David Hogg Knows Why Democrats Lost Young Voters

The conference room where David Hogg is mounting his bid for vice chair of the Democratic National Committee has exposed brick and a nice view of a specific Washington D.C. landmark, but he’s asked me not to disclose which one. Ever since his high school was shot up on Valentine’s Day seven years ago, and Hogg became one of the faces of the student-led movement for gun control, he has had to be careful about sharing details like that. He’s been doxed, his parent’s home was swatted, and he’s gotten used to heavily armed men showing up at his public appearances, demanding to speak with him. 

On Tuesday afternoon, Hogg was sitting at the table in that conference room, staring at a spreadsheet containing some 450-odd names of individuals voting in the DNC elections this Saturday. He was working through the sheet one cell at a time, making the case for his candidacy over the phone to everyone from a DNC member in the Northern Mariana Islands to the Democratic mayor of mid-sized Midwestern city. 

The short version of the pitch is obvious: Democrats absolutely hemorrhaged young voters in the last cycle, and Hogg — a 24-year-old Harvard grad who has spent virtually every spare moment of the past seven years organizing, registering, and working to elect members of Gen Z — understands this particular demographic in way most prominent voices in the party don’t. 

“This election was much more an indictment, frankly, of our party than it was of our country,” Hogg says.

In his view, there is not one reason why so young people deflected from the Democratic Party — there are many. Members of Gen Z “do not have the privilege of being single-issue voters,” Hogg says. “We had to grow up worrying about dying in a school shooting today, or dying of climate change tomorrow, and then being crushed by student debt and the housing crisis in between… and I think on the issue of Gaza in particular, it was emblematic of the fact that people felt like we were not listening to them — that we didn’t care.”

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The bigger problem — and the one he is committed to addressing if he wins a spot in DNC leadership — is a growing deficit of trust. “Young people do not trust political parties, and I don’t think this election, the shift to the right, was a reflection of the fact that young people have an enormous amount of faith in the Republican Party… It’s more testament to the fact that they have lost faith in us, as a party to deliver for them.” 

The son of a teacher and an FBI agent, Hogg lived in Southern California until the fifth grade, when his father was diagnosed with early on-set Parkinson’s disease. With his father medically retired, the family realized “we probably would not be able to continue to afford to pay our mortgage in California,” Hogg recalls. “We moved out to Florida — to Parkland — because it was the safest community that we could find.”

He was in the last half of his senior year when a 19-year-old former student stormed the halls of his high school with an AR-15, murdering 17 people and injuring 17 more. During the lockdown, Hogg recorded video of himself interviewing fellow students. The footage was aired by a local TV station, a succession of cable news interviews followed, and he quickly emerged as one of the massacre’s most outspoken survivors. 

At the time of the shooting, Maxwell Frost lived across the state. Frost was 21, and working as an organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union. He DMed a few students, offering to help, and one of them wrote back with an address. It was three hours away, but Frost packed a bag and jumped in his car. “I got there 2 a.m., pulled up to a house, and there was David and all the March for Our Lives founders sitting criss-cross on the floor of a living room figuring out what to do after their school just got shot up,” recalls Frost, now a congressman representing Orlando.

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An estimated 1.7 million participated in that first march, which took place in Washington D.C., and thousands more joined satellite protests around the country, making it one of the largest demonstrations in U.S. history. When they got back to Florida, Hogg and his cohort successfully pressured lawmakers to raise the age to buy a gun to 21, and to pass a red flag law. According to Hogg, that law has been used at least 19,000 times since the shooting at Stoneman Douglas.

But the work of getting that legislation passed took a toll on all of the students, says X Gonzalez, a classmate of Hogg’s. “We were taught that if people want to effect change, they go to their legislators, and they raise the issue, and the legislators listen to the people, and then they make the change,” Gonzalez says. Those illusions were quickly shattered. They recall feeling like the two of them — Gonzalez and Hogg — were deliberately made into caricatures to make it easier for lawmakers to brush their concerns aside: “Legislators were like: ‘You’re a skinhead lesbian, and you are a robot built by the Left.”

Like Hogg’s, Gonzalez’s profile grew after the shooting, fueled by their righteous denunciation of the National Rifle Association, but Gonzalez noticed a difference in the way they each were regarded by the public. “People were very forgiving of me, in my feeling of my emotions,” Gonzalez says; Hogg on the other hand was labeled a crisis actor by Alex Jones, likened to a Nazi on Breitbart, mocked by Laura Ingrahamt. “Obviously it affected him,” Gonzalez says. “But he understood the motives behind it, [and recognized it as] much more than a personal attack… He was like: They don’t know me. If anyone is against this, clearly they’re in favor of people dying every day due to gun violence… They’re trying to confuse that fact by saying incendiary things and going viral on Twitter.”

Eventually, it got to be too much for them: “It was killing me,” Gonzalez says. Virtually every other person in the original March For Our Lives cohort stepped back from activism at a certain point to focus on themselves. Everyone except Hogg. “I had conversations with him like: Why? Why don’t you want to enjoy your life? He likes surfing; he’s a beach-dwelling person. I was like: Why can’t you let go a little bit? Give your body back to yourself,” Gonzalez says. “But he just can’t let go when he knows there is a problem.” 

Back in 2018, when March for Our Lives was still getting started, Hogg thought he would run for office one day. But he’s sober about the fact that his activism has made him a polarizing figure. “I’m such a lightning rod for Republicans, specifically because of my views on guns. They would raise twice as much money fear-mongering about me being in Congress than I ever could hope to raise for myself,” he says. It’s also the reason why he started a PAC, Leaders We Deserve, to help elect young candidates. “With this role, I’m able to help get 20 to 30 phenomenal young progressives elected to state legislatures, and Congress all over the country, and help grow the power of young people in our party much more than I would be if I was just one person.”

The idea of running for DNC vice chair appealed to him for similar reasons — and because he’s furious about the outcome of the 2024 campaign. One of the biggest driving factors for Democrats’ loss in 2024 was massive drop in support from 18-29 year olds. Hogg remembers hearing the staggering figures — a 20-point shift to the right — when a Kamala Harris campaign pollster shared her findings with the DNC after the election. He recalls looking around the room during that briefing. “I did not see a single person in that room under the age of 30,” he says. 

For months leading up to the election, Hogg says he was raising alarms about young voters opting away from the Democrats. “I was trying to say, like, ‘Hey guys, this is a problem.’ And this was repeatedly written off by different sycophants and consultants throughout the party that told me that it wasn’t a problem. It sucks, because here we are, and we’re seeing the disastrous effects of that — and the disaster effects of our party surrounding itself with people who only tell it what it wants to hear.”

The reason why Democrats lost ground with young people — and with Americans more broadly — in 2024, in Hogg’s view, is pretty simple: “People felt like we were not listening to them.”

In poll after poll, people were saying: Joe Biden is too old, the cost of living is too high, the war in Gaza needs to end, but the party was not responding to those signals — any of them. “Rents skyrocketed for the past four years, and our party has done such a good job of making our consultants so fabulously wealthy that they’ve become detached from that reality. If you own a house and you have a fixed-rate mortgage, your cost of living, in terms of how much it costs for you to have your home, it’s actually going down over time,” he says. 

Even now, after the fact, he says, it still feels like no one is listening. “We went out there for eight years saying ‘Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. If he’s elected, the world is going to end and democracy is over.’ And then he got elected, and after he was elected, [Democrats] effectively said: ‘Well, guys, there isn’t anything different we could have done. Let’s throw our hands up in the air, and we’ll see you again in four years. And we hope that you keep donating [and opening] our bullshit emails that treat you like an ATM instead of a human being.’”

Hogg does not exempt himself entirely from blame. Eighteen months ago, he says, he was invited to the White House for a one-on-one in the Oval Office with President Joe Biden. “The first thing he asked me was, ‘How do we win young voters?’ I wish that I told him — and I know I would have been kicked out of the White House and probably ostracized more broadly within the party — but what I wish I had said is that he needed to drop out.”

His willingness to publicly admit that Biden should have left the 2024 presidential race sooner sets Hogg apart from the DNC’s outgoing chair, Jaime Harrison — as well as several of the candidates running to replace him. 

The turning point for Hogg — the moment he resolved to seek a bigger role in the party — came this summer, after the Democratic National Convention in August. I remember seeing him posing for selfies with the throngs of young cocktail-and-coconut-swilling revelers at a convention after party. He looked like he was having the time of his life, and he had reason to celebrate — Leaders We Deserve, the Super PAC he founded last year —  raised more than $8 million on behalf of 12 candidates. (Five won, seven lost.)

But after the convention, he flew back to Florida, where he was back in front of a computer, pouring over a different Excel spreadsheet. His father’s health had taken a turn for the worst. “He just stopped eating. We did everything we could to get him to eat and make him better, and he just refused,” Hogg says quietly. “When he was in hospice, we needed to have at least 12 hours a day of care for him. I had to make a spreadsheet to figure out how long we could afford to keep him alive, because — even though he was a veteran and retired FBI agent with relatively good health care — his cost of at-home care was going to be $19,000 a month.”

“The only reason my family didn’t go bankrupt is because my dad didn’t live long enough for that to happen,” he says. “No one should ever have to make that calculation, and increasingly, it is one that too many Americans are having to make as our population gets older. And the only way we’re going to address that is with our government. There’s no market solution that’s going to fix that.”

“That’s why I’m running for this position,” Hogg says. “I’ve been impacted by that failed political system far too much, and I want to fucking fix it.”