I’m a junior at the largest public high school in Virginia. I’m not old enough to vote yet, but if I were, I wouldn’t feel confident about voting for either political party.
While early exit polling suggests that in the recent midterm elections, young voters overwhelmingly voted blue, that isn’t proof that voters identify with the Democratic Party. The AP Voter Poll found that many young people’s votes were driven by opposition to President Donald Trump.
This was just the latest pendulum swing between the two parties – a process that creates change but doesn’t necessarily build trust or promise that young voters will see outcomes they want.
That’s why young and soon-to-be voters like me aren’t casting our hopes on this partisan binary – we’re looking beyond it. And I believe we’ll have the multiparty option we deserve in my lifetime.
We shouldn’t forget: In January, a Gallup poll found that 56% of Gen Z identifies with neither party, representing the highest disillusionment with the two-party system since the 19th century. This figure displays something critical. The two-party structure is failing us – specifically my generation.
As Generations Z and Alpha confront concerns surrounding the cost of living, job security, artificial intelligence and climate change, we see what older generations cannot: These problems can’t be solved within a partisan stalemate. If you want younger generations to trust the system, they need to be offered a party worth trusting – a third party that gives our binary system more dimension.
So that’s exactly what I’m looking toward. For now, I’m calling it The New People’s Party: a nonpartisan option for voters disillusioned with the two-party system.
Third parties have been floated before, like the Green Party, libertarians and the Populist Party of the 1890s. But the third party my generation needs is grounded in true populism: the belief in the rights, wisdom and virtues of the common people.
True populism would look different than the term thrown around by politicians on both the left and the right: It’s become a buzzword for campaign marketing. But new-generation voters like me see through this misrepresentation.
A populist third party isn’t a fantasy. Gen Z can make it happen
Young Americans are dealing with the most existential face-offs of the 21st century: humans against unregulated AI, young professionals against a deteriorating job market, common people against a climbing cost of living, frontline communities against climate change and an unstable economy against rising debt.
We need populist policies to address these issues before we drown in them.
Take the rising debt ceiling, for example. Both parties vote again and again to raise it, knowing reform is necessary but being too stubborn to agree. Now the government is buying back bonds in an attempt to curb the debt crisis – an attempt that Wall Street knows won’t work.
