Bearers of the Tar Heel torch: North Carolina’s youngest DNC delegates reaffirm commitment to party in Chicago
North Carolina Democratic delegates (left to right) Grayson Barnette, Kristen Robinson and Jesse Ross stand with the youngest state party chair in the nation, North Carolina’s Anderson Clayton (right), near the floor of the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Cory Vaillancourt photo
Torches were passed at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, even more so than most people might have seen on their television screens.
President Joe Biden’s acquiescence to his potential successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, took center stage, but working in the background all the while were scores of young Democrats.
They’re not your daddy’s Democrats. They’re grabbing the torch and running with their own priorities, hoping to foster increased participation by a coveted demographic and maybe — just maybe — to win the biggest fight of their lives. Again.
“I think the issue base that the Democratic Party champions really affects everybody, but in particular, there are some issues that are going to impact young people more, for sure,” said Grayson Barnette, a 28-year-old at-large delegate originally from Lenoir. “Especially issues that are really a longer-term conversation.”
Turnout has traditionally been a problem among the nation’s youngest voters. Whether disinterested, disgusted or devoted to making lives of their own, young people across the nation typically vote at rates far lower than older people. It’s one of the most durable statistics in all of politics, doled out over years.
People over 60 vote more than any other age bracket. In the 2020 General Election, an estimated 78% cast ballots, according to the University of Florida.
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Right behind them were voters aged 45 to 59, at 73%.
Behind them, ages 30 to 44 with 64%.
Voters 18 to 29 turned out at about 52%.
There are more than 50 million Americans in the 18 to 29 range — Democrats, Libertarians, Republicans, everything in between. The demographic has the potential to shape every election, every year, on every level, if it’s properly mobilized.
It’s usually not. During the 2022 mid-term election, when turnout is always lower overall, a Tufts University study showed especially sluggish turnout among younger voters in what are now presidential swing states. Only 23% of young North Carolina voters showed up to the polls that year, despite the obvious implication that they’ll have to live with the next administration’s policies a lot longer than older voters will.
“We have policymakers who are 75 and 80 years old who are not going to experience the economic impacts 40 years down the line,” said Colton Browder, a 23-year-old delegate from Buncombe County. “Ensuring that we are doing right by the people today, ensuring that our economic and fiscal policy is setting up our generation and future generations for success, I think, is critical.”
That’s what Minnesota governor and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz told hundreds of attendees when he dropped in unscheduled to a Democratic Youth Council meeting at the DNC on Aug. 20 to discuss policies younger Democrats prioritize.
“Look, we have issues we need to solve and I keep talking about this — the issue around climate change, you need to take a role in this. You know why? I’ll be dead long before the impact falls to you,” Walz said. “And this generation that doesn’t think they need to do a damn thing, you and your kids are going to feel the brunt of it if we don’t attack it.”
The effects of climate change are far-reaching and act as a drag on nearly every sector of the economy. North Carolina’s General Assembly overrode two vetoes by Gov. Roy Cooper last year that critics say will make it easier to pollute, and the North Carolina Republican Party nominee for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, believes climate science is junk.
Agriculture is the state’s top economic sector and is especially vulnerable to climate change, but along the state’s peripheries, another economic sector is equally vulnerable.
“We benefit a lot from tourism on the coast and in the mountains,” Barnette said. “Anytime we have these natural disasters that set our community back, we’re going to see our infrastructure crumble. With an 80-to-100-year timeline on most of our infrastructure, particularly in Western North Carolina, we’re going to start seeing more failures.”
The small Haywood County town of Canton may not be the tourist hotbed that other Smoky Mountain destinations are — yet — but deadly flooding in 2021 killed six people, caused half a billion dollars’ damage across the county and has thus far cost state and federal taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
“When the flooding happened in Canton, I think that was one of the times of us being able to see in Western North Carolina that some of this climate stuff is really affecting us, even all the way out here,” said Kristen Robinson, a 28-year-old Buncombe County delegate.
It was the town’s second 500-year flood in 17 years.
At age 60, Walz is long done with his formal schooling but addressed student loan forgiveness by focusing on the other side of the coin — college affordability.
“When I graduated high school, you could have taken a minimum wage job in the summer and paid the tuition cost at the University of Minnesota for a year,” he said.
In 1982, the year Walz’s class of 25 students graduated from high school in Butte, Nebraska, the cost for one year of college at the University of Minnesota was $1,455 in-state, which would take 470 hours of minimum wage labor at the prevailing $3.10 federal hourly minimum wage to pay for — about 11 weeks of full-time work, or roughly the average length of the a typical college summer break.
That same year, the average cost for one year of college in the United States was $3,877, per the National Center for Education Statistics. At minimum wage it would take 1,250 hours of work to pay for one year of college — more than the number of hours a full-time employee works in 31 weeks.
Walz’s anecdote makes a larger point. Today, “the economics of this are upside down,” he said, and the numbers are far worse.
For the 2022-23 school year, NCES reports an average cost of $38,270 for a year of college. With federal minimum wage holding steady at $7.25 for the past 15 years, today it would take 5,340 hours of work to pay for a year of college — more than 31 months of full-time, minimum wage labor.
Kristen Robinson is currently in graduate school, has $40,000 in educational debt and hasn’t yet entered her prime earning years, but she’s calling for increased funding of merit-based forgivable loan programs, like the N.C. Teaching Fellows Program.
“I think what we need to do is make sure we’re funding our education systems and also making sure that we’re keeping in check some of these institutions that are kind of price gouging,” she said.
Through a program called NC Promise that started in 2018, students in North Carolina can qualify for significantly reduced tuition at Elizabeth City State University, Fayetteville State University, UNC-Pembroke and Western Carolina University, $500 a semester. This fall, UNC-Chapel Hill’s “Tar Heel Guarantee” covers out-of-pocket tuition and fees for students whose families make less than $80,000 a year, but these programs are relatively new attempts to address affordability.
Jesse Ross, a 28-year-old delegate from Haywood County, said that he had to run a cost-benefit analysis of college a decade ago, eventually committing to Queen’s University of Charlotte, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history.
“Part of that calculus actually comes down to the fact that I remember being 18 and not knowing if a college degree would actually be worth it. It’s turned out that way for me. Luckily, I don’t have as many student loans,” said Ross, President of the Haywood County Young Democrats and western regional vice president for the Young Democrats of North Carolina. “But if I was that age now and looking at how much student loans were, I would be preaching about how absolutely unfair and how much of a lack of a future I have.”
Many younger Democrats are also concerned about what sort of future their LGBTQ+ peers will have, especially in a state that bumbled its way into massive boycotts by passing a so-called “bathroom bill” that was so unpopular its repeal actually expanded LGBTQ+ rights.
Whereas older generations may still feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the LGBTQ+ liberation movement, that’s not so for the next generation of Democrats who basically grew up taking modern visibility and freedoms for granted.
“Our generation, we have a lot of empathy with ‘Hey, we don’t want to be messed with by the government,’” Ross said. “Ironically, that’s a GOP talking point.”
Maybe not as much, anymore; at the risk of invoking conflicted memories of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Walz has been calling out what he says is a “weird” obsession by Republicans with bathroom/bedroom issues, using a new slogan — “mind your own damn business.” He’s not the only one.
“I don’t find it in my business what people do in their bedrooms and I think it’s odd to have such a fixation on what people want to do in their own personal lives,” Browder said.
“Democrats just want everybody to be able to live their lives safely, happily and not have to worry about medical debt or being burdened by a job that doesn’t pay them or being discriminated against for who they love or what they look like. It’s that simple,” said Barnette.
“I think it’s really weird that they are focused on this issue instead of things like affordable housing, affordable health care, the economy, making sure we have good-paying jobs,” Robinson said. “It seems like they just want to bring up issues to keep folks divided instead of bringing us together as a country.”
Robinson got her start in politics as the LGBTQ Caucus Chair for the College Democrats of North Carolina after the landmark 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment requires states to permit same-sex marriage. During her first semester at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, she was “amazed” to see that moment arrive for one of her LGBTQ+ professors.
“That’s kind of what motivated me to want to be involved in this stuff,” Robinson said. “I saw change can happen and things can get better. You just have to work for it.”
Sometimes lost in the roiling national debate about abortion, especially post-Dobbs, is that although a democracy allows everyone to have a say in the type of society they want to create, the primary demographic this particular issue affects is people of child-bearing age — young people.
Since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, only about a third of Americans have opposed the right to an abortion. Now, gone the guardrails of Roe, abortion is severely or completely restricted in 16 states.
Many consider outrage over the Dobbs ruling in some of those states as a key reason why an expected “red wave” in the 2022 election washed out long before hitting the shores of Washington, D.C. as hoped.
While other prominent issues have since popped into the forefront of the campaign, Democrats don’t want voters to forget who engineered the ruling that has imperiled what they say are their rights.
In North Carolina, the Dobbs led the General Assembly to roll back to a 12-week abortion ban — draconian by some measures, generous by others.
“Planned Parenthood in Asheville has seen an increase of folks from other states with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It’s putting a strain on our systems, but we have to have it,” Robinson said. “Folks need somewhere to go if they can’t go in their own state right now.”
Democrats used to have a saying about abortion. “Safe, legal and rare.”
While the party talked the talk on all three components of that statement, they’ve really only walked the walk on the first two.
Robinson thinks that if Americans really want abortions to be rare, they should try to protect the child once it’s outside the womb, too.
“With all the other things that are on top that we have to pay for, having things like the child tax credit I think really helps people feel more comfortable about being able to raise their family in a good, healthy way,” she said.
That, historically, has been a fight. But it’s a fight in which Walz and North Carolina’s youthful Democratic delegation are willing to engage.
“This is a privilege to be in this fight,” Walz said. “It’s a pain in the butt to have to do some of this, it’s a lot of extra work, but I guarantee you, I guarantee you, the stories that you will tell and your generation will tell — because look, this thing’s going to be close, it is going to be closer than it should be, it’s going to be won in the trenches — It’s going to be won by your demographic for the most part. If we can turn you out and get you to vote.”
Learn more
Haywood County delegate to the 2024 Democratic National Convention Jesse Ross has a lot to say about his experience in Chicago and wants to share it with you. Ross will host an informal informational session this weekend, answering your questions at the Haywood County Democratic Party headquarters. Free.
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Date: Sunday, Sept. 1
Location: 734 North Main Street, Waynesville
