I’m a junior at the largest public high school in Virginia. I’m not old enough to vote yet, but if I were, I wouldn’t feel confident about voting for either political party.
While early exit polling suggests that in the recent midterm elections, young voters overwhelmingly voted blue, that isn't proof that voters identify with the Democratic Party. The AP Voter Poll found that many young people’s votes were driven by opposition to President Donald Trump.
This was just the latest pendulum swing between the two parties – a process that creates change but doesn’t necessarily build trust or promise that young voters will see outcomes they want.
That's why young and soon-to-be voters like me aren't casting our hopes on this partisan binary – we're looking
beyond it. And I believe we'll have the multiparty option we deserve in my lifetime.
Gen Z won't settle for this broken two-party system
We shouldn’t forget: In January, a Gallup poll found that 56% of Gen Z identifies with neither party, representing the highest disillusionment with the two-party system since the 19th century. This figure displays something critical. The two-party structure is failing us – specifically my generation.
As Generations Z and Alpha confront concerns surrounding the cost of living, job security, artificial intelligence and climate change, we see what older generations cannot: These problems can’t be solved within a partisan stalemate. If you want younger generations to trust the system, they need to be offered a party worth trusting – a third party that gives our binary system more dimension.
So that's exactly what I'm looking toward. For now, I'm calling it The New People’s Party: a nonpartisan option for voters disillusioned with the two-party system.
Third parties have been floated before, like the Green Party, libertarians and the Populist Party of the 1890s. But the third party my generation needs is grounded in true populism: the belief in the rights, wisdom and virtues of the common people.
True populism would look different than the term thrown around by politicians on both the left and the right: It’s become a buzzword for campaign marketing. But new-generation voters like me see through this misrepresentation.
A populist third party isn't a fantasy. Gen Z can make it happen
Young Americans are dealing with the most existential face-offs of the 21st century: humans against unregulated AI, young professionals against a deteriorating job market, common people against a climbing cost of living, frontline communities against climate change and an unstable economy against rising debt.
We need populist policies to address these issues before we drown in them.
Take the rising debt ceiling, for example. Both parties vote again and again to raise it, knowing reform is necessary but being too stubborn to agree. Now the government is buying back bonds in an attempt to curb the debt crisis – an attempt that Wall Street knows won’t work.
The American myth that a multiparty system doesn’t work gets disproven when looking abroad. Canada, Denmark, India and Italy are just four examples of democratically led countries that have more than two parties.
Multiparty systems aren’t perfect, but the rest of the world understands politics isn't black and white. Adding a third party in the United States could increase voter turnout, which is still lower than many other nations despite the midterms' near record, and welcome discouraged voters back into the fold.
It could also make room for more collaboration between parties. Coalition building has helped pass major legislation abroad, including, for example, Canada’s pension plan and Ireland’s Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act.
We can escape the Republican vs. Democrat impasse and take direct action by forming a youth-led, populist party.
America is still one of the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas polluters, has a stagnant federal minimum wage and unstable work schedules, and has a Congress with no plan to put guardrails on AI or address the debt.
It is clear after the swing to the left in the midterms that America is trying to escape one party for another, when really many young people just want another option. We are told to accept this two-party system on a silver platter because it’s what’s for dinner. But Gen Z is cooking something better.
Gemma Pianesi is the arts and entertainment editor at Theogony, the student newspaper of Alexandria City High School in Northern Virginia. This opinion column was produced in partnership with the Students United News Network (SUNN), which connects student newsrooms across the country and publishes the first nationwide student newspaper, The SUNN Post.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: I'm a soon-to-be voter. Democrats, Republicans haven't earned mine | Opinion
