It is probably fair to assume that most Americans of the Baby Boomer and Gen X generations shudder at the prospect of today’s 16-year-olds voting. For that matter, they might not be all that thrilled about 18-year-olds choosing our political leaders and representatives. Given the state of education in the United States, coupled with the fact that just about everyone under the age of 30 seems primarily obsessed with social media, such trepidation can be forgiven. Still, former Vice President Kamala Harris thinks the voting age should be lowered to 16. As it turns out, the reasons she presented to support such a position appear to be the very reasons why handing ballots to teenagers may, in fact, be a really bad idea.
The losing 2024 presidential candidate gave an interview to the “Diary of a CEO” YouTube channel, released on Oct. 31. Harris seemed largely concerned with promoting herself and her book, as well as putting some distance between herself and her former boss, Joe Biden.
Harris Courts Gen Z
During the final 30 minutes of the one-hour-and-forty-five-minute interview, however, host Steven Bartlett asked Harris what she thought Democrats should do to “win back the people.” Part of her response was a suggestion to lower the voting age to 16. “I’ll tell you why,” she said:
“So, Gen Z, they’re aged about 13 through 27. They’ve only known the climate crisis. They missed substantial parts of their education because of the pandemic. If they’re in high school or college – especially in college – it is very likely that whatever they’ve chosen as their major for study may not result in an affordable wage.”
That doesn’t explain why 16-year-olds should be allowed to vote. And this isn’t some brilliant scheme she thought up all by herself, as some Democrats have flirted with the idea, off and on, for many years. But Harris had now embarked upon delivering one of her “word salads,” as they have come to be known. For those not familiar with the term, it means, essentially, a lengthy and rambling response or explanation that provides no real insight, rationality, or solution. It may well not even relate to the subject at hand. It’s something of a stream of consciousness caught in a loop. Harris became well known for them during the 2024 campaign. She continued:
“They’ve coined the term ‘climate anxiety’ to describe, not only fear of [not] being able to buy a home but, fear it will be wiped out by extreme weather – but fear of having children. It is expected that Gen Z will have 10 to 12 jobs in their lifetime. They are a larger number than Boomers. They are a specific generation of people who are going to impact our nation and the world.”
Harris continued in this vein for a bit longer before finally providing what she presumably hoped was a reasonable argument for why the voting age should be lowered. “If they were able to vote – because they know everything that’s happening right now is going to impact them more than anyone older than them, for the most part.” Presumably, this wasn’t true for any previous youth generation.
Though she was hardly going to admit it, the former VP is in fact onto something, in terms of party politics – and it seems obvious that Democrats would indeed want 16- and 17-year-olds to vote. They have just spent years in a public education system that has been transformed into a left-wing indoctrination machine. And not only public schools but also most of the private institutions, too.
A Generation of Conditioned Voters
Little wonder that a great many younger people are indeed probably suffering from “climate anxiety.” For their entire lives, elected Democrats, teachers, professors, climate activists, the United Nations, the left-wing media, and globalist corporations have been drumming the theories of anthropogenic climate change and global warming into their heads. They have been told this represents the deadliest threat to their very existence.
On top of that, Gen Z has been shielded from exposure to all the science that debunks or even challenges this narrative. Naturally, then, they are likely to vote for the party that claims it is dedicated to saving the planet.
If the voting age were lowered to 16, the Democratic Party would likely benefit from millions of new voters handing them the total and perhaps permanent power they seek. There are many things Harris knows that aren’t so – but this, she knows, and it is so. Her party may have finally lost its iron grip on the black vote, and millions of additional potential future Democrat voters may be leaving the country, courtesy of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. What better way to bolster the ranks, then, than to get the votes of people conditioned to believe what the left tells them and who are not yet old enough to have faced the harsh realities of taxation, starting a business, raising a family, and generally fending for themselves in the adult world?
