By Abigail Hakas

Pennsylvania Capitol-Star

September 22, 2024 – PITTSBURGH — With just 44 days until the 2024 election, U.S. Reps. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) rallied young voters for the Harris-Walz ticket at Carnegie Mellon University on Sunday.

Young people, Lee told the audience “are not the voices of the future,” but rather “the voices of right now.”

“We are all in the most powerful room in the country,” she said. “This is the most powerful room because we are in Western Pennsylvania, we’re in Western Pennsylvania, and the road to the White House, the road to the Senate and the road to the House all leads right here through y’all’s campuses.”

Pennsylvania is key for both Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ nominee, and former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee. With its 19 electoral votes, the Keystone State is the biggest prize of the “blue wall” battleground states for either candidate.

According to the Pew Research Center, about two-thirds of registered voters ages 18 to 24 align with Democrats. In 2023, the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement estimated around 41 million members of Gen Z would be eligible to vote in the 2024 election.

Sunday’s event was co-hosted by College Democrats at Pitt, the CMU College Democrats and the Young Democrats of Allegheny County.

“When I talk about what our job is in the next 40-something days, your job is to take care of each other because that’s who I’m voting for,” Lee said. “I’m going to go and vote for the most marginalized person in my life. Because it’s my job, it’s my responsibility, to make sure that I’m creating the conditions that we all can survive in, not just survive, that we can all thrive in.”

Ocasio-Cortez followed Lee with a list of the issues that young voters might be most concerned with: climate change, school shootings and the cost of rent and healthcare.

“We have been aging and growing in a world that our predecessors have left to us,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Respectfully, a lot of what has been left to us is messed up, is really messed up, and it’s messed up not even on a partisan basis, it’s messed up generationally.”

Ocasio-Cortez told a story of her time at Boston University when Barack Obama began his candidacy, and her absentee ballot did not arrive in time. She said she took a bus back home to New York City to cast her vote for the future president.

She not only encouraged students to register to vote in Pennsylvania with their on-campus address, but also to sign up for a shift with the Harris-Walz campaign, go door-to-door and ensure a Democratic victory at every level in the election.

Those calls-to-action were the theme of the speakers at Sunday’s event, with Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato, CMU College Democrats President Avalon Sueiro and Harris-Walz campus organizer Agatha Prairie all taking the stage.

Prairie encouraged attendees to convince five friends to vote and Sueiro said to knock on classmates’ doors and “have those tough conversations” about the stakes of the election.

Gainey took a more somber approach.

“We should all be tired. I’m tired of someone that can stand on the stage in a debate and say to the American people and the world that immigrants that are here in our country eat dogs and cats,” he said in reference to former President Donald Trump’s false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. “I’m tired of that level of hate.”

Trump’s running mate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) campaigned in Berks County on Saturday, and mentioned Springfield in his remarks. His job “as the United States Senator representing the people of Ohio is to listen to American citizens and fight for them,” Vance said.

“So our message to Kamala Harris and Democrats is we’re going to keep on complaining about their politics because this is America and we have the right to speak our minds,” he added.

Innamorato pointed out that a satellite voting location at the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall in Oakland will be open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. from Oct. 15-17. Satellite locations offer residents the ability to register to vote, request a mail-in ballot, complete and return it in one place.

“A Pennsylvania victory runs through Allegheny County, and it runs through young people,” Innamorato said. “I’m asking for all of you to do what you can, to knock doors, to volunteer, to make phone calls, to talk to your weird cousin, to get your classmates on board, because we got a lot of work to do over the next 44 days.”