In Wisconsin, more than 12 elections in the last 24 years have been won by less than 30,000 votes—a statistic that has become a talking point among politicians. In 2020, President Joe Biden won the state by a little over 20,500 votes.
That election after election here is determined by such razor-thin margins underscores the potential influence of young voters. The University of Wisconsin campus at Madison alone has nearly 50,000 students. In the 2022 midterm elections, nearly half of Wisconsinites under age 25 cast a ballot. Months later, in spring 2023, young voters turned out again to elect liberal-favored Judge Janet Protasiewicz to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The youth vote is often a driving factor in election results, but young people across the state, feeling their concerns about Palestine and other pressing issues are being sidelined, are flexing their political power in other ways. Some may still go to the polls, but they’re taking action beyond the ballot box, too, pressuring local and national politicians and institutions to enact change, and showing up or their community when the government fails to do so.
The trend has been obvious since Biden stepped away from the presidential race and Kamala Harris stepped in, bolstering her outreach to Gen Z with plans to reach swing states through targeted digital ads, campus visits, and Gen Z-focused social media content.
But such efforts miss the mark when they ignore Gaza. Some might argue that young voters “risk” the future, jeopardizing chances to ensure better policies for climate, health, or housing here in the U.S when they focus on foreign policy in the Middle East, eschewing voting for Harris-Walz to write in an “uninstructed” vote (as it is called it in Wisconsin) when no candidate aligns with their position on Israel’s military violence in Palestine.
But young progressives in Wisconsin—and across the country—aren’t burying their heads in the sand, or deprioritizing homegrown issues. Rather, they see U.S. support for Israel as inextricably tied to these issues at home, and fighting for justice in Palestine as a means of fighting for justice here. There’s a reason why young people championed demands such as “Money for Jobs, School, Healthcare, Housing, and Environment, Not for War!” at the March on the DNC, a march organized by the Coalition to March on the DNC, a collection of grassroots organizations fighting for the same demands.
Activists, including Greta Thunberg, argue that climate justice depends on a free Palestine. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to climate justice everywhere,” said Wisconsin climate organizer Max Prestigiacomo, who is a recent UW-Madison graduate and former alderman. “In a fight to prevent the climate crisis which first and foremost recognizes that the impacts of said crisis—death—will fall on marginalized people worldwide, ignoring the active oppression and genocide in Palestine is complacency.”
Reproductive justice, too—another issue bringing many young voters out to the polls. “Roe v. Wade got overturned here, we obviously have to fight for a women’s right to choose in the U.S.,” said 25-year-old Danaka Katovich, national co-director of CODEPINK, a feminist grassroots organization, during a protest at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. But “in Gaza, women are having c-sections with no anesthesia. Their children are being crushed under rubble and bombs that say ‘made in the USA.’ We’re here to link those two issues.”
Young people are ready to be heard. In Wisconsin, in the U.S., and around the world, those in power must listen and react to what we’re saying—not only on November 5th, but every day.
CODEPINK also protested at the DNC in Chicago—just like thousands of young people, including from Wisconsin, who protested both conventions, linking justice in Palestine to climate and reproductive justice but also to immigrant, worker, LGBTQIA+, and women’s rights, and to ending police violence. “What made me come to the march was the genocide in Palestine,” commented Wisconsin student Cesar Moreno at the March on the RNC.
Youth politics beyond the ballot box in Wisconsin traces its history back to UW-Madison, a campus with a rich history of protest, just blocks away from the state’s capitol. It’s not uncommon to see students marching down the street in protest or tabling for causes—regardless of the weather forecast.
“Students have been protesting since the beginning of UW,” Kacie Lucchini Butcher, director of the Rebecca M. Blank Center for Campus History, told campus radio station WUWM in a recent interview, calling UW-Madison students “civically engaged.” The Black Student Strike in 1969 mobilized thousands and eventually led to the development of a Black Studies Department; protests against South African apartheid began in the late 1960s and extended through the 1980s.
A crystallizing moment came in 1968, when hundreds of students protested the presence on campus of recruiters from Dow Chemical, the makers of napalm. Protesters encountered brutal police violence that, the Wisconsin Historical Society records, “politiciz[ed] thousands of previously apathetic students” and transformed the campus into “one of the nation’s leading anti-war communities.”
Community members today draw comparisons between the Dow Chemical protests and 2024’s pro-Palestine protests. Student groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine at UW-Madison have pushed for cutting U.S. military spending for Israel, interrupting a Harris rally in September and threatening to withhold their votes until she met their demands for an arms embargo. In May, students launched a pro-Palestine encampment to demand the university divest from Israel, which was met with police violence and arrests.
Beyond political protests, students and community members show up for each other when government and local institutions fall short. Whether students are using social media to raise funds for peers in need, starting community campaigns to provide legal support to those arrested at pro-Palestine demonstrations or various grassroots organizations working to support their community, young people are dedicated to dreaming up and building a better world.
Social movements have long leaned on mutual aid—“the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world,” as lawyer, activist, and author Dean Spade puts it—to address community needs. Now, young people are rallying around one another. They feel their elected officials are failing them.
“I think this moment represents a turning point,” said Wisconsin youth organizer Aliya Glasper. “We are depending on our community, our collective power, strength, resolve to resist the current system that exists to work toward a fully liberated world that benefits everyone. A world where the ‘lesser of two evils’ doesn’t exist.”
Young people are ready to be heard. In Wisconsin, in the U.S., and around the world, those in power must listen and react to what we’re saying—not only on November 5th, but every day. And understand that young people are more than their vote.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24982514/Quest_3_dock.jpg "Meta’s ‘software update issue’ has been breaking Quest headsets for weeks")
