bransonglobe.com NATIONAL June 14-16, 2020 • 11 Protesters march through the streets of Manhattan, New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) • VOTE? Continued from page 10 fund the police,” which has become a rallying cry for protesters. The former vice president said Monday an overhaul of policing is needed but can be done by putting conditions on federal funds. That position may reassure older and moderate voters who helped Biden win the nomination, Green said, but young people want to see more change. “If not, they’ll just say ‘to hell with the election,’” he said. Many of the young people taking to the streets are focused on public officials with a more direct impact on their lives such as mayors, police chiefs and district attorneys because “they see that’s where the change is,” said Green, a Black Lives Matter leader who joined protesters in Minneapolis. There were also protests in Louisville, Kentucky, over the death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black woman fatally shot by police in her home in March. Tom Bergan, 22, attended a protest last week in Louisville, where he’s a HeadCount field organizer. In pre-pandemic days, HeadCount focused on registering young people at concerts and festivals, but that’s shifted to more online organizing since COVID-19. For Friday’s protests, Bergan printed off large QR codes that he hoisted on a poster board. Anyone who scanned the code on their phone was connected to an online voter registration page. Bergan said the crowd was enthusiastic, with many already registered to vote, and much of the conversations were around Taylor’s death and local changes such as the decision to limit no-knock warrants. He said the moment reminds him of 2018, when he volunteered with HeadCount during a March for Our Lives in St. Louis, as thousands of young people turned out in cold, rainy weather. That fall, turnout among voters ages 18-29 was nearly double what it was in 2014, with 28% of eligible young voters casting ballots, according to CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. They were much more likely to support Democratic than Republican congressional candidates, 64% to 34%, according to an AP VoteCast survey of more than 115,000 midterm voters nationwide. That turnout is still less than in 2016 or 2012, presidential election years when about 45% of young voters turned out, according to CIRCLE, a drop from 2008, when Barack Obama was on the ballot and turnout soared to a level not seen since 1992. Will 2020 bring another peak? “That’s the big ‘if,’ and we don’t really know until Bergan said. November,”
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