The Press in North Carolina | These young people who go to vote while pinching their noses

(Chapel Hill, North Carolina) With a microphone in hand, Shiva Rajbhandari sings Hello!the well-known anthem of the Italian resistance during World War II.

It is with this militant song that he launches the “climate karaoke”, accompanied by “non-alcoholic cocktails”, which closes the first meeting of the school year with around sixty students in favor of a green revolution across the United States, a Green New Deal.

The mood is festive. “We’re going to change this country!” the charismatic young Nepali-American tells a packed room on the campus of the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, one of the top-rated public universities in the United States.

The student leader has big ambitions that are reflected in the Green New Deal, a set of green policies that he believes could have an impact comparable to that of the New Deal, put forward by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. It involves getting rid of the economic system that is “killing” his generation and to make the right to housing and decent work as important as the right to freedom of expression, he explains.

Being young in a decisive state

Before the revolution, however, there is the November election. And his generation, says Shiva Rajbhandari, is taking it very seriously.

Young voters aged 29 and under, who make up nearly a third of the American electorate, turned out in record numbers in 2020. They are more educated than ever and more diverse, according to the Brookings Institution, which just released a report on them. In North Carolina, a state that Donald Trump won by just 75,000 votes in 2020, their vote could swing the election in favor of his Democratic rival, Shiva Rajbhandari believes. And if Kamala Harris wins North Carolina and its 16 electoral votes, she is more than 96.5% certain to win the election, according to data journalist Nate Silver.

The choice of the lesser evil

“I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris, but I’m not super excited about it,” says the public policy and sociology major. “Her complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza is immoral, but she’s our only chance to defeat Donald Trump and his fascist ideas once and for all. But afterward, if she’s elected, I’m going to continue to fight for the environment and the common good,” Shiva Rajbhandari tells me the day after climate karaoke at a Nepalese restaurant a stone’s throw from campus.

He and his friends will do whatever it takes to convince other Gen Z students to vote, even if they have to do it holding their noses.

Dissociate the candidate from the program

UNC Young Republican president Matthew Trott, also 20, has beliefs on the other end of the political spectrum—describing himself as a Christian conservative—but he has similar ambivalence about the candidate he’s voting for, Donald Trump. “I sum it up this way: I don’t support his views on the stolen election in 2020 or his personality, but I like his policy agenda. In that sense, he’s the better of the two candidates,” the political science major says, sitting at a table at Carolina Coffee Shop.

Despite his apprehensions, he plans to work extra hard, aided by the 160 or so members of his university association, to try to convince other students to vote for former President Trump and the other Republican candidates.

According to Matthew Trott, recruiting is easiest within fraternities – exclusive student groups – and Christian groups.

And even that is not a foregone conclusion, as he found out on Labor Day. That day, UNC fraternities were in the national media spotlight with a country concert in honor of their “patriotism,” Flagstock.

The battle for the flag

The story began in April when pro-Palestinian protesters replaced the American flag in the heart of campus with a Palestinian flag. About twenty fraternity members, the “bros,” then intervened to protect the American flag that had been torn down from the flagpole. Their gesture was praised by Donald Trump and earned them an invitation to the Republican Convention in Milwaukee.

Party aide John Noonan launched a fundraiser to throw them a party. He raised more than $500,000. Country music stars — known for their ties to Donald Trump — descended on Chapel Hill for a concert on September 2.

Invitations were extended to more than 3,000 “bros.” Barely 400 showed up that evening, according to the university newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel.

Matthew Trott believes the timing was poor—students were on vacation on the 3rd—but there was also a political message in the desertion. “The co-opting of our actions to promote a narrative that we are right-wing, ‘Make America Great Again’ heroes is misleading and does a disservice to many of those who were there.” [pour défendre le drapeau] ” said Oliver Levine, student president of Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity.

The Harris Card

These days, life has returned to normal on the Carolina campus. The 31,000 students rush from one class to another or enjoy the sunshine on the green lawns. Invitations to vote or attend a meeting are sometimes painted on walls, stapled to posts or written in chalk on the ground.

Before returning from summer vacation, Justin Goldman, editor of Carolina Political Reviewa student magazine covering political issues, worried that many of his disillusioned peers would refuse to vote in the election that would pit Donald Trump against Joe Biden again. “We saw four years of Trump and then we saw that in four years of Biden, life has not improved,” said the Virginia student, a university-colored skullcap perched on his head.

The arrival of Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee in July changed everything, he says. “Since school started, more people than ever have been contacting me to find out how to register to vote,” he says, noting that issues of climate change, the cost of living, abortion rights, gun safety and the Middle East conflict are top of mind for his classmates.

“There are some who feel like they are choosing the lesser of two evils by voting for Kamala Harris, but many believe that her election could be the beginning of a new political era,” adds Justin Goldman.

An era in which his generation will finally have its say.

A university at the heart of the storm

It’s no accident that I decided to report from the University of North Carolina, where I earned my undergraduate degree in the late 1990s. Campus politics have always been volatile. When I was a student, there was a heated debate over the creation of a center for black culture. UNC’s most famous alumnus, basketball player Michael Jordan, got involved. The university has also been rocked by major disputes over a statue of a pro-slavery Confederate soldier that was erected at the campus entrance in 1913 and toppled in 2018. Last year, the conservative Supreme Court struck down affirmative action practices at UNC and Harvard. These days, the appointment of a new conservative chancellor, Lee Roberts, who intervened with 200 police officers to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment in April, continues to fuel passions at this university where the confrontation between the left – the majority on campus – and the right – very present in the state – seems to be constantly renewed.