasn’t reached.
In your speech to the Women’s National Democratic Club, you correctly identified a “major consulting problem” in the party that needs to be addressed. On the platform formerly known as Twitter you wrote,
We need a list of consultants who should be banned from working on campaigns. The level of extortion and grift is insane. Every candidate who runs as a Dem and their manager should get a memo of how much the standard rates for different services like mail, digital, TV, etc cost and if they are a certain percent above that rate there should be someone they can call to ask if they are getting ripped off.
And you sent a cease and desist letter to Jackson McMillan, the fundraising consultant for Florida congressional candidate Josh Weil for using your name without permission, calling him “one of many” who need to be dealt with.
The New York Times called McMillan the 23-Year-Old Student Who Raised $25 Million in Democratic Losses—and their report includes this tasty morsel:
One secret ingredient to his firm’s success, Mr. McMillan explained, is Dungeons & Dragons.
Need to know why? Here’s a link to the full story, my gift. It describes how McMillan’s firm earns a 25% cut of donations on top of fund-raising expenses which trust me, are marked up.
I agree with you about consultants. In fact, back in 1999 I published this act of “career arson” in the Washington Post on the theme of “Don’t Listen to Consultants—Like Me,” and wrote:
In the age of made-for-TV elections, old-fashioned political party activity such as conventions and primaries are little more than sideshows. The real drama is the candidates' scramble to line up the top fund-raisers, media consultants and pollsters, and earn the mantle of "inevitability." The only sure result is that elections are more expensive and voters more alienated.
But as much as we need to blame consultants—or “insultants” as a friend and client once accurately described me and my ilk—cleaning house at the DNC won’t solve the turnout problem.
I completely believe what John Della Volpe has studied and written about—that Gen Z are values-based voters motivated by threats to their basic rights—clean air and water, feeling safe in school, reproductive rights, a decent standard of living—far more than purely partisan appeals.
You’ve talked about the issues that motivate young voters, but how do we make the connection between those issues and the solution of voting in elections?
Donald Trump won by assembling a new coalition made of up voters many of us didn’t see coming. First-time voters broke for Trump, 54%-45%. That was a huge reversal from four years ago, when new voters strongly favored Biden, 64%-32%.
And then there were the bros. John Della Volpe was interviewed in the New Yorker for an article titled, “The Battle for the Bros."
In last year’s Presidential election, Democrats lost support with nearly every kind of voter: rich, poor, white, Black, Asian American, Hispanic. But the defection that alarmed Party strategists the most was that of young voters, especially young men, a group that Donald Trump lost by fifteen points in 2020 and won by fourteen points in 2024—a nearly thirty-point swing. “The only cohort of men that Biden won in 2020 was eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds,” John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a former adviser to Biden’s Presidential campaign, told me. “That was the one cohort they had to hold on to, and they let it go.”
David, I’m particularly excited to see that your Leaders We Deserve PAC is focusing on state legislative contests to build a bench to elect statewide leaders and future Senators and members of Congress. But before that, we have to win back the House, and convince all those values-driven Gen Z voters that elections don’t have to be a clown show, a cash cow for consultants, or a complete waste of their time.
I’ve read that one of the obstacles that young voters say keep them from voting is not knowing enough about where the candidates stand on all the issues they care about. For someone who grew up in a Democratic household, this is hard for me to understand. With rare exceptions, (New Jersey had a liberal Republican Senator) my parents always voted for Democrats, and no research was needed to choose between the party candidates.
I suppose that the choice these conscientious young voters are contemplating is between voting for a Democrat who may not be a consistent supporter of all their issue priorities, or staying home and not voting. This speaks to the depth we’ve fallen as a republic, and the extent of your challenge.
In that speech in Washington, you said, “We have to show them it is important to vote for Democrats not because we are not Donald Trump, but because we are Democrats and we deliver, and we care about you.”
We can start those deliveries when we win back the House.