Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rallies young voters at UC Irvine to turn up at this year’s election
With Election Day just two weeks away, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited Irvine from her native New York to encourage young voters to cast a ballot in the Nov. 8 midterm elections.
Ocasio-Cortez, a darling of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing, attended a late-morning rally at UC Irvine held by the Sunrise Movement Orange County, the Orange County Young Democrats, Planned Parenthood Generation Action UC Irvine, the UC Student Workers Union and College Democrats at UCI on Sunday to call on an oft-questioned demographic to help hold the county’s blue seats in the U.S. Congress.
Crowds of students and residents attended Sunday’s rally, which also saw a fair share of counterprotesters.
Younger voters who showed up in 2018 and again in 2020 were instrumental in putting President Joe Biden in office, according to a Los Angeles Times report, spurred in part by anger at former President Donald Trump. But they were also inspired to vote by the growth of grassroots activist movements centering on racial justice, gun control and climate change.
A 2020 poll at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University in Massachusetts indicated that roughly 52% to 55% of 18- to 29-year-olds were eligible to vote turned out for that year’s election.
Once known as a bastion of conservative politics, Orange County has shifted purple in recent elections. Roughly 1.8 million residents are active registered voters, according to data Monday from the county Registrar of Voters’ office. While information on the age demographics of voters is not immediately available, 682,536 active voters are registered Democrats while 602,061 are registered Republicans. The data list 63,415 voters as independent.
It is unclear how many of those same young voters or those who have come of age since the 2020 election will cast a ballot this year or how many of the larger voting population in Orange County will go blue or red in the contested races statewide.
Also speaking with Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday were Tommy Vietor, a co-founder of Crooked Media and host of “Pod Save America,” Costa Mesa Councilwoman Arlis Reynolds, Kathleen Treseder, a Howard A. Schneiderman endowed chair and professor of biology at UC Irvine, and Iris “Nini” Wu of the Orange County Young Democrats.
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