America’s first-time voters are heading to the polls on Nov. 8 with the influences of the COVID-19 quarantines, social media, and mainstream media outlets on their minds.
According to the research arm of Tufts University, there are about 8.3 million 18-year-olds eligible to vote in the 2022 midterm elections.
All of them were just 12 years old when Donald Trump was elected president.
For some, how the past few years of their minor lives have swayed their political views may come as a surprise in a country where youth is often associated with liberalism.
Kleg Zoraqi, who just turned 19, is the son of first-generation immigrants from Albania. He grew up and attended public schools in Worcester, Massachusetts. He told The Epoch Times that he saw his share of gang violence and drug abuse among teens in the schools.
He now goes to an area community college and works part time at a local hospital in which COVID-19 vaccines are a topic of conversation, and he’s surrounded by peers that, as he put it, get their news from TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter.
He’s also voting Republican.
“I started realizing growing up that we were being fed fake news and information,” Zoraqi said. “It has been especially bad in just the last few years where there seems to be a deliberate direction to point the younger age in the wrong direction.”
Zoraqi, whose parents went through the process of becoming legal U.S. citizens, said he can’t wait to exercise his right to vote for the first time on Nov. 8. He said he’s looking for candidates with “American ideals” that aren’t trying to create a cult-like atmosphere of redefining morality as something perverse.
He said he finds the entertainment industry especially hypocritical, preaching concern and diversity for youth and then glorifying violence and promoting illicit drug use to teens.
Sarah Hoell, who just turned 18 last month, comes from a very different background than Zoraqi but shares similar viewpoints. Hoell grew up homeschooled in New Hampshire, ranked one of the safest states in the United States compared to Worcester, a city with one of New England’s highest crime rates.
As a pro-life Christian who will also be voting Republican as a first-time voter, Hoell has participated in homeschool debates in which not everyone agrees on key issues such as abortion and vaccine mandates. While some teens can agree to disagree, she has also seen what she also characterized as a cult-like influence of both social and mainstream media that treats anyone who disagrees with liberal agendas as a social outcast.
“With the left, their beliefs have been turned into something very personal. They have their parades, their pins, their social media posts,” Hoell said. “Whereas the right already has individual identities; they are more content with who they are.”
She, like Zoraqi, believes that the COVID-19 quarantines played an especially influential role in turning teens into what Hoell called social warriors.
Rian Gibson, a first-time voter who’s about to enlist in the U.S. Navy, said he came to recognize that the government was using the “technology evolution” to manipulate his generation about five years ago, when he was 13.
“The sad irony is as they are programming us to think a certain way to create an army of followers, they are losing us to depression and suicide,” the 18-year-old Maine teen said.
Identifying as more of a centrist than right-leaning, Gibson said he’s voting with mental health illness on his mind, especially among the members of the military.
Last year, his 22-year-old brother, a popular student from Traip Academy high school in Kittery, Maine, committed suicide shortly after being honorably discharged from the U.S. Marines. Gibson, who comes from a military family and has moved around a lot, said that everywhere he’s been, he has seen a contradiction by liberals to “adultify” kids while creating “unattainable adult situations for them.”
Gibson places most of the blame for that on Democrats with their overzealous drive to push LGBT and pro-abortion agendas while ignoring the rest of the issues facing the younger generation.
“We are out here trying to live on a non-livable minimum wage, facing crazy housing costs to be on our own, and with a leadership occupied with things that don’t even come to play in most of our lives,” he said.
