Young Democrats Are Putting the Party Back in Politics. It’s Working.

Sept. 25, 2026

For decades, young people have been one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal blocs.

That allegiance has crumbled.

Eight years ago, 41 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 identified as Democrats. Today, just 28 percent do. Even if Democrats eke out victories in November and in 2028 without large numbers of young people, it won’t be enough to marginalize MAGA or enact ambitious change.

A blue youth wave is possible. It starts by dusting off an old political tool, one that the party has neglected for decades: collective fun. This isn’t the vibes-based joy from Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. It’s a participatory, populist joy that older political machines used to build power, and that some younger politicians, including Michelle Wu and Zohran Mamdani, have begun reviving.

Sweeping the midterms is not enough. To defeat President Trump’s movement and win back young voters, Democrats need a credible vision for how to make everyday life joyful again.

Politicians used to understand the power of a good time. A century ago, attracting volunteers and voters often meant hosting a dance with cheap drinks at the neighborhood hall or drawing whole families to a clambake in the park. Tammany Hall was more than a machine; it was a building in Manhattan that had an oyster bar, a ladies’ lounge and a theater, whose performances helped launch vaudeville. One Tammany leader, George Washington Plunkitt, explained how he won over new voters: “Young feller gains a reputation as a baseball player in a vacant lot. I bring him into our baseball club. That fixes him. You’ll find him workin’ for my ticket at the polls next Election Day.”

The old political machines could reach into a dense web of communal life. Consider the “sewer socialists” who governed Milwaukee for most years between 1910 and 1960. Before sweeping into City Hall, socialists took the helm of the city’s labor movement and rooted their party in Milwaukee’s choirs, gymnastics clubs and mutual-aid societies. Milwaukee’s first socialist mayor, Emil Seidel, recalled that in their party’s parades, every band in the city marched, and “everybody who had a horn played.” The socialists held carnivals regularly, often drawing over 10,000 people.

The result, from the 1970s onward, was the reign of a broadcast politics that had little need for popular participation. Fun could, at most, be something messaged to people. It was no longer something they did together.

Bill Clinton helped pioneer this model of top-down fun during his 1992 presidential campaign, when he donned sunglasses and played the saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” an appearance that helped rewrite the playbook for presidential campaigning. Three decades later, Kamala Harris brought the same basic approach into the social-media age. Realizing that voters in 2024 were exhausted by political gloom, she pumped pop music at her rallies and called herself a “joyful warrior.” To some extent, her message landed: I shared her viral coconut-tree meme at one point. Yet the good-vibes approach ultimately fizzled, and by the homestretch, she had largely dropped it. One problem was that the joy was broadcast from above, through Ms. Harris’s smiles onstage, a Megan Thee Stallion performance and a Ben Stiller fund-raising Zoom call.

A disappointing presidency can’t be messaged away. And an army of volunteers capable of persuading their neighbors can’t be conjured through a few rallies and calls on the eve of an election. For Democrats in 2024, the fun was too little, too late.

At the local and state levels, some Millennial Democrats are bringing back older forms of participatory politics. A Democratic leader in Wisconsin, Ben Wikler, argues that the Democratic Party should make itself a permanent presence in local communities, with neighborhood-level organizing between elections — much as he did while chairing his state’s party. Boston’s mayor, Ms. Wu, gives grants for residents to throw their own free block parties.

But the clearest revival of true political fun is in New York City. Last year, Zohran Mamdani combined free communal events with a message of economic populism to win more votes than any mayoral candidate since 1969. He swept young Black, white and Latino voters.

Like Milwaukee’s sewer socialists, Mr. Mamdani’s organization spent years building a movement through community events. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (of which I’m a member) offers daily opportunities for face-to-face socializing: a “Sing in Solidarity” choir, soccer and softball leagues, picnics and potlucks, “Coffee with Comrades,” a running club, dance parties, singles mixers, game nights and birding outings.

ImageCredit...Lauren Roche for The New York Times

Many of these activities sprang up after the success of New York City D.S.A.’s soccer league in 2022. In March 2023, the chapter’s membership coordinator at the time, Joshua Kraushaar, wrote that proactive socializing could “hold the key to substantial growth,” especially among young people. Today, 50 to 100 people join the chapter each week, many after having attended one of its social events, according to Mr. Kraushaar.

Mr. Mamdani carried this participatory spirit into his campaign and then into office. On Jan. 1, 2026, he paired his City Hall swearing-in with an Inaugural Block Party attended by tens of thousands of New Yorkers. Despite below-freezing temperatures, it felt at times like a carnival, with participants dancing in between speakers, singing together, sharing hand warmers, occasionally crying. “Not only will we make it possible for every New Yorker to afford a life they love once again,” the 34-year-old mayor told the crowd. “we will overcome the isolation that too many feel, and connect the people of this city to one another.”

Fun public events aren’t just a recruitment tactic for Mr. Mamdani, as they were for Tammany Hall. They communicate a larger goal: that everyday people should be able to afford a joyful life. Since taking office, he has distributed cheap World Cup tickets, hosted Knicks watch parties and piloted a program that provides free babysitting. He opened five municipal soccer fields 24/7 over the summer. On Thursday, he announced that he was giving away 70,000 free tickets to the Metropolitan Opera.

These are all modest actions. But the mayor leans on these acts to dramatize, in miniature, the same argument he makes when freezing the rent, expanding child care, or taxing second homes: that the good life has been fenced off by wealth, and that public power can tear those fences down.

Had Ms. Harris won the same share of young voters as Mr. Mamdani did — 75 percent — and approximated his surge in youth turnout, she would have carried all seven battleground states and decisively won the 2024 popular vote.

A populist youth surge has reshaped American politics before. In 1936, young voters supported Franklin Roosevelt by more than two to one, helping cement a New Deal coalition that passed Social Security, strengthened labor rights and established a federal minimum wage — and kept Democrats dominant in Congress for decades.

The country, of course, isn’t nearly as progressive as New York City. But the potential to engage young people is enormous: Fewer than half voted in 2024, and their partisan loyalties remain relatively unsettled. When Americans under 30 were asked what would make them more likely to participate, their top answer was reducing the influence of corporations and money in politics. That’s the opening: Democrats should make shared fun a means of challenging corporate power and an end worth fighting for.

ImageCredit...Lauren Roche for The New York Times

For over a century, companies have converted the things we did together into things we consume separately. Singing around a piano gave way to a Ticketmaster checkout, the front stoop to the Instagram feed. In 1912, working men in New York City averaged about 135 minutes of daily socializing; today the number for Americans has fallen nationwide to only 55 minutes a day, even when you include phone and video calls. That means we now spend less than half as much time socializing, with young people doing so least of all.

Mr. Mamdani’s movement focused on constructing a new communal infrastructure, one soccer league at a time. So must Democrats everywhere. The party’s old playbook of farming out community engagement can only go so far when fewer than 6 percent of private-sector workers are in a union, when so many nonprofits don’t have members and when church attendance is at historic lows across racial groups.

Instead of disbanding volunteer engagement after Election Day, Democratic politicians should emulate New York’s new administration by putting governmental resources behind tenant unions and workplace organizing. Rebuilding participation is a year-round task requiring grass-roots organization and collective effervescence. For every text and email politicians send asking for donations, another could invite people to attend or host an in-person event — neighborhood potlucks, kickball games before meetings, drinks after canvassing — and not just during campaign season.

Participatory fun has shown that it can scale. Nondenominational evangelical churches — among the few growing institutions in America — turn skeptics into believers via live bands and small weekly meet-ups. Mr. Trump’s movement has generated its own joy through regular rallies that feel more like parties than political events. Turning Point USA uses game nights and socials to recruit students nationwide.

Democrats will be tempted to take the parts of joyful populism that they find comfortable and leave the rest. Hosting a bouncy-castle picnic is easy; passing legislation that gives working people a bigger slice of the economic pie is not. But both are necessary for a true politics of joy. Nothing is fun when you’re up until 3 a.m. staring at a hospital bill. Somebody has to pay for the public pools, recreation leagues and health care that can make life lighter.

If Democrats want large numbers of people to show up, they need more than karaoke and camaraderie. They need policy fights — wealth taxes, corporate regulation, health care reform — that take on the forces that fenced off the good life in the first place. That’s how a party gets popular enough to defeat Trumpism and make joy a common good.

Yorumlar

Diğer materyaller