Kluver, a rising sophomore at George Washington University, is an intern with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and Made By Us.
If I asked a random person on the street today, “What are your voting plans for the midterm elections in just a few months?” I would probably receive strange looks. People would respond, “What’s that?” Or some would likely say, “There’s no point in voting as my voice doesn’t matter anyways.”
But FiveThirtyEight found that 60 percent of people who “rarely or never vote” said the 2020 presidential election results really mattered to them. So why aren’t they turning out to vote?
For years, Americans have been subjected to one of the most malignant cases of voter apathy in any liberal democracy. Candidates and parties ignore voters and take them for granted. Turnout barely cracks 55 percent in presidential elections, and 40 percent in midterms. Yet, many elections are decided by mere hundreds of votes, meaning an individual's vote actually can change the outcome.
Young people have become the face of this stereotype. They are often portrayed as lazy or apathetic, and those who do vote are presumed to be bastions of the Democratic Party and progressive principles. However, this is not necessarily the case. In my internship this summer with the Smithsonian and Emerson Collective, I got an up-close view of how people 18-30 years old engage with history and civics through Made By Us, and I knew there was more to the story to explore. Luckily, a new report from CIRCLE at Tufts University has a wealth of data, FAQs and explainers to back it up.
For example, the 2018 midterm elections saw people 18-24 years old vote at a record 28 percent, almost double from 2014, with said percentage expected to increase as more of Generation Z comes of voting age.
The real issue lies in systemic barriers to voting. Among a sample of voting-age Gen Z who did not vote, 30 percent of youth of color said they had issues with presenting voter identification at the polling place — double the rate of white respondents. The same goes for those who had difficulties finding transportation to polling places or faced long lines; youth of color were noticeably more impacted. And 39 percent of those polled overall simply did not know where to vote.
More barriers exist for the non-college educated. As of 2016, those without any college degree were 20 percent less likely to vote than their peers who attended college. Similar gaps are shown between youth of color and white youth as between non-college-educated and college-educated youth. Non-college educated young people are subject to long lines, lack of transportation, voter ID issues and so on. Plus, media reinforces these principles, often failing to address the sheer importance of youth participation in democratic processes.
Young people are engaged, fired up and ready to shake the system to the core. But we need to build a system that supports their voting activity and knowledge. So, what can we do to solve this? The answer is civic education – built for real life.
Generation Z remains civically engaged using one primary tool: technology. In 2020, according to CIRCLE, over 50 percent of Gen Zers said they tried to convince peers to vote, often by sharing online petitions and other resources for their peers to see. This marks a 17 percent increase from just four years prior. Even then, there exists a large gap between youth who are registered to vote and those who actually turn out. They’re registered and they’re telling friends to vote, but turnout is still lagging. We need to find ways to make voting feel meaningful, fun and effective.
Let’s start by looking at areas of life Gen Z isn’t skipping out on: school, friends and online communities. Increase investment in civic education programs in high schools teaching students about parties, candidates and the electoral system. Have every eligible student register to vote in class — online! Provide them the resources through social media (especially digitally) to request ballots, find polling places and research candidates. Have their favorite celebrities, Twitch streamers and idols reinforce the importance of voting. If young people have educational resources provided to them in the format they are most versatile in, maybe American society will start to see real change, one youth vote at a time.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.