So it’s 2005, I’m 16 years old, and John Lewis is yelling at me. And with 400 of my high school classmates in a high school auditorium and he’s screaming, “You are never too young to change the world”. And I’m like a cynical smartass, elite private school kid. I’ve heard this before and I never really believed it, but it’s a little different when John Lewis is saying it to you. 

He was our age when he first got involved in the civil rights movement, and he was still a student when he was starting the Freedom Rides and the lunch counter sit-ins and spoke at the March on Washington. And I was like, there might be something to this shit. And Mid was the perfect place to become an activist. I started at Middlebury the semester after the kids who founded threefifty.org graduated. So there was already a global youth social movement that was founded by Middlebury College alums.

And I was like, yeah, I can do this too. And so I got six of my friends together and we decided we were going to get involved in the Vermont Governor’s election, sexy right. And we said, if a bunch of college kids stand up and we say what we want to have happen, the candidates will have to listen to us. And they did. It was actually kind of easy and their platforms was basically what we wanted it to be. And I was like, this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. 

So cut to 2018, I’m wearing a jean vest and jorts. I’m in a hotel ballroom in Detroit, and instead of six Mid kids, I’m surrounded by 600 young Americans and they’re all looking at me waiting for me to tell them how to start a youth vote revolution. And I’d start to panic.

Five years earlier, I’d started a nonprofit that was all about getting young people to vote. I’d swindled a billionaire into giving me millions of dollars to bring everyone to Detroit. And then I went on MSNBC and I told them that we were going to power a youth voter wave in the midterm elections, but we’d been losing a lot. 

In 2014, we lost every race that we engaged in. In 2016, we had the lowest youth voter turnout in a presidential election in history. And I’m looking around the room at these kids and they look really young. I mean, they’re teenagers. They’ve never worked on a political campaign. I mean, some of them had never been on an airplane. 

And they’re looking at me like I have some secret recipe to the youth vote Kool-Aid that they should be drinking. But I’m starting to doubt whether I drink it myself. But I go up to the mic and I do my best John Lewis impression, and I say, “Please don’t go to the weed convention that’s next door. I know the Canadian border is just across the river, but please don’t go there. If you get in trouble, I don’t know how to get you back. And I need you all to wear your brightly colored lanyards at all times so I can identify you around this hotel”.

And over the next three days, “Oh by the way, you’re never too young to change the world”. And over the next three days in Detroit, those young people prove themselves. They showed up early to every session to learn how to register their peers. They took place in the largest phone bank in American campaign history. 

They came up with ideas that were way better than my ideas, like bringing puppies to polling places to get their friends out to vote. And over the next 100 days, they registered 800,000 young people and powered the largest youth voter turnout in midterm history. Right. And so I learned that John Lewis was right, you underestimate the youth at your peril. And I will never doubt them again. 

Thank you.