What’s masked as a culture war in Florida is actually a class war the billionaires designed to tune us out, but young people are ready to even the scales on Election Day.
Everyone seems to have a theory about why Gen Z is doomed. AI will take our jobs. The planet will burn. We’ll never be able to afford a home and it’s anyone’s guess which comes first: World War III or the next global pandemic.
It’s no stretch to say we’re living in a golden era for downers, so much so that consuming negative news has become its own pastime. This act of “doomscrolling,” which last year officially entered Merriam-Webster Dictionary, became for many the very picture of apathy with which to view young people. How else to explain the drop in participation in the last presidential election?
My role as a 21-year-old organizer who’s knocked on countless doors and visited dozens of campuses across the state means that I talk to many other young people. And when you take the time to listen to them, you realize just how much young Floridians actually care. They care about finding a good job. They care about whether their family can see a doctor, whether their little siblings are safe at school, and whether they too can one day afford to start a family of their own.
Caring was never the problem. The problem is that so many young Floridians have lost hope that anything they do will actually make a dent in the biggest issues of our day.
With each year, more money and power consolidate into the hands of the wealthy few who then spend big to block any meaningful change. The results are as tragic as they are predictable: our government, compromised by a corporate elite, fails to deliver for everyday people, causing them to lose faith in the government as well as each other. Instead of uniting, we become distracted and angry. We fight with our neighbors instead of the mega-wealthy who then swoop in for more spoils before the whole thing starts over again.
It’s a cycle my organization, Youth Action Fund (YAF), calls the “Doom Loop,” and just like doomscrolling, it will go on forever until we put an end to it. Because the truth is that we don’t have an apathy problem here in Florida — we have a billionaire problem that intentionally breaks governments and plays us off each other. And solving that problem starts with young people making their voices heard this Election Day.
YAF’s organizers are leading youth-led voter engagement efforts across the state to meet voters where they are. Through phone banks, texts, and in-person events, we and our partners have laid the groundwork to bring more than 1.5 million young voters into the fold. In September, we registered more than 1,000 students to vote — enough to break the 5-year streak of one-party new registration advantage. And as we continue to contract hundreds of thousands of low-propensity young voters this year — 500,000 in total — they are turning out in higher rates comparatively to any other age group.
These breakthroughs become even more impressive when considering recent efforts by state lawmakers to silence our voices, passing laws making it harder for organizations like mine to help register young voters while limiting the availability of early voting sites on college campuses. The Legislature has also instituted a new requirement of in-person voting for first-time voters without a state drivers license — a burden which disproportionately affects young people.
If it weren’t clear enough already, this fight is about more than just one election — but inevitably it starts with this election. I call on young voters to break the “Doom Loop” holding us all back at the ballot box. Florida should belong to the people who live here, not billionaires with cushy coastal vacation homes or corporations chasing a tax haven. “Florida for us” is what young people are demanding. And this Election Day, we have the chance to win just that.
Cameron Driggers of Orlando is the founder and executive director of Youth Action Fund, a youth organizing nonprofit that has mobilized thousands of students across the country and trained hundreds to become skilled youth advocates.