PITTSBURGH — With just 44 days until the 2024 election, U.S. Reps. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) mobilized youthful voters for Harris-Walz at Carnegie Mellon University on Sunday.
Young people, Lee told the audience, “are not the voices of the future” but rather “the voices of the present.”
“We are all in the most influential room in the country,” she said. “This is the most powerful room because we are in western Pennsylvania, we are in western Pennsylvania, and the path to the White House, the path to the Senate and the path to the House of Representatives all run right through your campuses.”
Pennsylvania is key for both Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee. With 19 electoral votes, the Keystone State is the biggest prize among the blue wall states for each candidate.
According to the Pew Research Center, About two-thirds of registered voters aged 18 to 24 support DemocratsIn 2023, the Center for Information and Research on Citizen Science and Engagement estimated that Approximately 41 million Generation Z members will be eligible to vote in the 2024 election..
The co-organizers of Sunday’s event were: Pitt Student Democrats, CMU Student Democrats, and Allegheny County Young Democrats.
“When I talk about what our job is in the next 40 days, your job is to take care of each other, because that’s what I’m voting for,” Lee said. “I’m going to vote for the most marginalized person in my life. Because that’s my job, my responsibility, to make sure that I create conditions where we can all survive, not just survive, where we can all thrive.”
Ocasio-Cortez gave Lee a list of issues that are most likely to worry youthful voters: climate change, school shootings and the cost of rent and health care.
“We’re getting older and growing up in a world that our predecessors left us,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “With respect, a lot of what we’re left with is broken, really broken, and broken not just on a partisan level but generationally.”
Ocasio-Cortez told a story from her time at Boston University when Barack Obama launched his candidacy, and her mail-in ballot did not arrive in time. She said she took a bus back home to New York to cast her vote for the next president.
She encouraged students not only to register to vote in Pennsylvania with an on-campus address, but also to sign up for a shift with the Harris-Walz campaign, going door-to-door and ensuring Democrats win at every level of the election.
Those calls to action were the theme of Sunday’s event, which featured speakers including Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato, CMU College Democrats President Avalon Sueiro and Harris-Walz campus organizer Agatha Prairie.
Prairie encouraged attendees to convince five friends to vote, and Sueiro said to knock on classmates’ doors and “have tough conversations” about the stakes of the election.
Gainey adopted a more somber attitude.
“We should all be tired. I’m tired of someone who can stand on a debate stage and tell the American people and the world that the immigrants who are here in our country are eating dogs and cats,” he said, referring to former President Donald Trump. false claim that Haitian immigrants ate pets in Springfield, Ohio“I’ve had enough of this level of hate.”
Trump’s vice presidential candidate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), campaigned in Berks County on Saturday and mentioned Springfield in his remarks. His job “as a United States senator representing the people of Ohio is to listen to the American people and fight for them,” Vance said.
“Our message to Kamala Harris and the Democrats is that we will continue to complain about their policies because this is America and we have the right to express our opinions,” he added.
Innamorato noted that the satellite voting site at Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall in Oakland will be open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. from Oct. 15 to 17. The satellite locations offer residents the ability to register to vote, request an absentee ballot, fill it out and return it all in one place.
“Pennsylvania’s victory is visible in Allegheny County and in its young people,” Innamorato said. “I ask all of you to please do what you can, knock on doors, volunteer, make phone calls, talk to your weird cousins, talk to your classmates, because we have a lot of work to do in the next 44 days.”
