"I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?"
So began the viral meme that would become a trending TikTok sound and a cornerstone of then-presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’s digital campaign to win over youth voters: her memory of a quote from her mother.
Official account KamalaHQ posted viral memes proclaiming “Kamala is Brat” in the iconic Charli-XCX-Brat-summer-green-and-black and reposting musical remixes of the coconut tree line. Harris’s running mate Tim Walz leaned into the camo and neon aesthetics of another pop star, the Midwest Princess herself, Chappell Roan. It was all part of a calculated effort to reach Gen-Z in their native habitat: the digital world.
Politicians have always hungered for young votes: Bill Clinton played the sax on the Arsenio Hall Show. Richard Nixon made a cameo on the variety show, Laugh In, delivering a bewildered version of the show’s “sock it to me” catchphrase. Hillary Clinton tapped into a hot mobile game trend by calling for young voters to "Pokémon Go to the polls.”
And yet, despite Harris’s success at tapping into algorithmic virality, she underperformed with the youth: She won the majority of Gen-Z votes, but turned out fewer young voters than former President Joe Biden in his 2020 campaign. Washington was no exception to the trend; voter participation among those aged 18 to 24 dropped 8.5% from 2020 to 2024.
Conventional wisdom is that while the younger generation might be politically engaged online, that rarely translates to votes. In Washington’s Fifth Congressional District, people under the age of 35 make up more than a quarter of the electorate — and less than 20% of them voted in the 2024 primaries.
But despite the long odds, local campaigns aren’t giving up entirely on winning the IRL support of Gen-Z voters in the race for the House seat currently held by incumbent Congressman Michael Baumgartner.
Democrat Richard Freudenberg posts frequently on Tiktok. Fellow Dem Bajun Mavalwalla posted a video riding through District 5 on the electric scooters teens whip around downtown. Baumgartner sent Gen-Z volunteers to Spokane’s Hoopfest wearing basketball hoop costumes and letting constituents dunk on them.
A few campaigns, seeking untapped voters who could give them any edge in a crowded primary, have gone even further.
Cringe or not? You decide:
Carmela Conroy
Jacob Skeim may be just 22 but he’s already glossed with the porcelain charm of a longtime party insider — the Jennifer Barkley of college kids. He’s also a field organizer for congressional candidate Carmela Conroy, and at the time we spoke, one of the young men behind the Instagram account GenZ for Conroy.
The account has caught flak from opponents, a super-PAC and anonymous Redditors who called the posts “cringe,” “misguided,” and speculated it was a product of letting someone’s young relative have the social media login. But the two actual Gen-Zs behind the keyboard beg to differ.
Videos of a crudely photoshopped Conroy bare-knuckle bear-fighting and moody-lighting Conroy posing in front of stained glass windows while a song proclaimed her “honorable” were engineered at the behest of Skeim and an even-younger volunteer — high school student Gabriel Linares.
It’s part of their strategy to get her elected: show their fellow young people the Conroy they know.
They described a woman who is kind, generous with her expertise and “very hip.” A woman who will go to late-night Pride after parties after a long day of canvassing, and enthusiastically pose for pictures with a person wearing a “Kill Your Local Pedophile” shirt. A woman who went out of her way to help local students. A woman who calls what’s happening in Gaza genocide (though she declined to say that in a RANGE questionnaire) and who changed her mind about wanting a two-state solution when presented with new information. Skeim jokes that she has been “woke-maxxing.”
She’s genuine, Linares said, and wants to increase civic education and break out of political polarization — two of the biggest issues facing the youth, according to Linares.
“ [Baumgartner] sat on party lines and voted only with Speaker Mike Johnson, like a hundred percent of the time, which was to me very frustrating,” Linares said. “I saw [in Conroy] someone who genuinely wants to represent Eastern Washington, someone who isn't gonna sit on her party line, get to Congress and then just leave Eastern Washington behind.”
When Skeim met Conroy, he was trying to revive the Eastern Washington University Student Democrats, which he characterized as a “failing” student political club, with no money and lapsed paperwork. Conroy was tabling at the university’s Neighborfest in September of 2025, and was kind enough to let the student Democrat club hand out promotional materials at her table, Skeim said, because they hadn’t been able to get registered due to paperwork issues.
She gave advice on how to organize the club out of dysfunction — perhaps from her personal experience trying to rebuild the Spokane County Democrats, when she was the chair between two turbulent periods. It made an impression on Skeim, who now spends roughly 20 hours a week phone banking and knocking doors for Conroy’s campaign.
Linares, the 17-year-old intern visionary behind much of the video content, has been in politics since before Conroy ran for Congress the first time in 2024. He has been lobbying the state legislature since he was 14, and worked in the lieutenant governor’s office as a member of the Legislative Youth Advisory Council for Washington State.
He wanted to find ways to help Conroy “really speak to Gen Z” and showcase that “she’s also kind of cool.”
While Internet commenters criticized one of Conroy’s digital attempts to reach the youth through trends and memes, when we met in early August, Skeim said it shows that Conroy listens to young voters and their opinions. They met to film the “honorable” video, which apes a viral trend of videos of, say, finance bros or a bull semen salesman flexing over-the-top swagger, backed by a bass-thumping sample of We On Go by BIA. But in Conroy’s case, the videographer kept trying to suggest deviations from the format.
“Carmela was just like ‘Trust the youth on this one,’ and it turned out fantastic,” Skeim said.
It made him feel the hype for Conroy’s campaign. There’s a section where it pans to a clip of Baumgartner taken from a town hall.
“He’s just like ‘I know no one in this room voted for me,’ and I’m like ‘Yeah, and they’re not going to vote for you again, bitch,” Skeim said.
There were big things coming for the GenZ for Conroy account, both Skeim and Linares told me: scripts in the works, a video on political polarization in Eastern WA and more “focused Gen-Z-prioritized content coming out in the next few days,” Linares said.
Instead, the account unceremoniously disappeared.
Posters online theorized that perhaps the Conroy campaign themselves took it down after the criticism, but Skeim proved otherwise: the account was pulled down by Instagram. He suspects another candidate reported the account. Now, they’re trying to recover the account, which is asking for ID verification.
“Still not up but we’re fighting it,” he wrote in a text Wednesday.
Kevin Fagan
Democrat Kevin Fagan doesn’t have a separate digital presence to connect with the youth. He doesn’t need one. The ruddy-cheeked first-time candidate is 27 himself, an elder Gen-Z. There’s no need to market test messages to the young — he’s just speaking to his peers.
When Fagan decided to jump into the race — fueled by frustration with the Trump administration’s funding cuts to climate change research in the region — he was the only Democrat candidate under the age of 60. Even as the race filled with candidates, Fagan remained one of just three under the age of 50, and the sole Democrat.
“ I wanted to have a very policy-first campaign that prioritized things that people in my generation want to see from their elected leaders, such as Medicare for All and universal childcare,” Fagan said. “ With that in mind, there was this niche to carve out a voice for a younger generation that was mainly a voice for change.”
His signs are painted in shades of orange and blue only slightly less vibrant than the colors that made Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral campaign iconic. In Mamdani-style walk-and-talk vertical videos showcasing Fagan on the streets of downtown Spokane, it’s easy to see what kind of image Fagan is trying to project: He’s young, he’s in touch with the political zeitgeist, and more importantly, he’s in touch with what Gen-Z voters are looking for.
His policy positions are unabashedly progressive and buzzword-heavy: “Abolish ICE,” “Climate Crisis” and “Putting the 5th First.” He’s spent some of his limited time campaigning for federal office advocating against the state ballot measure to ban trans girls from playing girls’ sports, and for the local ballot measure to renew the 2/10ths of 1% sales tax to support the region’s public bus network.
This is the plan, Fagan says, for how he will do what none of the older Democrats, even those with young volunteers, can: turn out his generation and win it all.
“ It's fighting for policies that we are hearing from the community,” he said. “That could be standing up for trans rights, or it could be recognizing our healthcare system is broken and unapologetically fighting for Medicare for All.”
Fagan is #notlikeotherDems, voicing frustration with what he sees as the party’s failure to fight genocide in Gaza and leverage limited minority-party power to fight the Trump administration. He’s inspired by candidates like Zohran Mamdani and Pramila Jayapal, who lead with progressive policy.
“ I look up and I see people in Congress with decades of experience as a congressional representative, and they absolutely fail to serve their people,” Fagan said. “I see that they just take corporate money and pass laws that their lobbyists tell them to.”
He hopes this frustration will resonate with young voters who are “rightfully pissed,” — even if it doesn’t resonate with the typical Democrat donors. His campaign had raised just under $27k by late July.
“There's not a significant amount of disposable income amongst the group that we are getting out to vote, to donate,” Fagan said.
Still, he doesn’t think he should be counted out of the race just because he’s financially strapped. Many of his potential future constituents are too.
He’s running a grassroots, door-knocking campaign that relies on other young voters who feel passionately. His new wife — who he married while taking a brief break from the campaign trail — is his campaign manager. About 50% of his campaign volunteers are Gen-Z. And, he’s endorsed by someone who ran a door-knocking campaign with less cash than her opponent — albeit in a much smaller region — and won: Spokane City Council Member Sarah Dixit, whose campaign Fagan says he’s inspired by.
“I believe a lot of Democrats in the county party are still trying to hold on to the past rather than being willing to usher in the next generation of leadership,” Fagan said. “ There's a coldness and a ‘You need to wait your turn in order to participate’ coming from a group of people within the county party, a group of older establishment Democrats. I think the Young Democrats are a great voice in countering that, that say, like, ‘We're here already. This is our future that we're fighting for.’"
Andrew Bartleson
19-year-old Ava Bartleson is worried about climate change, rampant AI usage and data centers using too much water. 47-year-old Andrew Bartleson is worried about the world his generation is going to leave behind, the problems his daughter and her generation will inherit.
Family conversations about these fears and encouragement from Ava inspired the elder Bartleson’s run for Congress.
“ We've always had good conversations and talked about these things, and he goes on rants about it, and I've always been telling him, "We need to do something about it, you need to get out there and do something,’” Ava said. “ I've always known he could do it. He's very smart in all the things we talk about, and so I'm just really glad that he finally put himself out there.”
So Bartleson made Ava his unofficial campaign manager: Running as an Independent and advised by Ava, he’s got a different sort of campaign.
Onstage at forums, he speaks naturally, with none of the polished charm of a lifelong politician and all of the charm of a man who genuinely believes what he’s saying. Ava takes videos of his responses, clipping them and posting them to Instagram, where — despite having no declared fundraising — Bartleson has found organic engagement, his progressive policies and authentic way of speaking about them resonating with viewers. He has quickly garnered over 1500 followers, more than any other candidate in the race save Nate Powell, and seen some viral success, with one video finding 58,000 viewers and another 51,000.
They’re scrappy in other ways, too.
Where other candidates have yard signs, the Bartlesons hand out free black t-shirts bearing the red text “Bartleson for Congress” and iron-on decals of family photos: the family dog, Bartleson with a mullet and a Speedo spraying a hose, Ava and her dad wearing their own black shirts with the Speedo photo, Bartleson throwing a thumbs up sign while pressing his face to his wife’s pregnant stomach — Ava incubating inside.
When Powell sent out a mailer that included a picture of the elder Bartleson shaking his hand, looking like a proud constituent, Bartleson responded by posting memes on the internet, including one where he edited his own face over Powell’s and another with Powell bearing a money decal on his shirt and the words “PAC Man” behind his head.
Ava has encouraged her dad to be himself on the campaign trail; she thinks his authenticity will resonate with voters, especially young ones. When he submitted a picture of himself wearing a blue suit as his candidate headshot to the Spokesman Review — at the guidance of his wife — Ava told him he needed to wear the fun t-shirts. When he changed his profile picture on Instagram to something more serious, Ava told him to change it back.
“ I was like, ‘No, no, no, you gotta go back — The people like that one.’ I've had a lot of my friends tell me how much they like that one,” she said. “ I get a lot of input from my friends, and so more people my age … A lot of them haven't been able to make it to the events even though they want to, and they're like, ‘Can I at least get a shirt still if I can't go?’”
Her dad takes her feedback seriously, implementing it into his campaign.
“ She made me my best self, and she always makes me better,” Bartleson said.
He knows a victory is unlikely — “ If I win, they'll make a Disney movie about me,” he said — but the long hours on the campaign trail have all been worth it because of their time together. It made his daughter proud of him.
“ The fact that it was a long shot and he did it anyways,” Ava said. “ He's been himself this entire time, and people love him for it or they don't like him for it, and either way, he's fine with that because you can't just get up there and do something that's not you.”
Where Bartleson is loud, Ava is quiet, where Bartleson is bold, Ava is shy. But through the campaign, he’s seen her make connections and speak out about what she cares about.
“ That's made me so happy,’ Bartleson said. “Just seeing her just really blossom into the woman I always knew she would be.”
He wants to lead with the same love he has for Ava: “ Everybody's got hugs from us. We're getting thousands of hugs. We mean it, you know? We don't fake the funk on our nasty dunk.”
