As I walked from my lower Manhattan office to head home on Election Night, I kept thinking the unseasonably humid November air smelled like Florida — a place I’ve spent a lot of time, that under the DeSantis administration would rather I never come back. Within hours, the election was being called for former president Donald Trump. In a literal sense, the reactionary conservatism of states like Florida had come for the rest of the country, just as Florida youth warned me it would. Come Wednesday morning, New York City was hotter and redder than the day before.
Already the election is being blamed on young people; it was before it even happened. To that I have to say a hearty f*ck you. Young progressives told Democrats how to stop this, and they refused. Now we have another Trump presidency, likely a Republican-led Congress, and pivotal crises that will only be worsened under their leadership. People are shocked that there are populations of young voters that went for Trump, but it’s no coincidence those particular voters are largely white and conservative. Democrats gave progressive young people nothing to vote for. As professor Tyler Austin Harper wrote this morning for the New York Times, “What we just went through was not an election; it was a hostage situation.”
The “lesser of two evils” argument has run dry, just in time for the autumn drought on the East Coast — “rare” for now; who knows for the future.
A year ago, young people were warning the Democrats about the strong chance they would lose in 2024 if they didn’t switch up their policy on Gaza. At that time we already knew how deeply unpopular both then-nominee Biden and Trump were with voters. On November 7, 2023, March for Our Lives, Sunrise Movement, United We Dream, and Gen Z for Change issued a letter to the Biden administration warning, “The position of your administration is badly out of step with young people and the positions of Democratic voters... This is already becoming an issue we are hearing about from thousands of young people across the country. We cannot explain your position to the people of our generation.”
As I noted at the time, this was compounding with deep existential dread over the Biden admin’s choice to approve oil drilling in Alaska that spring, in spite of extreme pushback. We knew then that he was risking Michigan. By the spring, voters were using “uncommitted” and similar ballot efforts to sound the alarm, as the death toll in Gaza continued rising by the thousands. Over half a million voters did so during the primaries.
Democrats responded by letting over 2,000 pro-Palestine college students get arrested and harrassed on college campuses for months. Officials with both parties spent the last few years post-2020 uprisings criminalizing protest in states across the country; the spring gave them an opportunity to bear down on youth people especially. “I wonder if tear-gassing all your student voters effected [sic] the election,” sardonically asked one Twitter user, reacting to Harris’s losses in Michigan.
Once Biden dropped out, young voters were offered a new Democratic nominee who consistently refused to differentiate herself from him. Protesters gathered at the DNC and organizers lobbied for the party to consider platforming a Palestinian voice; that small ask – infinitesimal when taken alongside the Palestinian-Americans who have lost dozens of family members from U.S.-supplied weapons – was denied. Some of those protesters had hope at the time that Kamala Harris’ campaign could be swayed. Within weeks, Harris dismissed them. Pop star Chappell Roan echoed the concerns of young voters over Gaza and LGBTQ+ rights then was harassed for weeks, all because she wouldn’t fall into line with the rest of the celebrity endorsements.
The Democrats declined to make aggressive commitments on climate change as the planet burns, focused instead on a mythical centrist voter who doesn’t seem to exist. If they do, they went for Trump — because, as many have said, why go for “Republican light” if the real thing is available?
Over and over, pro-Palestine protesters chanted, “Come November/We’ll remember.” They did. Did the Democrats? Some did; Palestinian-American Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib won handily in the state that went to Trump — indeed, she did twice as well as Kamala Harris.
And even if you say it wasn’t just Palestine, it was any number of things, the story is the same: They bet on the wrong people, the ones they never stood a chance with. To do so, “Both candidates offered up policies that were unpopular even among their supporters, serving a banquet for their donor classes while doling out junk food to their base,” argued Harper in the Times.
And who was left behind in the process? Today I’m thinking of trans youth, some of whom have already been forced to flee their states under anti-trans state legislation. Democrats hung them out to dry. “Every day I get more angry that we, politicians, no matter your party affiliation, are aiding in a transgenocide,” outgoing State Rep. Mauree Turner of Oklahoma commented after the death of Oklahoman trans 16-year-old Nex Benedict in February. Turner, the first openly nonbinary elected state official, has since decided not to run for re-election, blaming in part bipartisan abandonment of the marginalized communities they originally ran to serve.
As writer and LGBTQ+ organizer Raquel Willis told me in September, “We are being failed across the political spectrum… The uptick in the number of legislation introduced regarding the LGBTQ+ community has happened under the watch of the Biden-Harris administration.”
A survey we covered in August 2024 found that over 1 in 5 trans people surveyed lost access to healthcare “as a result of anti-LGBTQ policies and laws.” Nine in 10 believed the 2024 election would have “a major impact on access to healthcare for LGBTQ people nationwide.” Sixty-seven percent “[had] made or [were] planning to make changes to their use of gender-affirming care due to concerns about the election.”
The Trump campaign’s website promises a federal ban on gender-affirming care for minors, federally mandating gender assignment at birth, “Don’t Say Gay” in schools, and further fear-mongering about trans participation in sports.
Joe Scarborough is partly blaming trans participation in sports for the Democrats’ losses when the issue that the party threw themselves most firmly behind – reproductive rights – has even stronger support with nonbinary people than with women. Now consider that with the fact that a majority of white women voted for Trump for the third time in a row. Trump went wild with “Kamala is for they/them,” and Democrats couldn’t even put a trans person on stage at the DNC, even though one they invited up onto the 2016 stage became the first to win a seat in Congress.
Willis told me then, “We know that the fight continues, regardless of who gets into the Oval Office come January 2025… your power doesn't start or end at the ballot box; as much as we like to say that it does in the United States, it doesn't. It's everyday people who feed and clothe and house and keep safe and heal folks who for too long have been failed by many of the institutions around us.”
Those people will be working for young people regardless of what happened this week. Too bad we can’t say the same for most adults in this country.
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