Define those terms. Guest millennials were born between 1981 and 1996. We were thought to be the youngest generation out there, but generation z is now of voting age. You have 18, 19, 20 euros in that age range. Host every election cycle there is excitement about the potential for the youth vote. Every cycle without fail, the youth vote has the lowest turnout compared to other generations. 2018, it was 30 lower than the 60 plusyearolds. Do you have expectations that that pattern is going to change in 2020 . Guest yes. I would reframe 2018. We had the highest turnout in 25 years in 2018 midterms. Midterms, from 2014 which is nearly a 50 increase overall. When we take away from that is that there is great opportunity, 31 voted which means 69 didnt so there is huge and opportunity. The movement and advancement is hugely promising going into 2020. Host how do you get to the rates of 60 plusyearolds who are, the turnout rate was just under 70 for 60 plusyearolds. Will you ever get there with the youth vote . Guest there are systemic , before millennials came of voting age. Talking about things like automatic voter registration, preregistration, sameday registration, things we know really matter for young people who are the most transient in their lives. 60 plus arent going anywhere. Many times, they have their house and they have been there 30 years. They registered to vote and they vote at the same place every year. Millennials move. You are in college, somewhere you, you move for a job, have to reregister each time even if you are just going across a few streets down but it is a new precinct. Variousre any of those barriers being lowered . Guest they should be. The majority leader mitch mcconnell, and who was blocking increasedas a access for young people, sameday registration so if you move you can register to vote the same day. Other things, combating the influence of big money in politics. He called it a power grab. I think what is happening is to keep the power they have already stolen. The hrone is known as for the people act. In the segment we talk about the youth vote for the next half hour. Phone lines are split up differently this morning. They are split by age. 18 to 35, 202 7488000. 36 to 60 years old, 202 7488001. If you are over 60, 202 7488002. You can go ahead and start calling now. You talked about the barriers to actually voting. What are the issues that will be driving the youth vote . Guest generation progress has organized issues around five key areas. Climate change is huge for young people. It is important. We are the ones that will be dealing with the repercussions of climate change, the inaction, as well as our kids. Many millennials have young children. Criminal Justice Reform. We have suffered through mass incarceration. We have lost generations to it. It is time to end mass incarceration. Gun violence prevention. 50 of homicides, gun related homicides involve young adults under the age of 30. 15 to 29yearolds. That is hugely disproportionate. Immigration. We have seen it with dreamers. We have friends, colleagues, classmates that are dreamers. Having those protections rescinded was hugely impactful for us. Also, the humanitarian crisis the Trump Administration created at the border impacts many of us personally, either we know folks or because for older millennials with young children, we see our children in those cages, toyearolds without diapers being cared for by sevenyearolds. Its egregious. And student debt. One in three young adults have a student loan. We know the rates around default. Around homeownership. Student debt is a big reason why people are having trouble getting there. Guest are you a fan of the plans to eliminate student debt . Guest we need a plan to limit to cancel student debt in this country, yes. Host there is the Bernie Sanders plan to eliminate debt, Elizabeth Warren is a tiered plan of how much debt would be eliminated contingent on how much your family makes. Guest we put out report. Cancellation is important. I think the considerations are simplicity, cancellation needs to be simple. Two is equity. Make sure we are targeting those most at risk for other systemic depressions in this country. Including things on wage discrimination on the backend. Not just a plan but is critical that happens here. Host usa todays Editorial Board after Bernie Sanders put out his plan last month said both sanders and Elizabeth Warren are pandering to young voters with their student loan plan. Here is what they said. The most obvious thing to say is proposals like these are arbitrary and inequitable and make fools of people who saved and ate romen noodles. The retirement plans are unfair to people who have already paid back loans. They undermine the concept of debt and legal obligation. Guest it is clear they dont understand what Student Loan Debt is. Thats the bottom line. The cost of college has risen eight times faster than the cost of wages over the past 40 years. We are in a situation where we have forprofit colleges that are doing predatory lending. Not dissimilar to what happened in the mortgage crisis. You have people who ate ramen noodles, lived with five people and ended up with Student Loans and are trying to pay it down 10 years at a time to find out that up and they went now own more than they did when they first took out the loan. I would encourage the Editorial Board to look into the issue and better understand it. Host when issue is criminal Justice Reform. This is something that will bring young people to the polls. I wonder what you think of the first step act, the act President Trump signed into law and touted as his achievement on criminal Justice Reform. Guest there is no question there is some good that came out of it. Specifically with the ,etroactivity of sentencing which is beneficial. There are also problematic things, including the expansion of electronic monitoring, the way that it is written expands the footprint which is concerning. It is not just the we have many people in prisons. It is that we have many people under the control of the criminal justice system. What is more problematic is donald trump is not just touting the first step act. He is touting this as, look what i did for black people. Look what i did for people of color. Every other policy he has out there in fact harms the very people he is claiming he is here to help. Host brett cohen taking your phone calls in this segment of washington journal. Phone lines are split by age. We will put the phone numbers on the screen as we hear from betty on the line for 60 and over out of virginia beach, virginia. Go ahead. Caller good morning and happy fourth of july, although this will be a bad one with that rotten parade that trump is putting on. About the youth vote, the youth vote, and im a progressive but i want to say one thing. I am still for joe biden. I guess people in my age group, a lot of them are still for joe biden. I like a lot of these progressive ideas very much but in my opinion, just my opinion, some of the candidates that are far out on the left might win the nomination but they will not win the general election if theyre too far out on the left. I am going to vote for whoever the democrats put out. I like mayor pete. I like kamala harris. I did not like her going after my guy joe but she had her point and she made her point and maybe she could go up against trump and be successful. Host you talked about going after your guy. I wonder what you thought about congressman Eric Swalwell going after joe biden, echoing john kennedy and telling him to pass the torch to a new generation. What did you think of that Exchange Backup that exchange . Caller i love him. One of the reasons i love him, he went after joe, not as forcefully, but she had her point. She is fighting to win the election. I love Eric Swalwell because im very much for gun control. This is the Third Community i have lived in that had mass shootings. Im originally from sandy hook, connecticut. Then i lived in charleston, South Carolina when that terrible shooting happened in the church. I went to the pastors funeral. I had people in my building that went to that church. Now we had one here in virginia beach. At least he is for gun control. Look, half or more of these people that are out there dont have any chance of becoming the president anymore than i do. They have a right to be up there. They have the right to run for president , but a lot of them are taking away time from people that are serious contenders. Host brett cohen . What do you take from that . Guest i think young people are be 37 of the electorate in 2020. When you think about millennials and generation z, we have a wealth of candidates. Werewas impressive was, we able to have two days of policy conversations without namecalling and telling lies, which is significant contrasting with the Trump Administration. Whoever the democratic nominee is, whoever is running for president , its important they are speaking to and connecting with a wide array of people, including young voters. Host when you say 37 of the electorate, you dont expect 37 of those who vote in november of 2020 will be under 35 . Guest 37 of millennials and generation z are eligible voters. The question is, how do we motivate and engage in turnout and turnout folks . The main way to do that is to speak about the issues that matter most to millennials and generation z and develop real concrete policies that address those issues. Host cape coral, florida. Mike, how old are you . Caller i am 35. Just finishing up. I wanted to say to your guest, the Democratic Party has been pandering to black people since the 1940s. To say donald trump is pandering to black people because he does something that the black community, i am a black man. That is ridiculous. Lets have a conversation on solutions. Not talking about the 20 democrats that are pandering, as well. Now to the issue of student debt. It is a real issue so maybe you could touch on this point as well. Student debt is a real issue. Im a teacher myself and im trying to go through paying back loans which i should not have to do. Why are you not talking about the colleges who are raising prices . Why are we not talking about colleges who are putting in all these unnecessary courses and classes that students have to take in order to get their degrees for the careers they choose . If youre serious in your organization about student debt, why not talk about the colleges and not just complain about a loan program that was put in place to get people in debt by saying you can take all the loans you want . Dont worry, you will have to pay it back every now and then. Guest absolutely. There were two points raised. On the criminal Justice Reform, you need to look at trumps stances on this holistically. I will leave out the fact that he calls for the execution and the guilt of the exonerated five from central park. That underlies what his policies have been. Look at the appointment of jeff sessions, the nomination of william barr. These men literally have fought every step of the way, any type of criminal Justice Reform, have said they dont think mass incarceration is a problem. William barr wrote the book on mass incarceration. He literally wrote the memo on what it looks like to use mass incarceration. The need for the drug war and the need to ramp up here. And has not disavowed that in the last 30 years who many people have. They have said, i went to far. And there were, not even unintended consequences, but a level of consequences that impacted communities too harshly. Its important to look at the trump record in that context. Secondly, one more thing on that point, they infect tried to roll back criminal Justice Reform so significantly that they were trying to prevent people going into a Diversion Program from becoming federal employees. Diversion programs are set up by states and localities and courts specifically so people do not end up with a conviction record, so they dont get impacted by the collateral consequences. He wanted people to require to fill out whether they have been in one. 3500 people spoke out against it, the Washington Post and advocates on the right spoke out against it and the white house pulled it back. But that is trumps record on criminal Justice Reform. On College Affordability you are absolutely right. I strongly believe any debt forgiveness, cancellation, needs to happen handinhand with College Affordability plans. College affordability has been part of the policy debate for quite a few years now largely in part because of efficacy led advocacy led by young people. More than 80 organizations have come together to say it is a huge issue. We need guardrails around what affordability looks like. We need to make sure forprofit colleges are not praying on the most vulnerable students. We need to make sure we have plans, debtfree college or Free Community college or a multitude , thatns beyond tuition addresses College AffordabilityGoing Forward so we dont end up in this situation again. We need to recognize the system failed over the last 30 years, and put low and middle income students into huge amounts of debt that isnt forgiven by anything, even as serious as bankruptcy. We need to address that as we address College Affordability. Host fort washington, maryland on the line for those between 35 and 60. Pamela. Good morning. Caller good morning. I have to disagree with brent when it comes to the difficulty of registering to vote. I dont think it is any harder to register to vote for young people. I think it is easier because you have the advent of online things you can do, and now they basically, they have a card and they renew when their license and they can register at the dmv. When i was younger, we had to actually go to these places, or actually send a form to these places. I dont see where that is any harder for younger people. The other thing i disagree with is, when you say people that are , they areer stationary. A lot of them are actually snowbirds and things of that nature, so they still move around a lot, and they actually still have to find places to where theyure out are living at verses where they vacation at or live part of the year. Whether they can vote there. Let me give brett a chance to respond to that. Guest one of the policies that pamela advocated for, going to the dmv and register to vote, that is automatic voter registration. That is what we are advocating. It doesnt happen in all 50 states. It should. She is right. That is a type of policy that would increase access to the polls. In regards to being stationary versus not, i will give my own personal example. In three years in college i lived in four different cities. They were all within 10 minutes of each other. I lived in richmond, california, oakland, berkeley, albany. That means four different voter registrations. For someone dealing with the full course load of College Classes plus work and trying to figure out where to register to vote, that is different. That is not saying anybody else does not have to figure out where to register to vote, but there are some inherent things to the Younger Generation today, not even comparing it to the Younger Generation from yesteryear that makes it less difficult for older folks. Host windham, connecticut. Stephen on the line between 3560, good morning. Caller good morning. Im calling on the get out the vote effort. In my town to secure education, we have to get out the vote. We have a large Hispanic Community. We engaged the Hispanic Community and it took a long time to get out the vote. Then we won. Our interest waned, and then we lost. To get out the vote in the Hispanic Community, because they dont vote. They really dont vote. Unless we get the women engaged, we lose. What are you doing, and i dont see any of the candidates getting it or talking out getting out the vote in the debates. President trump, biden. Im interested to see if either of them get to talk about get out the vote today. I doubt they will talk about it. But if you want to win, you have to get out the vote. What are you doing to persistently get out the vote . Host i will let you answer the question but i wanted to show viewers this chart from elect project, turnout rates by race and ethnicity. This is 2016 some of the last president ial election. Hispanic turnout rate was the lowest among those on the graph. Just over 45 . Nonhispanic blacks at about 60 in 2016. Nonhispanic whites a little bit more than that. Guest we cant have a conversation about, first of all, get out the vote is critical. But we cant have a conversation about voter turnout rates, particularly by race, without talking about Voter Suppression, which is alive and well, the reason Stacey Abrams is not the governor of georgia. It is why North Carolina doesnt have a sitting congressman. They literally throughout ballots from communities of color. If we have a real conversation about get out the vote, it is what we are doing now, engaging folks on the issue they care most about and help and provide solutions that are concrete to address the issues. It is about addressing systemic barriers and the machine of Voter Suppression and gerrymandering. We saw it with the census. The underlying reason to ask a Citizenship Question was to specifically and concretely under represent certain communities. It was very intentional and intentional to