Vice President Kamala Harris looked up from prepared remarks in the White House’s ornate Roosevelt Room this month to make sure the reporters in the room could hear her clearly: “Nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed.” Harris’ “marijuana reform roundtable” was a striking reminder of how the politics have shifted for a onetime prosecutor raised in the “Just Say No” era of zero-tolerance drug enforcement.
Democrats, through a variety of methods including social media influencers and a newly launched campus outreach program, are trying to make the broader case to young people that Biden is fighting for equity and change while Trump is looking backward. They note that young voters proved critical not only in Biden's 2020 election but also in the 2022 midterm elections, when concerns over democracy and abortion rights helped the party perform better than expected.