This month, we’re inviting audiences to watch “Girls State” and “Boys State,” two documentaries that follow teens learning about democracy and politics by participating in a mock government. Both films are available to stream on Apple TV+ with a subscription.
What do young voters care about? The same stuff as everyone else; economics is top of mind this election.
“Both [young men and women] identify inflation as their top concern, with affordable housing and better-paying jobs consistently also in the top tier of concerns,” said Gabriel Sanchez, senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
“Access to higher- or better-paying jobs is of particular importance for young women,” said Sanchez, noting that the income gap between men and women widened for the first time in 20 years in 2023.
Despite a strong job market and average wages outpacing inflation, Gen Z has more debt and pays more for basics like car insurance, health insurance and rent than previous generations did, and fewer young Americans can afford to buy their own homes.
You can see these economic challenges guiding the aspiring politicians in Boys and Girls State programs. Teen senators who participated in Boys Nation, a follow-up camp that aims to mimics the federal government’s legislative process, passed 13 bills, including a national paid family leave program, increased funding for veterans mental health care, expanded affordable housing and addressed Social Security solvency.
Girls Nation participants passed 10 bills this summer, including protections against deepfakes and more transparent rules around evictions. (Notably, the boys and girls collectively passed almost as many bills in a week as the real Congress passed in all of 2023.)
The teens’ mock government doesn’t require appropriations or budget reconciliation. But Philip Lam, a 2023 California Boys and Girls State participant, said he and other teen state senators considered the economic viability of their proposed legislation.
“A lot of noneconomic policies debated on the floor boiled down to the extent of taxpayer burden; bills that were good in principle more likely got struck down if the economic costs outweighed the societal benefits,” Lam wrote in an email to Marketplace.
Lam said he looks at politics differently since participating in the program. He found last week’s presidential debate wanting.“Our candidates ought to have robust conversations on their respective policy proposals,” he said. “It frustrates me that they have defaulted to the same ad hominem attacks, recycled the same rhetoric and displayed an intriguing inability to directly answer questions posed by the moderators.”
Eight million more teens are newly eligible to vote in this year’s election, including Lam, who’s now an undergraduate at Northwestern University studying journalism and political science. He plans to cast his first ballot in November.
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