No teenager in modern American history has been on the receiving end of such vitriol as David Hogg, the media-savvy gun safety advocate who survived the massacre of seventeen students and staff at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, and recorded his classmates’ reactions while it was taking place.
Nor has any teenager fought back with such skill. When FNC host Laura Ingraham posted on colleges which had rejected Hogg’s entrance applications, he caused two dozen advertisers to withdraw support from her show.
Ingraham was forced to apologize.
Hogg, now twenty-three and a recently minted Harvard graduate, has just co-launched a political committee called Leaders We Deserve, designed to support Generation Z and millennials running for public office.
It will put boots on the ground and money in the coffers of legislative candidates under thirty and congressional aspirants under thirty-five.
The bulk of support is slated for legislative races, designed to build Democrats’ “bench” of upwardly mobile officeholders. “Leaders” is stressing a trio of issues: They are gun safety, reproductive rights and response to the climate crisis.
Hogg and the first Generation Z member of Congress, United States Representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost, were camped in Virginia – more accurately, on the road – this past weekend drumming up support for young candidates running for legislative seats in the Old Dominion. The Virginia House of Delegates in narrowly controlled by Republicans while Democrats cling to a two-seat majority in the State Senate. All seats are up on Tuesday.
“Join me @GrassrootsDemHQ tonight to call voters, help take back VHD and protect the Senate,” Frost wrote on Twitter. Hogg boosted candidate Lily Franklin at Virginia Tech University, then drove across the state to Newport News to join Maryland Governor Wes Moore in stumping for candidate Monty Mason.
“If students at Virginia Tech turn out and vote they could win this race and make it a major upset,” Hogg wrote on Twitter. “If that happens, Republicans will have a lot harder of a time weakening gun laws.”
Hogg has seemingly been everywhere. He was with University of North Carolina students in galleries of the state legislature, protesting lack of action on gun safety after a shooting episode on the Chapel Hill campus. He was in Birmingham, Alabama, boosting candidate Sylvia Swayne in a special legislative election.
He was also at the White House last month as President Biden announced creation of an Office of Gun Violence Prevention to be overseen by Vice President Kamala Harris. With Republican blocking action on such legislation as an assault weapon ban, the president took executive action to keep focus on gun violence.
Hogg is a fighter and a player. He used not one, but two profanities to describe Republicans’ attempts to confuse students in Virginia about their ability to register and vote. Over the last year, however, he has endorsed incremental change and dialogue. He backed the small steps taken to keep guns out of dangerous hands when Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. He is the son of a former FBI agent and publicizes his trips to a practice range.
Generation Z and millennials began to show strength as a voting bloc in the 2018 midterm elections, which gave Democrats control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time since 2008.
Only thirteen percent of voters under thirty turned out in 2014, but twenty-eight percent cast ballots four years later, according to figures compiled by Tufts University’s Center for Information Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
The figure last November was twenty-three percent, but a look at the map shows where the Z’s and millennials made a difference. The highest under-thirty turnout was in Michigan, where Democrats flipped control of the legislature and abortion reform won a big majority. Governor Gretchen Whitmer and her running mate, NPI alum Garlin Gilchrist II, were reelected in a landslide. A second high state, Minnesota, saw Democrats gain full control of the Legislature.
The Democrats won tight Senate races in Pennsylvania and Arizona, and narrowly elected a governor and attorney general in Arizona. Under-thirty voters turned out in both states. They turned out in numbers higher than the national average in Washington, Colorado and Georgia. Republicans professed to have hopes of unseating Senators Patty Murray, Michael Bennet and Raphael Warnock.
Murray and Bennet won landslide victories, while Warnock defeated Republican Herschel Walker in the nation’s most expensive U.S. Senate contest.
The lowest youth turnout came in states of Oklahoma, Alabama, Indiana, West Virginia and Tennessee, all of them Republican bastions in which Democrats fared poorly. Republican governors were reelected in Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee.
Leaders We Deserve didn’t get a win in one initial contest. It backed Sylvania Swayne, a candidate who is transgender, for the legislature in Alabama. Swayne lost by a two-to-one margin to fellow Democrat Travis Hendrix, a Birmingham police sergeant.
Still, Leaders We Deserve deserves support.
It is a brainchild of Hogg and Kevin Lata, who managed Frost’s campaign for Congress in Orlando. Frost, twenty-six, is a former organizing director of March for Our Lives, the movement started by survivors of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas shootings. He has also worked for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Nor has Hogg lacked for attention on Capitol Hill.
A video gone viral shows him walking down a street in the nation’s capital, being pursued by then future Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Greene is shouting abuse at Hogg for his effective lobbying of Congress.
Leaders We Deserve was partially inspired by the “Tennessee Three,” legislators who refused to shut up as the Republican-dominated Tennessee Legislature refused to take up gun safety legislation. Legislative galleries in the Volunteer State were packed in the wake of the Nashville massacre which saw three adults and three children slain. The shooter fired off 152 rounds.
A pair of young African American lawmakers, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, were expelled from the Tennessee State House of Representatives. A third, Representative Gloria Johnson, kept her seat by one vote. Both Jones and Pearson were promptly given provisional appointments by their county commissions, and later won back their seats in special elections.
Johnson is challenging ultra MAGA Republican United States Senator Marsha Blackburn, who offered “thought and prayers” for Nashville victims but has opposed all gun safety legislation.
Hogg put it on the line in announcing Leaders We Deserve: “Far-right extremists are willing to let children be slaughtered at school and watch our planet burn for personal gain. But badass young people have a habit of being underestimated and scaring the shit out of Republicans by proving our power.”
Young voters helped stop what pundit elders and Republican pollsters predicted would be a “red wave” in 2022. Remember those surveys by Moore Information and Trafalgar showing Tiffany Smiley in hot pursuit of Patty Murray.
Well, Democrats kept control of the U.S. Senate and Murray has become the second woman to chair the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Leaders We Deserve is on the web here if you’d like to follow their work.
