Nonpartisan group teams up with conservatives to boost youth voter engagement at RNC

MILWAUKEE (CN) — A politically unaffiliated organization striving to engage college-aged potential voters conducted a workshop championing nonpartisan political discourse and hosted speeches by a former Republican congressman and other conservative speakers as part of the Republican National Convention on Wednesday.

Though the event occurred on day three of the GOP’s presidential nomination convention, organizers from the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago stressed that the program was explicitly nonpartisan. The organizers said they feel that is the best way to approach young voters, particularly those who feel disillusioned by the political process.

“When students, and young people more broadly, turn out in force, they can impact our democracy in a way that transcends partisan politics," Clarissa Unger, co-founder and executive director of Students Learn Students Vote, said.

Feeling the spirit of transcending partisan politics, former Republican U.S. Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina said during a conversation with Institute of Politics director and former New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer late in the day’s program that, in Congress, he had friends across the aisle like former U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, now deceased.

"The toughest people on me when I was in Congress were my own team," Gowdy said, adding, “I don’t hate people that disagree with me … it’s okay to reconsider that maybe you are wrong on a position.”

Gowdy said his time spent as a federal prosecutor and Republican district attorney before he was in Congress influenced how he views political disagreements.

“When you prosecute homicide cases, you know what evil is. Evil is not someone who disagrees with you politically,” he said.

The former lawmaker is perhaps best remembered for chairing a committee that conducted a contentious, politically fraught investigation into an attack on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, during the Barack Obama presidency that resulted in the death of three Americans, including a U.S. ambassador.

For the first half of the institute’s event at the Blue Ribbon Hall once part of the former Pabst brewery, college students from schools all over the country were split into groups for three different workshops. Beforehand, they listed issues that were important to them, such as immigration, inflation, climate, foreign policy and, perhaps unsurprisingly, student debt.

One workshop was specifically geared toward giving students tools for having nonpartisan conversations about politics with their peers on campus.

Ben Heinz, a student who attends Illinois Wesleyan and lives in Bloomington-Normal, knocks on doors for a local candidate, and he said many people he speaks to feel like “no one represents them” in the political arena.

Students Learn Students Vote communications director Danny Fersh touched on this during the workshop, explaining that young people often sense a lack of representation in elected officials from their age group, race and ethnicity and gender.

Fersh said this is particularly true of Generation Z, an age group typically defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, who feel particularly disillusioned with both major political parties. But he said that students engaging students works because they trust people in their social circle more than those outside of it.

Dolan Blair, a recent graduate of Wheaton College in Michigan where he ran the College Republicans chapter, said he plans to attend the RNC Wednesday night as a guest of a delegate. He said the economy is the number one issue for him, especially given his age.

“We just aren’t increasing as fast as inflation is, and for people like me who are younger, it’s getting harder to buy a house, gas and food,” he said.

Other speakers in the second half of the event included conservative media personality and Donald Trump supporter Clay Travis; Whitley Yates, the Indiana Republican Party’s director of diversity; and Benji Backer, founder of the American Conservation Coalition, a right-leaning environmentalist group.

Backer expressed frustration that conservation was a partisan issue and stressed unity across the political spectrum.

“Americans want a lot of the same things, we just have different ideas of how to get there," he said.

Yates said people remain politically divided and estranged from those who think differently because “we are so comfortable in our silos of sameness."

In terms of determining how young people vote, pollsters and data wonks often consider “young” to be between the ages of 18 and 24, although other sources count anyone under 30. Still others consider those aged 18 to 44 to be “younger” voters, like a Brookings Institute study that showed a generational divide on key issues between older and younger Republicans.

No matter how you qualify a voter as young, the youth vote is something coveted by both parties trying to juice turnout.

This is no different in swing-state Wisconsin, whose 10 electoral votes are considered one of the linchpins to victory for both Republicans and Democrats this November. And there could be a lot of votes to be had, seeing as how the Upper Midwest battleground led the nation in turnout for voters under 25 as recently as the 2022 midterms, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Institute of Politics will also be in Chicago next month for the Democratic National Convention with a similar program of workshops and speakers.

Follow @cnsjkelly