Women Who Travel Podcast: Traveling the Country to Mobilize Young Voters

One of my favorite things I love to do when I go to the campuses with our team is we actually do a lot of interviews for social media when people come up and say, “Tell me why you’re voting.” Or, “What matters to you this election?” And what’s really cool is I was interviewing two sets of friends. They were new to campus. They had just met each other in the dorm two days before, but they had become already super best friends, and one young woman, you asked her, she was 18, she was going to be a first-time voter, she was so excited to vote. She had clearly like, “These are all the policy reasons why I’m going to vote on abortion, on Project 2025.” And then her friend said, “I don’t know. I want to vote for Kamala because I think she’s cool.” And what was great about it’s they each were learning from each other, but I am always really impressed by the level of knowledge that people have.

So when you come up to a NextGen table, not only are you going to be greeted by other young people, but they may be making Taylor Swift friendship bracelets at our booths. We’ve also had coffee and donuts, different games and prizes, and, of course, our big, big swag that people love is our Hot Girls Vote campaign and our Bad Boys Vote campaign. So people love the swag and stickers that come from those. So people’s dorms can be kind of dreary. So they were actually coming to the booth so that they could paint original artwork for their dorms to decorate them. So a lot of those activities are what draw people in.

There’s also these amazing local influencers that have really key geographic followings. So there was a pair of huskies, not even people, huskies, that had a huge following in Wisconsin. So we signed up them, actually, it’s their owner, and signed them up to make sure they were using their platform to tell people about the voting deadlines to get, encouraged them to vote, and why the dogs wanted to vote and who they were voting for if they could.

We are trying to increase and make sure that we have more men in the organization, and we even organize on Discord and Twitch to try and reach young men. We know that men of color vote at less higher numbers. So this election we’ve also been targeting certain men of color and Pennsylvania and Arizona to make sure they’re using their platforms to connect with young people and make sure that they’re getting out information that’s reliable and honest and truthful about when, where, and how to vote.