This is republished as part of a series in collaboration with the Headway Election Challenge. Chalkbeat and Headway at The New York Times will ask young people to share their insights and perspectives throughout the 2024 presidential election.
Norah Henry has a clear memory of the days after the 2020 presidential election. The race in Georgia, her home state, had been so close that the votes had to be tallied three times.
“I remember that it took multiple days to count the votes and stuff because things kept having to be recounted because they were so close,” said Henry, 16, a sophomore at Decatur High School in Decatur, Georgia. “Every night that they counted it, I would stay up with my dad and watch, like, CNN or whatever vote-counting things, up until they stopped showing it.”
When Georgia’s election results were finally certified that December, Joe Biden’s margin of victory over Donald J. Trump in the state was less than 12,000 votes out of nearly five million. The narrowness of that victory would put Georgia in the national spotlight the next January, when a leaked phone call revealed that Trump had tried to pressure Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn the state’s election results.
In the previous questionnaire for the Headway Teen Election Challenge, in collaboration with Chalkbeat, we asked teenagers, “How confident are you that a vote can make a difference in the U.S. election?”
Henry answered “extremely confident,” as did just under a fifth of our respondents. She said that seeing Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state stand by the election results despite pressure from Trump, their own party’s candidate, helped bolster her faith in the ballot.
A solid majority of our respondents — more than 70 percent — told us they felt at least somewhat confident that a vote could make a difference. But most also said they placed little trust in the U.S. political system to address the issues that matter most to them. Almost a third of the respondents said they had no trust at all that the system would.
A scant few of our respondents said they trusted the political system a lot to address their issues. Maddie Winslett, 16, a junior at the Altamont School in Birmingham, Alabama, is among them.
Consuming news and social media about the presidential election doesn’t do much to instill faith in the system, Winslett said, “because no matter what side you’re on, people are blaming the other side for what’s going on, or they’re just saying all the horrible things that are going on.” In her questionnaire response, she wrote, “Personally, I feel worse about the world around me anytime I go on Instagram.”
But “I think the citizens make me have a little bit more faith in it than the news does, because when I pay attention to people in my neighborhood or people going to rallies and stuff like that, no matter what candidate they’re supporting, they seem so excited about it and so interested in it,” Winslett added. “And I think that makes me feel like we have more hope.”
One formative experience that led Winslett to view the democratic process as a powerful tool was participating in the Junior United Nations Assembly of Alabama while in middle school. She came to understand constitutional democracy as a “way to make sure that we can make decisions, but that no one has too much power over the other and that we’re able to find compromises.”
Winslett participated in the Junior U.N. for three years, and it gave her faith in the simple process of people coming together to try to find solutions to their problems. “The solutions might not have been the most well-thought-out when you’re 12 and 13,” she said. “But they were actively trying to find solutions to real-world problems, and they were doing a good job of that.”
This impression was one of many from our respondents suggesting that politics looks better the closer it is to the ground. Nick Hasbun, 18, a freshman at Georgetown University, wrote that his faith in the democracy was lessened by the range of ways voters’ power in the system was reduced, whether through restricting access to voting, gerrymandering, or misinformation. Hasbun is eligible to vote this year, he wrote, “and I am extremely excited to fill out my entire ballot from top to bottom.”
“I think that the future lies in grass roots organizing,” he wrote, “because regular people are genuinely the most invested in solving the issues that affect their communities.”
Now, let’s get into this week’s challenge.
Week 6: Do you feel represented in this election?
Fill out this week’s question here. If you missed any parts of the challenge, go here.
