Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Associated Press/Canva/Getty/Gen Z Democrats Rebel Against DNC
By Alex J. Rouhandeh
National Political Correspondent
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It was less than three months after Kamala Harris had lost in all seven swing states that I met Georgia Young Democrats leader Parker Short. His party found itself embroiled in an identity crisis after Donald Trump grew his vote total among 18–29-year-old voters by 11 points.
For a party long identified with championing causes of the future, the shift was a smack in the face. However, coming from a place of relative success, Parker, 23, was optimistic about emerging leadership's ability to prevent this shift from becoming a trend.
Georgia was the only state where Democrats outperformed Biden's 2020 total with young voters, gaining by 7 percent with voters under 30, according to NPR. Parker helped lead that effort as president of the Young Democrats of Georgia from January through September of 2024 before taking the role of national committee representative that he holds today.
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Prior to visiting Parker in his hometown of Dunwoody, Georgia, as part of a larger reporting project on Gen Z politics, I'd encountered him in August 2024 at the Democratic National Convention confronting Republicans who came to exert their presence.
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That took place less than a month after Parker became a popular figure on TikTok and Instagram—boasting roughly 205,000 and 60,000 followers on the respective platforms—after he went viral for rapping the lyrics to Kendrick Lamar's grammy-winning single "Not Like Us" at a Harris campaign rally.
"When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade," Parker told me over coffee. Having started his foray into Democratic politics knocking on doors at 15, then founding a Democratic Party chapter at his high school, then working to elect a Democratic mayor to Dunwoody, then volunteering for Jon Ossoff's Senate campaign, then serving as a 2020 DNC delegate, Parker never intended to become a social media influencer.
The viral moment has no doubt offered Parker a platform to share nuanced political content and connect with peers across the country. However, he still believes the key to political change starts at the local and community level, emphasizing that through bottom-up organizing, Democrats can win again by starting small and riding that momentum up. His evidence: the top-down approach executed by the party last cycle proved disastrous and alienated young Democrats in the process.
A Changing Democratic Voter
The rise of social media and fall of prime-time television have vastly changed political campaigning. While candidates could once reach tens of millions of voters during prime time, today's audiences are fractured and skeptical of interacting with mailers and phone calls. Strategy matters more than ever because, as Trump proved, elections can be won despite raising far less money.
Democrats raised more than $1 billion more than Republicans—according to a New York Times analysis of Federal Election Commission data. A breakdown of that data by the nonprofit OpenSecrets found 70 percent—roughly $1.6 billion—of the Harris campaign's spending went toward media, with her top five recipients all being media consultant and production firms based in Washington, D.C.
The Trump campaign also had media as its top expenditure at 67 percent of its spending—nearly $314 million—but his campaign hired firms based in New York, Florida, and Virginia, with his fifth highest expenditure being private jet services.
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Gen Z Republican politicos attribute the Trump campaign's diversified outreach strategy to his unexpected success with voters under 29. Brilyn Hollyhand, chair of the Republican National Committee's Youth Advisory Council, said his council aided Republicans in reaching new segments of youth voters by bringing together elected officials, young and college Republicans, corporate leaders, and national figures to execute new outreach strategies.
Emanuel Hernaiz, treasurer of the Georgia and Atlanta Young Republican chapters as well as the former state director of Latinos for Trump, said the GOP benefits greatly from its relationship with conservative activist Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA. Through its local chapters and relationships with influencers, Turning Point proved a powerful force in bolstering Republican grassroots outreach and helping the party respond quickly to trending issues online.
Young Republicans and Democrats I spoke to agreed that the left does not have a comparable grassroots outreach arm to Turning Point, and leaders, including Parker, offered criticism toward the DNC's concentration of power and resources in Washington, D.C.
The imbalance of power between Washington Democrats and their state peers became a key feature of the 2025 race for DNC chair, with Ken Martin, who previously led Minnesota's state Democratic Party, winning the nomination on the promise of returning power to the states. For Democrats in red America, this mandate warranted cause for optimism.
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Fighting From Within
Kimberly Agyekum, a 29-year-old native of central Ohio, serves as the president of the Ohio Young Democrats. Her unconventional entry into politics began at an Ohio wine bar where she met the mother of Democratic congressional candidate Danny O'Connor, who talked her into working for his campaign.
Despite O'Connor losing his bid—although he now serves as Franklin County Recorder—Agyekum said it was "the best summer of my life" and has been hooked on politics ever since. In April 2024, she became the first Black woman to lead the Ohio Young Democrats and has played a key role in national campaigns. It's in the latter position where she noticed issues with her party's strategy.
Agyekum believes Ohio is emblematic of a missed political opportunity for the Democratic Party. Ohio voted for the winning presidential candidate every election since 1964 until it backed Trump over Biden in 2020.
Still, despite being represented by Republicans in all the major statewide offices, the state feels winnable for Democrats. In 2023, a ballot measure passed in Ohio affirming abortion access. The state ranks among the 20 most unionized, and it has three significant Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas in Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. Given this, Agyekum doesn't see culture war issues as the reason for Democratic losses but instead blames the party's top-down organizing strategy.
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In contrast to the Democrats' grassroots approach to defending abortion access in Ohio, the 2024 election was an example of what state party leaders described to me as The National Consultant Treatment.
"They come in and don't really invest in the infrastructure of what we can do here at the state and local level and instead just want to do their thing," Agyekum said. While she believes the state party needs national funds to compete, Agyekum said state and local party leaders better understand how to spend those dollars. For example, when national Democrats decided to fund a mural in Columbus promoting Harris, the mural was installed in an area with low foot and vehicle traffic, she said.
The 2024 Ohio Senate race was a prime example of this as former four-term Democratic incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown defended his seat against Bernie Moreno, a wealthy car dealer.
Brown's campaign featured criticism of his own party. Yet, despite his rallying against the establishment, the party apparatus inserted itself heavily in the race as individuals came in across the country and started instructing local leaders and volunteers on how to run things, Agyekum said.
In the process, they demonstrated knowledge gaps and drew resistance from locals. "Anybody who has 'organizing' in their title, whether it be the top person or all the way down to organizing interns, those people should be from here," Agyekum said. "When we're talking about people lower on the totem pole of a campaign, it becomes more and more important that that person works in the state where they're from."
A Pattern of Unforced Errors
The chair of the Democratic National Committee Youth Council agrees with Agyekum's analysis of the problem. André Treiber, a 33-year-old Texan, has worked in politics since Barack Obama's presidency and believes it's not the party's platform that has soured with voters, but its way of connecting with them.
"What activists, elected officials, and party officers see and face in their communities every day is completely different from what a consultant is going to talk about at their happy hour," André told me.
André said services from the national party are sometimes only received from its preferred vendors. André has carried out organizing work for campaigns in Texas and experienced national consultants coming in and presenting campaign strategies derived from national polling and focus groups that he said feel out of touch with the area's concerns.
Other times, André said, Democratic-aligned PACs fundraise off a heated race without a clear intention of putting that money back into the campaign. Sometimes they also spread political materials that actively work against the campaign, because of being out of touch with local issues.
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Understanding the landscape and culture of an area doesn't just help ensure messaging lands, but it also helps prevent money being misspent. Irshad Rembert, a 20-year-old Georgia State University political science student, has experienced the unforced errors and wasted dollars associated with poor top-down organizing.
After completing an internship with Georgia General Assembly for Democratic Representative Tanya Miller, Irshad was inspired to recharter the Georgia State Young Democrats chapter in Spring of 2024 and has grown its membership to 130, he said.
When it came time for Democrats to campaign in the state later that summer, the party had a new organization at the state's most heavily enrolled school, which has a student population of over 50,000. Come election season, the Democratic Party of Georgia expressed interest in holding an event on campus. But when the time came, Irshad said the party communicated very little with the chapter and arranged to hold the event in a known hub for unhoused individuals.
The event was supposed to give free food to college students, but instead it went to the unhoused people, he said. As the election drew nearer, interactions with party higher-ups proved similar. "Whatever the request was, however small it was, it was like pulling teeth," he said.
Georgia State's appointed campus organizer promised signs and T-shirts, but come October 25, was unable to provide them. When Irshad asked why, the organizer said the state party, which coordinated with the national party, was unresponsive.
By contrast, when Kirk and Turning Point came to campus, they brought a robust array of volunteers, posted numerous signs, and gave away free MAGA hats. At a Georgia Democratic Party campus event, they charged for Harris-Walz hats. "Turning Point is about 10 members that I know of, if that, so for them to get that level of support campus, was really shocking to me."
Organizing Forward
All the young Democrats I spoke to remain committed to their party's platform and do not think it needs to take any major changes to stave off accusations of being too "woke." Rather, they believe their current principles—like supporting abortion rights, LGBTQ+ equality, and racial justice—should be treated as settled priorities, thus state and local leaders will not need to relitigate these topics and can instead focus on the matters most pertinent to their communities.
Parker believes doing this effectively requires D.C. policymakers to seed agenda-setting power to their colleagues back home. By listening to those on the ground, he thinks the party can better expand its appeal.
"If you're out there in the community, they're gonna humble you, and you can't be elitist," he said. "Folks really need to focus on being out in their community or candidates will get out of touch and that's what I think is like an issue with some folks in D.C."
In Georgia, Parker is encouraging young people interested in politics to begin their careers by pursing roles in local and state office. So far, this effort has found success. "The Henry County party is led by a 25-year-old. The Macon-Bibb County party is led by a 25-year-old. The vice chair of Gwinnett County is led by a 20-year-old," he told me.
The Harvard Public Opinion Project Youth Poll's Spring 2025 data reports that just 19 percent of Americans under 30 trust the federal government to do the right thing most or all the time, with further distrust being held toward an array of other national institutions.
The internet no doubt changed the way America conducts politics, and with historic economic inequality and political unrest, many individuals only trust the people and institutions they interact with face to face. For most, that's not Washington—it's the state and their community.
While a strong federal government may be central to the Democratic Party's identity, maintaining that objective likely requires relinquishing control from the capital and encouraging state politicos to explore new ways to achieve success.
The organizers who win elections have grown tired of D.C. calling the shots, and the young Democrats of Georgia believe the success they've garnered demonstrates that bottom-up campaigning can expand appeal in places like Ohio.
The question for party leaders is will they let the next generation of organizers test this belief come 2026 and 2028.
Editor's Note: This story was written under advisement of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where the author conducted this reporting in completion of his Master of Arts thesis.
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