Democrats want to turn internet hype for Harris into actual votes

Eve Levenson’s job looked very different just over a month ago.

The 24-year-old is the National Youth Engagement Director for Vice President Harris’s presidential campaign, a role she’s had since the beginning of the year when President Biden was seeking re-election. Her task has been the same throughout: get young voters to the polls this fall.

But as she addressed a room of Gen Z organizers last week at a coffee shop in Chicago, wearing a handful of friendship bracelets that said, ‘Kamala,’ ‘political girlie,’ and ‘voting era,’ there’s a new playing field.

“It's been so great to see the attention and the energy online,” Levenson said. “We're really focused on how do we make sure that we maintain that energy and how do we then harness that energy?”

That’s a goal shared by many young organizers also working to rally youth support after a boost in enthusiasm for Harris among voters under 30 – the same demographic that supported Biden four years ago but soured on him over the past year.

But making that support stick is a daunting task given how recently Harris launched her campaign and how historically unreliable young voters are in consistently turning out to vote – despite notable increases over the past decade.

Levenson can already point to promising signs for the campaign’s organizing push. She has built a program for the Harris campaign to tap into, launching a nationwide student organizing program last spring that will start back up as students return to campus this fall.

“We've seen such a great influx of folks coming into our campaign,” she said. “We've seen more sign-ups for our student program in the last few weeks than we had seen in the entirety of the time before. We've seen more folks signing up for our