New Minnesota organization looks to get out the Gen Z vote

CATHY WURZER: It's 12:31. Early voting is officially underway for the Minnesota presidential primary. And a new organization wants to make sure that young voters are engaged and have a record turnout. One recent estimate from Tufts University found that 41 million members of Gen Z will be eligible to vote this year. And the organization Believe In What's Possible wants to make sure as many of those Minnesotans are getting to the polls.

Joining us right now is Programming Director Chelsea Sheldon. Welcome, Chelsea. I'm sorry, I can't even talk today. Welcome to the program.

CHELSEA SHELDON: No worries at all. Thanks so much.

CATHY WURZER: Absolutely. So I was on your website earlier this morning, and the first thing I saw was this quote-- "Generation Z is being gaslit by politics." What do you mean by that?

CHELSEA SHELDON: Yeah. It's right up there at the top of our website and is really what's driving a lot of our work is Believe in What's Possible, because our generation here's a lot that we are disengaged. That we're not politically active. That we don't care, don't listen, don't vote.

And our generation doesn't believe that. We think that that message is inaccurate of the care and investment that we have around a lot of these issues. But a lot of the times, the political process or the current ways we engage voters don't reach my generation. And so that's kind of what we're saying with that quote right at the top. It's that we are an engaged generation, we just have to be thinking and acting a little bit differently in order to engage us on our terms.

CATHY WURZER: So, as one of the founders of this organization, what are you doing differently that other efforts are not?

CHELSEA SHELDON: Yeah. Well, I'm super proud to be one of the co-founders, like you said, along with three of my peers. And what we're trying to do is think specifically around primary elections for youth voter turnout and space-based organizing. So what I mean by that is we see a lot of people doing compelling youth voter engagement, but it often looks like the last two weeks before an election day, dorm storming college campuses, or going and knocking on all the doors at a college dorm building.

But we know that young people are in lots of other spaces than just on college campuses, and that they want to be engaged earlier in the process than right before or on election day. So what Believe In What's Possible is trying to do is start the conversation in the summer around primary elections when, quite literally, our vote matters more, because the percentage of people voting, determining who's on the ballot in November, is much smaller.

And so we're trying to create events-- concerts, craft nights, things like that-- during the early vote period that invite our generation into the space in a welcoming room that's surrounded by their peers to do an event or activity that they want to do anyway, and then linking that to political actions, such as through a popup polling place, or educational resources, or things like that that are specific to young people and the concerns we have.

CATHY WURZER: And are you nonpartisan?

CHELSEA SHELDON: We are. We are a completely nonpartisan organization. Our hope is to elevate young voices to speak on behalf of the issues they care about, and entirely emphasizing educational resources, access to these rooms rather than what we believe you have to be voting on behalf of.

CATHY WURZER: Tufts, as I mentioned in the intro, also found in this poll that racial inequities are pretty stark among young voters. Gosh, 2022, the voter turnout of white youth was between 7 and 11 points higher than that of other racial and ethnic groups of young people. How are racial inequities playing a role in this? And how are you trying to battle that?

CHELSEA SHELDON: Racial inequities are a huge piece of the conversation for all generation of voters, but including Gen Z, including my generation. The resources that we currently have are focused on, like I said, college-bound young people, young people that are already engaged in this process, people that we know have voted before. And data indicates that is often a wider collection of young people.

And so if we're using traditional tactics that emphasize who have voted before or who we think will vote, then we're not reaching whole swaths of our generation and not imagining a better future for what voter turnout can look like. So like I said earlier, and exactly to your point, we need to be thinking about how we can be shifting tactics, changing who's in the room, changing what the room looks like in the first place so that we're not just repeating what turnout has looked like all of these past few years, because then we're not going to see any significant change in the data that you highlight. So that's definitely one piece of the grounding that Believe In What's Possible is trying to have as we create rooms that are new and different than what political spaces have looked like for my generation up until this point.

CATHY WURZER: And how are you harnessing the power of social media? Because, of course, young folks are pretty savvy when it comes to social media.

CHELSEA SHELDON: A great question. Yeah. I think that's one of our superpowers. We got that covered. And I think that when we're talking about youth voter turnout, that needs to be part of the conversation. And I'm super lucky to be working with an incredible colleague of mine, our creative director who's trying to ask questions around, OK, what is our communications plan? How are we engaging and talking to all the other young people that have been working around this work or have been leading social change movements in and around Minneapolis, St. Paul, all of the state of Minnesota so that we're learning what is worked in the past, we're analyzing what other political campaigns, what other political organizations have done, and said, hmm, that didn't really vibe with our message, with our community, and trying to make sure that we're actively talking about social media as a compelling tool and crafting our message to speak to our generation, including sentences like that one you highlighted right at the top-- Gen Z is being gaslit by politics. That hits us to our core, and we believe it.

CATHY WURZER: That sentence was on your website. And there's another one, which I got a big smile on my face when I read it-- when we're done, voting and other forms of political action will be as exciting as getting your driver's license, buying your first lottery ticket, or turning 21. So you want to, obviously, ignite excitement in the political process.

CHELSEA SHELDON: 100%. Voting is a milestone, just like any other definition of age, right? Getting your driver's license, turning 21, things like that. And our team believes that it should be a spot of excitement, a spot of celebration, a means of participation rather than something that's like, oh, once every four years we got to go and take this action that we'd prefer we didn't have to do.

No, that's not what this should be. This should be something that's exciting, where we're speaking on behalf of the issues that are important to us with a community that believes the same and a network of our peers. It should be powerful and empowering. And so that's some of the thinking behind that sentence.

CATHY WURZER: And I appreciate the energy, but you're also bucking a lot of cynicism among voters out there.

CHELSEA SHELDON: That is true. And that's one of the reasons that we're trying to say, we want to do this differently. We're fully aware of the fact that up until this point-- and a lot of the times, people don't want to engage because those rooms are not fun. They're not inspiring. They're not empowering.

And by starting from the ground up and saying, no, we're going to make spaces that are and feel different for my generation, that's how we can then begin having conversations around how do we feel hopeful in these rooms, how do we feel inspired in these rooms?

Because you're 100% right. Right now, people question whether or not they want to engage, often for many really, really valid reasons. And we think that we need to be doing better by making spaces that feel a lot more genuine.

CATHY WURZER: Final question for you-- early voting is underway, as you know, for the primaries. What's the goal for your organization?

CHELSEA SHELDON: 100%. Yeah. So the early voting for the presidential primaries opened on January 19. So of course, we want everybody participating in that. For Believe In What's Possible specifically, we are actually thinking forward towards the state primaries this summer. That's what a lot of our scheming is around-- want to make sure that we're really invested at the local level.

So our target, specifically, is to increase youth voter turnout by 5% in the state primaries in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and St. Cloud. So that's what we're working around. We are really excited to chat to anyone and everyone including, all the young people that are invested in that vision and are ready to hit it this summer.

CATHY WURZER: All right. We'll keep track of you. Thank you so much. That was Chelsea Sheldon, the Programming Director for Believe In What's Possible here in the state of Minnesota.