Millennial delegates fight to keep Republicans relevant
Nick Allman pushed his friends to register to vote. He dragged them to the polls on primary day. He answered questions and explained positions and even championed their political discourse. Those friends, Allman, 23, admits with a sigh and a laugh, largely cast their votes for Bernie Sanders.
"Look, I'd rather friends vote for the other team than not vote at all," Allman, an unabashed Republican and Texas delegate at this year's GOP convention, says.
Allman is among the ideologically motivated, passionate and unusually engaged millennial delegates who trekked to Cleveland for the party convention, despite his own mixed feelings about Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.
A contingent of under-30 delegates, whom Allman has unofficially organized into a youth caucus for the Republican convention, is concerned about the party's lack of appeal to young voters. Some worry that older Republicans' harping on social issues, like same-sex marriage, will drive the party apart -- or worse, to extinction.
"We fight very hard to ensure that a very small minority is not allowed to shape the agenda of our party," Claire Chiara, a 22-year-old California delegate, says.
Chiara is already something of a political unicorn -- a Republican at UC Berkeley.
"It's difficult to have people who, right off the bat, believe that your beliefs are wrong," she explains of the notoriously liberal university campus. "I've made it my mission to show people that you shouldn't make assumptions about others."
The young delegates here say they're fatigued by Washington's partisanship, but they're collectively optimistic and are promoting collegiality as a better way to govern.
"If someone says they hate Trump, then hey, let's talk about it," 20-year-old delegate Jacob Lopez says.
Lopez, participating in his first presidential election, was fearful of blowback from his peers when he decided to support Trump. His fears, as it turned out, were not unfounded. His truck was later egged on the campus of his Santa Barbara, Calif. college.
"It's not all easy," he concedes. But he pressed on as California state director for "Students for Trump," and he was ultimately rewarded by the campaign with a delegate slot.
At the first of two youth caucus meetings on Tuesday, a few millennial delegates lamented what they called, "a GOP marketing problem."
"Some people take their sport really seriously, and some people take music really seriously," Washington state delegate Jack Pickett says. "Politics is my music -- it's my sport."
Pickett, an 18-year-old with a penchant for seersucker and suspenders, is not wild about the nominee -- he is "still really doing some soul searching" -- but his devotion to the party is unshakable.
"There's a lot more to it for me than the White House," he says. "I'm going to fight for the party's survival and its success."
For Pickett, who was aiding his University of Washington fraternity with rush preparations in the days before Cleveland, a zest for politics is a family affair. His mother, Pickett noted, stepped aside at Washington's GOP convention so he could run as a delegate. And he, too, is an outlier among his teenage friends, who lovingly call him a nerd.
"Everyone knows what Republicans are against; our jobs are to let people know what we're for," Pickett says.
When Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) addressed the Youth Caucus' first meeting on Tuesday, his message -- replete with references to youth-friendly social media platforms -- was eminently clear: millennials matter.
"Republicans could be the next MySpace if we're not careful."