Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Democrats, other organizations pursuing Florida’s millennial voters
The sweeping victories won by Democrats in Virginia this month were spearheaded by a spike in turnout among one group in particular — millennials.
Now, local and national political organizations have targeted Florida as one of the next battlegrounds to energize that younger generation to vote — or even run for office.
“Young voters are more likely to turn out when there’s people like them on the ballot,” said Olivia Bercow, a spokeswoman for the group NextGen America. “Young and diverse and talking about issues they care about.”
NextGen was founded by billionaire Tom Steyer, who also has funded TV ads and billboards pushing for President Donald Trump’s impeachment. The group is also one of several progressive organizations focused on turning out young voters, including Flippable, Mobilize-America and Run For Something.
Turnout in the Nov. 7 election in Virginia among 18- to 29-year-olds, Bercow said, was up 10 percent from 2013. Those young voters came to the polls, she and others said, in part because of strong down-ballot candidates — those running in local and state house races — and in turn created what one called “reverse coattails” that helped the gubernatorial candidate at the top of the ticket.
“I’ve been in politics for 25 years, and one thing I can say with wisdom is there is no ‘conventional wisdom’ anymore,” said Ross Morales Rocketto, co-founder of Run For Something.
The group hopes to follow up its successful 2017 campaigns by recruiting 50,000 people nationally to run in 2018, with the goal of ultimately getting 1,000 candidates on ballots across the country on Election Day.
Already, the group has endorsed state House District 47 Democratic candidate Anna Eskamani, 27, running in the central Orange County district to succeed outgoing state Rep. Mike Miller, R-Winter Park.
Veterans of the Virginia election also agreed on another strategy for Democrats — leaving no
election uncontested.
Democrats flipped at least 15 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates thanks to running serious candidates in many seats they hadn’t contested before. That’s a notable difference from Florida Democrats’ current strategy of defending the one-third of state House seats they already have.
In a special election in October for state House District 44 in Orange County — where Hillary Clinton won handily in 2016 — Democrats, for example, only fielded one littleknown candidate who then withdrew after the ballot deadline.
That left final Democratic candidate Eddy Dominguez’s name off the ballot entirely. But he still did better than any Democratic state House candidate in years.
“Virginia showed the potential for a blue wave, if people have candidates to
support,” said Catherine Vaughan of Flippable. “I do think people have to run everywhere.”
Rocketto called 2018 “the year of the down-ballot campaigns,” saying Democrats need to run local candidates knowledgeable about local issues.
“If we as a party are going to do well nationally, the way we’re going to do it isn’t investing in fancy TV ads,” he said. “It’s investing in
really local races, including city council races and school boards.”
Issues important to Millennials according to surveys, Nercow said, include health care, college affordability and immigration — many of the same issues, she said, as older voters.
And sometimes, issues can be really local. In Virginia, Danica Roem, the first transgender person elected to the state House, ran on one issue — “Traffic,” said Rocketto. “Traffic was the only thing she talked about.”