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Biden’s Drastic Actions on Alaska Drilling and TikTok Push Voters, Especially Young Ones, to the Polls

by Ryan Lee
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President Joe Biden is facing some challenges to stay popular among young voters with his decisions recently for TikTok and Alaska. Ever since President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, youth have been helping Biden to win seats in the Senate and votes for Democrats in the House during their elections last year.

President Biden is 80-years-old and has never been the top choice for young people who think America needs a new leader. He may have difficulty winning the next election because of plans to prevent TikTok from being used and allowing drilling in Alaska.

At the moment, Joe Biden’s plan to get rid of a ton of student loan debt might not be successful due to an issue with the Supreme Court. He announced this before last year’s big election and it was part of a promise he made when he beat out Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic Party race.

Biden’s worry isn’t that these young, left-leaning people will vote for candidates from another party. It’s that they won’t participate at all if they’re not excited by this election.

Mark Buehlmann, a 20-year-old college student from Arizona State University, is a Democrat but he doesn’t want to vote for Biden. He thinks that if Biden becomes the Democratic nominee then he will probably not vote and thinks Joe Biden might be able to do a good job but he’s not great at gathering supporters or motivating people who usually support Democrats.

TikTok is a really popular app for young people. Around 150 million people in the United States use it to share fun and creative videos with their friends or even strangers. The app has an amazing system that figures out what videos you’ll like, so it can show them to you! Some say TikTok is addicting, because there’s always something to watch and explore around the community.

Governments around the world have become worried about TikTok’s owner, ByteDance from Beijing, since they are worried that this company might hand over their users’ browsing history and other data to the Chinese government or spread propaganda and false information. The U.S. and other countries have even blocked its use on any device owned by a government while several states in the country have done the same.

The U.S. government recently threatened to ban TikTok unless its owners, ByteDance, sell the app. This follows President Trump’s attempt to ban it in 2020 but this was stopped by a court and cancelled when Joe Biden became president and asked for an investigation about it.

ByteDance is attempting to fix any security issues by using Oracle’s servers. The Biden government officials acknowledge that politics can affect their review, but still they are not ignoring the political factors.

Both Democratic and Republican Parties are now taking stronger economic and security positions against China. So, Joe Biden (the President) has been asked by Republicans to do something about TikTok.

Gina Raimondo (who works in the Commerce Department) said that if Biden doesn’t take action against TikTok, he will probably lose voters under the age of 35 forever.

The White House of President Biden and his potential re-election campaign has taken notice of the app’s high usage in the United States and how young voters leaning towards Democratic Party are using it. Last week, Rep. Jamaal Bowman from New York (a Democrat who is popular among many people on the left side) did a press conference with certain users of TikTok to support freedom of expression on this social network platform.

On Thursday, a group of people in government called ‘lawmakers’ asked the CEO of TikTok (Shou Zi Chew) lots of questions about data security and harmful content for nearly six hours. They were unsure if the app should be blocked from use because it has some ties to China, but Chew said that ByteDance (which owns TikTok) is definitely not under control by any other countries.

At Arizona State University (one of the biggest colleges in America), people were interviewed about President Biden’s narrow win in the swing state. Most young people there said that a TikTok ban is something annoying, but expected to happen and it will not change their views on Biden.

Lucas Vittor, a 19-year-old student studying business administration from Houston, said most people don’t really think about the possible ban on TikTok. He believes that all they would know is that an old leader is trying to be oppressive and therefore blocking social media access.

TikTok might disappear, but that just means something new will replace it, said Vittor. YouTube and Instagram already have some of the same features as TikTok, even though people sometimes think they’re not as good.

Ginny Xu (20 years old) is from Goodyear, Arizona and isn’t sure whether President Biden is really involved with this be happening or not, but she believes it has to do with everyone being worried about stuff coming from China.

Xu said she would be sad if she couldn’t use TikTok, but it still wouldn’t stop her from voting for Biden if another Democratic candidate isn’t running. Maddie Bruce, a 20-year old student, feels the same way. She doesn’t like Biden either, but she would still vote for him if someone else didn’t step up to the plate.

An idea to help solve the national security threat of TikTok is for its Chinese parent company to sell their stake in the U.S. version, so that people can still use it but without all the risks.

Also, more young people are taking part in voting since President Trump’s election, compared to older generations like grandparents and parents.

During the 2018 and 2020 midterms, a lot of young people voted. According to researchers from Tufts University, this was the highest amount of youth voting in the last 30 years. And when they did vote, it was mostly for Democrats.

Biden was very popular with young voters aged between 18 and 24, winning 63% of their votes compared to Trump’s 34%, according to research from AP VoteCast. Even though Republicans did better with young voters in the midterms last year, Democrats still had a 14-point advantage, meaning they got 54% of the votes from people under 25 years old, while Republicans received 40%.

Jack Lobel from Voters of Tomorrow, an organization that helps young people to vote, said: “Young voters are like a secret weapon for the Democrats. Even though they already have us as their supporters, we’re still not fully utilized yet, so campaigns are trying to tap into this group.”

He also shared that a TikTok ban might make some young people mad but at least Joe Biden listened to and supported what’s important to them.

President Biden has promised to help people with their student loan debts and to protect the rights of people who may be thinking about getting an abortion. He also just passed a bill that will spend a lot of money on climate change and made it illegal for certain types of guns or gun accessories.

Marisol Ortega, a 21-year-old journalism student from Glendale, Arizona, said her friends are hoping for someone younger and more exciting than Biden as President. But even then, they still think they’ll have to take the matter into their own hands and vote for him anyways.

Ortega said,”Joe Biden has been a big figure in US politics for a long time. But people are now looking for something new.”

However, the Biden government hasn’t done well with environmentalists and young people because they gave approval to the huge oil drilling project called Willow on Alaska’s North Slope.

Young people have been working hard to slow down the drilling for oil and shift away from using it as a fuel. A bunch of videos on TikTok, with the hashtag #StopWillow, got millions of views before the president made his decision to stop the process.

Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the leader of NextGen America, a group that focuses on organizing young people, said that they had advised the administration not to head in this direction because it would not do enough for youths.

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