Tom Steyer on organizing young voters: "I think that I was right"

Seven years ago, businessman Tom Steyer took a bet on the youth vote.

At the time, critics told him that organizing young voters was too expensive, he said. His response: “It was too expensive not to."

With five days until the 2020 election, the former Democratic candidate and current Biden surrogate said, “If you think about where we are in 2020, I think that I was right.”

In 2013, Steyer founded NextGen America, the youth-oriented, progressive nonprofit. According to the organization, they have deployed over 17,000 volunteers in 11 battleground states to engage with, register, and mobilize young people ahead of the 2020 election. (Steyer stepped away from NextGen last year as he prepared for his own bid for the presidency.)

Steyer could not have predicted the wave of crises afflicting young voters in 2020, he said: the Covid-19 pandemic, job losses, climate change and a national reckoning with race.

“The stakes are the highest they’ve ever been and the difference between the candidates is the greatest it's ever been. And just to put in context of one crisis, which is the climate crisis, we have never been living the climate crisis so obviously as we are in 2020. There has never been such strong indications of how urgent the situation is as it is now,” Steyer said.

“The fact that young people do get this [urgency] and are turning out in such numbers is a critical element in terms of achieving what they want,” he said.

Steyer believes the difference maker leading to high youth voter turnout in 2020 could be the stark differences between the two presidential candidates and young people’s ability to imagine a future under a Biden presidency, he told CNN.

Steyer, a longtime climate activist, believes that in part, that the climate crisis is motivating young voters to get behind Biden.

“I think a big reason that the Biden-Harris ticket is so compelling for young people and why there’s such high turnout and why there's such a huge Democratic to Republican spread is the climate plan,” Steyer said.

Biden and Harris are “running on climate,” he told CNN. “They are appealing to young people on an issue that is at the core of their future and at the core of their present.”

Across the board, young voters on the left and right both recognize the need to address the climate crisis. Among likely voters from both parties, 76% of likely voters ages 18-29 believe the government should do more to deal with the environment, also according to Harvard’s youth poll.