About NextGen America
NextGen America is the largest national organization for engaging young people in voter education, registration and mobilization. We invite 18-to-35 year olds — the largest and most diverse generation in American history — into our democracy to ensure our government works for us and to find new solutions to the dire challenges facing our society and the world. Since 2013, NextGen America has registered more than 1.4 million young voters and educated millions more.
NextGen America is organized as a 501c4 nonprofit organization. The NextGen Education Fund is its affiliated 501c3 charitable organization. NextGen Voters the organization’s nonpartisan voter registration and education program.
About NextGen’s 2022 Program
NextGen America is embarking on a $32 million voter-outreach program aimed at reaching 9.2 million voters between the ages of 18 and 35 in eight key states in 2022. The program calls for on-the-ground field organizing in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina and Pennsylvania as well as a distributed digital organizing program in Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire and Wisconsin.
NextGen will establish community-level teams of professional organizers and community volunteers, who will conduct in-person voter outreach alongside a proven text-, phone-, and online-organizing program drawing on an existing national base of more than 25,000 supporters. In addition to registration, NextGen runs voter education and mobilization programs through mail, social media and influencer marketing, digital and traditional advertising and more.
NextGen aims to register more than 288,000 young people to vote during the 2022 election cycle, including 150,000 in Texas alone.
About NextGen’s 2020 Program
NextGen America contributed to the highest youth-voter turnout in U.S. history in 2020, reaching more than 10.5 million people across nearly a dozen states and motivating nearly 4.7 million to cast ballots in the November election. Across the country, NextGen reached one in every nine voters under 35 who cast a ballot in 2020. And that outreach made a demonstrable difference: of the young people registered by NextGen in 2020, 73 percent turned out to vote, compared to 60 percent of young people overall.
NextGen adjusted seamlessly to the organizing conditions of a Covid-19 pandemic, ending in-person voter-contact and building a distributed organizing team on the fly that eventually encompassed more than 25,000 volunteers. NextGen sent more than 25 million text messages, made nearly 10 million phone calls, and piloted an innovative social-media influencer program that reached more than 80 million young people.
Young Voter Facts
- An estimated 50 percent of young people, aged 18-29, voted in the 2020 presidential election, an 11-point increase from 2016 and likely one of the highest rates of youth electoral participation since the voting age was lowered to 18. [1]
- The youngest two generations of Americans (Millennials and Gen Z) represented nearly one out of every three voters in 2020, while the Baby Boomers and older generations declined to 44 percent of the electorate — underscoring the rapid generational change underway in America. [2]
- NextGen invested in 11 battleground states in 2020, including Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
- NextGen registered 122,185 young voters and collected 441,630 pledges to vote in 2020. Of the young people registered by NextGen, 73 percent turned out to vote — compared to 60 percent of young registrants overall.
- With 487 staffers on the ground and more than 25,000 volunteers, NextGen made 9.5 million phone calls, sent 27.6 million texts and sent 6.5 million pieces of mail, with an emphasis on African American and Latino youth.
- NextGen ultimately reached more than 10.5 million young voters in 2020 — contacting one in every seven eligible young voters and mobilizing one in every nine who actually cast a ballot. Nearly 4.7 million people contacted by NextGen voted, leading to the largest youth voter turnout in history.
- In 2022 and beyond, NextGen is preparing to engage the rising generations of Americans in their communities and on their terms. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the white population in the United States declined for the first time in history between 2010 and 2020 [3], underscoring the massive demographic shift being led by Americans under 35.
- Texas is the second most populous state in America, the third-youngest and the fourth-most diverse. Texans of color accounted for 95 percent of the state’s population growth between 2010 and 2020. Non-Hispanic white Texans now make up just under 40 percent of the state’s population — down from 45 percent in 2010. Meanwhile, the share of Hispanic Texans has grown to 39.3 percent. [4]
[1] https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/half-youth-voted-2020-11-point-increase-2016
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/
[3] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/population-changes-nations-diversity.html
[4] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/08/12/texas-2020-census/