David Hogg is a survivor of the Parkland high school massacre and is an advocate for banning automatic weapons like the one used in the shooting. He spoke during a recent webinar hosted by the Longboat Key Democratic Club.
Hogg says 18- to 29-year-olds voted at the highest rates ever in the past three elections. But he warned that young men are trending more conservative and drifting away from the Democratic Party.
“Honestly, my biggest fear is that young men are going to be the noncollege educated voter of 2016, but for this election.”
And that, he said, could end up costing Democrats the White House.
"We've seen a growing trend globally in developed countries and in the United States where younger men are becoming more and more conservative. And there's growing gender polarization and I think that there's a bit of a taboo honestly within the Democratic Party to talk about this because obviously men have been at the center of the conversation for thousands of years,” Hogg said.
“And a lot of the time we mistake thinking that if we talk about men that it's to the exclusion of other people like women, for example. But I think we need to have a more nuanced conversation about that and the fact that we are hemorrhaging young male voters right now and it's not just young white men, it's young men of color and it's young, it's young men of all races that we're losing.”
Still, young people may be key to deciding the next election, said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a professor at Stetson University College of Law.
She says there was a fear that younger people would be turned off with a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But with Kamala Harris now in the race, young voters seem to be getting more energized.
Torres-Spelliscy says what may have been a bigger move was the endorsement of Taylor Swift for Harris after the last debate.
Swift included instructions for registering to vote, which moved hundreds of thousands of people to register.
“We'll see how that shakes out in the 2024 election,” she said. “But if those new voters show up and actually vote in the fall, that could decide who becomes our next president.”
The deadline to register is Oct. 7.
