A Gen Z advocacy group is trying to dissuade young voters from backing Trump and Haley

The battle is on for Gen Z’s votes.

A liberal political advocacy group said Monday that it had bought up two website domains to steer young voters away from the leading GOP candidates: former President Donald Trump and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.

Voters of Tomorrow, a Gen Z-run advocacy organization, snagged the URLs GenZforTrump.org and GenZforHaley.org to redirect users to GenZvsFarRight.org. The initiative is designed to educate young voters about Trump’s and Haley’s agendas to show “their visions are overwhelmingly unpopular with young voters,” said Jack Lobel, the organization’s national press secretary.

The news was first reported by Wired. 

Lobel, who is a student at Columbia University, said he believes Trump and Haley are not putting in much effort to inform Gen Z about their stances.

“There’s so many freedoms that Trump and Haley want to take away from young voters, and we’re not going to let them: the freedom to read books that accurately portray American history, the freedom to go to school and not get shot, the freedom to drink clean water and to live on a planet without irreversible climate damage,” Lobel, 19, told NBC News. “These are serious choices that we have to make.”

Representatives for Trump’s and Haley’s campaigns did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

GenZvsFarRight.org does not explicitly advocate against Trump or Haley. But the website cites examples of their stances on certain issues to suggest why young voters might not align with them. 

For example, their views on abortion — which during the 2022 midterms was “the top issue influencing” the youth vote, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

“Trump knows his position is unpopular, so he dodges the question to avoid accountability,” GenZvsFarRight.org says on its site, noting that he has said he would be willing to sign a federal abortion ban.

And after it lists Haley’s stance — that she would “absolutely” sign a national abortion ban — the website says she “doesn’t care about representing our views.”

Launched by a high school student in 2019, Voters of Tomorrow now boasts chapters in 20 states.

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The organization said it hoped to get eyes on the websites by advertising on Instagram and Snapchat, social media platforms that are native to Gen Z, those born in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. The organization said its goal is to reach at least half a million people in key states (such as Michigan, North Carolina and Florida) where young voters have significant power to sway election outcomes.

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“Gen Z clearly gets a lot of their information there,” Lobel said. “Trump and Haley aren’t doing any sort of outreach on these platforms in a way that authentically communicates their views on abortion, climate change, gun violence and other top issues. So we’re doing it for them.”

Internet trolling has become a popular political advocacy tactic in the digital age, especially among Gen Z social media natives.

Last year, three TikTok creators uploaded a video suggesting viewers inundate Truth Social with the hashtag #desantis2024 to get Ron DeSantis, Trump’s most formidable presidential primary opponent at the time, trending on the former president’s own social media platform. It worked almost overnight.

In 2022, TikTokers bombarded a Texas anti-abortion-rights whistleblower website with Shrek porn and false information in an effort spearheaded by two Gen Zers.

In 2020, social media users persuaded thousands to reserve tickets to a Trump rally without planning to attend, resulting in his coming out to rows of empty seats.

It’s not uncommon for political candidates to face domain trolling, as well. When former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina entered the Republican presidential primaries in 2016, an internet troll bought CarlyFiorina.org and flooded it with 30,000 sad emoticons to represent the number of people laid off at HP during her tenure.

As for Gen Z, there is some expectation that it is a cohort worth courting. Tufts University’s civic engagement center found that Gen Z voted at a higher rate in 2022 (28.4%) than previous generations had in their first midterm elections. That year was the first when the generation made up the entire group of potential voters ages 18-24, the group said in a report in August.

“Historical turnout data for youth ages 18-29 also confirm that today’s young people are among the most electorally engaged in recent decades,” the report said.