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Exclusive: Chris Evans Was Captain America. Now He Wants to Help Gen Z Reshape US Politics
Jun 09, 2021 4 mins, 8 secs

For a year and a half, the 39-year-old megastar (he turns 40 on June 13), best known for playing Captain America in the Marvel movies, has been quietly working the halls of the Capitol, occasionally in person, in an effort to persuade senators and representatives to put aside their hyper-partisan hyperbole and explain, in under two minutes, their views on politics and policy to a new generation of young potential voters.

The two-minute interviews are posted to A Starting Point, an app and website that Evans co-founded with director and actor Mark Kassen and health care entrepreneur and philanthropist Joe Kiani.

(In spite of the focus on the TikTok generation, A Starting Point isn't active there, conceding that territory to younger posters.) "I love the idea of getting concise information from the people who are most involved in the political process, in their own words, without any journalistic spin," says Evans.

"When I was a teenager, politics felt like something that was far away from what mattered to me," says Evans.

The youth vote has for decades been so unreliable that political campaigns considered it barely worth their time and effort, compared to the more certain payoff from older voters.

About 55 percent of eligible voters between the ages of 18-to-29 voted in the 2020 elections, compared to 44 percent in 2016, according to Tufts University's Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE).

That jump, which is bigger than other age groups saw in 2020, helped lift the youth vote to 17 percent of all votes cast, the most since the voting age was lowered in 1970.

And further increases may be in store for future elections, says CIRCLE Deputy Director Abby Kiesa.

"These kinds of increases among young voters are unheard of," she says.

"They're savvy consumers of digital media, but candidates have rarely spoken to them directly to address what especially matters to them," says Elizabeth Matto, director of the Center for Youth Political Participation at Rutgers University.

"Students quickly organized political responses, not only marching, but identifying the positions that members of Congress were taking on gun control, and engaging other young people to register to vote," says Matto.

"They don't want to see that politicians are trying, and they don't want to achieve moral victories," says Brent Cohen, executive director of Generation Progress, a progressive political advocacy group focused on younger voters.

"They want to see which politicians can make it happen and get bills passed." To get Gen Zs to vote in ever-larger and even election-swinging numbers, he says, many candidates are going to give young people the kind of attention that until now has been reserved for undecided voters in swing states.

"People my age realize how much of an impact our vote had in 2020," she says.

Case in point: when a million ticket requests came in online for a June-2020 Trump rally and only 6,200 people showed up, the difference was widely attributed to young TikTok activists eager to thwart the then-president.

The three co-founded A Starting Point to fill the gap in here-are-the-issues online information.

To keep the tenor informational—and to avoid vicious, snarky food-fights—the site has no comments or "likes." "You have these curious young voters who throw in a political comment on a website, and suddenly they're bombarded with vitriol," says Evans.

"Whether we like what they say or not, everyone we have on the site deserves to be there, because they won the vote of the people," says Kiani.

The videos on A Starting Point offer a chance to see politicians when they aren't pandering to the hard-line voters of their parties or sparring with journalists probing for controversy.

It's not that they're split between the two parties; only a fifth of them approve of Trump, and about two-thirds voted for Biden—the biggest margin by far of any age group, and the most lopsided youth vote in modern history.

At the same time, progressive young voters appear to be more open-minded than older voters: a third of non-Republican Gen Zs say that they'd consider voting Republican in future elections, according to a 2020 survey conducted by the non-profit Niskanen Center.

Regardless of their political affiliation, Gen Zs tend to resent either side trying to win them over with spin, says Matto, which may be why a site like A Starting Point, which is willing to provide unfiltered political exposition, is likely to resonate with them.

Its relatively non-partisan approach has also helped A Starting Point catch on as a classroom tool, via a partnership with the Close Up Foundation, which offers a range of civic-engagement programs to high schools.

"Young people are much less likely to be contacted by campaigns or other forms of outreach," she says.

Meanwhile, new election laws being pushed through by red states are certain to make it more challenging for young people to vote

"I don't believe you're going to see a big shift to the right in this generation," says Cohen

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