Democrats counting on young voters in North Carolina

LAURINBURG, United States: For several months, Yampiere Lugo has been going door to door, urging young people in North Carolina to vote in November.

With Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race and Kamala Harris’s arrival atop the Democratic ticket, the party activist says his generation -- a key voting bloc -- is fired up.

“I’ve talked to a lot of people around my age who have sort of all expressed the same sentiment -- that they’re just so much more excited to have someone who’s just younger, more energetic,” Lugo told AFP.

The 25-year-old, who works as an administrative assistant at a local school, says even people he thought might skip the election altogether have said the vice president has their support.

The enthusiasm marks a sharp contrast with the situation Lugo was facing just over a month ago, when he was canvassing for Biden in Laurinburg, the seat of Scotland County, not far from the border with South Carolina.

At the time, the activist admitted to AFP that young voters were “frustrated” with their options, facing a choice between the 81-year-old Biden and Donald Trump, the 78-year-old Republican former president.

Now, Lugo believes Harris, 59, can win North Carolina, one of a handful of swing states likely to play a pivotal role in the race for the White House.

Winning here will be an uphill battle -- the southern state has not voted for a Democrat in the presidential election since Barack Obama in 2008. “North Carolina is going to have something to say in November,” said Zach Finley, the president of the Young Democrats of North Carolina.

But for Harris to turn the state Democratic blue, the party needs to campaign “the right way, turning out the folks we need to,” added Finley, who is also 25.

On a national level, voters between the ages of 18 and 39 favored Biden over Trump in 2020 by a margin of about 20 percentage points, according to the Pew Research Center. Finley says the party needs to “turn out young people who, especially in the last couple of years, have been really disincentivized” by the political process.