Rep. Summer Lee questions the enthusiasm of young voters for Biden
Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) expressed concern about the lack of enthusiasm among young voters for President Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 general election. Lee highlighted this sentiment during her appearance on CBS News’s Face the Nation, citing Biden’s policies towards Israel as a factor. She recently participated in student protests at the University of Pittsburgh, advocating for divestment from Israel in the aftermath of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Lee emphasized that young voters prioritize a ceasefire in Gaza as their primary concern heading into the election.
Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) expressed concern about young voter’s enthusiasm for President Joe Biden going into the 2024 general election.
On CBS News’s Face the Nation, Lee said she is not seeing as much enthusiasm from young voters about Biden as in 2020 due to Biden’s policies toward Israel. Lee recently visited the University of Pittsburgh in her district to join student protests that are calling for the university to divest from Israel in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war.
“To be honest, you know, we don’t,” Lee said when asked if she sees enthusiasm from students about voting for Biden. “It’s not a topic that always comes up, but it does a lot.”
In 2020, half of the youth population in the United States, composed of those aged 18-29, voted in the last election, which was an 11% increase from the 2016 election where 39% of the youth population voted.
Lee claimed that young voters’ “No. 1” priority going into the general election is a ceasefire in Gaza.
“I think that the No. 1 goal for them right now is just listening to what they have to say, is that they want to see a ceasefire in Gaza. They want to see the indiscriminate bombings and killings end,” Lee said.
“There’s a lot of noise around this that distracts from that. There’s a lot of noise that tries to take away from that central message, but that is the central thing that they are fighting for, and they believe, and they feel like our government can do more, and that’s what they’re looking for,” Lee said.
She said young people want to see an acknowledgment from the federal government about the death toll growing in Gaza.
“They’re looking for some sort of acknowledgment from our leadership that they hear our needs. That they hear these young people saying ‘We want our country, we want our government to go in a different direction,” Lee said.
Lee represents Pennsylvania’s 12th district, which encompasses Pittsburgh and much of Allegheny County, a county that is expected to be hotly contested. Her constituency has a large Jewish-American population and is home to Squirrel Hill, which was the location of a 2018 antisemitic mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue.
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Lee, a first-term Democrat, recently won a contested primary by a significant margin. It was the first test of how “Squad” Democrats would fair in the 2024 elections given their stances on the Israel-Hamas war.
“When we look at an election like mine, we’ve seen how popular it is to take a pro-peace stance, how popular it is to call for a different direction in the policies that the United States has toward the war in Gaza, toward sending unconditional weapons, offensive weapons to Netanyahu,” Lee said. “Our government still has time to react, we still have time to listen to the folks who have feelings about that.”
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