Avra Reddy’s election is one of many in recent months to feature millennial candidates.
On International Women’s Day, March 8, Avra Reddy wore a baby pink T-shirt that read, “Heroes, Friends, Mothers, Daughters, Visionaries, Queens, Rulers, Women.” But the nineteen-year-old freshman at the University of Wisconsin wasn’t just celebrating the holiday—she was preparing to debate her opponent in the race for Madison Common Council.
Reddy sat at the table next to her opponent, Matthew Mitnick, also a UW-Madison freshman. She had a folder full of notes that she shuffled between questions. The first question: “What makes you qualified for this position?”
“I’m an activist,” Reddy replied, explaining her past experience as a fellow for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. “I’ve probably knocked on upwards of 3,000 doors and definitely made over 7,000 phone calls. . . . I’m going to take that strength of being an activist, my strength of turning people out to vote, and I want to bring a student voice to the table.”
Mitnick, in turn, stood up to answer, wearing an ironed button-up shirt rolled up to the elbows and a pair of khakis—looking every bit the politician. “I have experience working with local government,” he said, “working through the city process to make things happen.”
Adam Fearing
Reddy, left, ran a winning campaign while maintaining her status as a full-time student at UW-Madison.
Reddy launched her campaign in November 2018, seeking to represent a district mostly made up of UW-Madison college students. Her platform focused on the environment and safety, particularly the safety of women. Throughout the campaign for the part-time position (it pays $13,570 per year), she remained a full-time student. She had four core staff members, and about fifteen to twenty weekend campaigners—all unpaid—who went door-to-door talking to voters and working phone and text banks. The campaign had no official office space, working in campus cafeterias and student organization office spaces when available.
On April 2, their efforts paid off when Reddy was elected as Madison’s 8th District alderperson, beating Mitnick by an unofficial tally of 887 to 735 votes. She became the first woman to be elected to represent this district in twenty-six years, and the first-ever woman of color.
“Avra is definitely an activist at heart,” says Adam Fearing, her campaign manager. “She’s coming from a place of genuine passion on these issues, which young people relate to.”
Reddy’s election is one of many in recent months to feature millennial candidates, like Katherine Kerwin, a twenty-one-year-old from Rhode Island who ran for city council last fall and won, or Ja’mal Green, a twenty-three-year-old who ran for mayor of Chicago, or the six teens who ran for governor in Kansas, and eighteen-year-old Hadiya Afzal, who ran for county board in suburban Illinois.
Leading up to the 2018 midterms, Run For Something, a progressive organization that helps young and progressive candidates get on the ballot and hopefully win, claimed it had around 15,000 millennials asking for help to run for office.
“In 2018, we saw a surge of both young people and women, and that, in the Democratic Party those running in both those groups were far more people of color than previously,” says Shauna Shames, assistant professor in Rutgers department of political science and author of Out of the Running: Why Millenials Reject Political Careers and Why it Matters.
“It may have felt like this in the sixties with the civil rights movement too, or in the late seventies with women and the ERA movement,” Shames says. “But it’s worth noting that young people did not have a universal right to vote at eighteen until a few decades ago, so this may indeed be [a new surge].”
Reddy grew up in Grayslake, Illinois, about fifty miles north of Chicago. Her dad helped build her interest in politics. They’d stay up together to watch late night talk shows, and have their own political chats.
In high school, Reddy was appointed as one of two student representatives on her school board, where she served alongside the elected members. After working through school budgets and advocating for her fellow students for two years, Reddy fell in love with politics and policy making. But it was the polarized 2016 presidential election that made her want to get more involved.
“As Donald Trump started to gain traction,” she says, “I realized that I wanted to start working on behalf of a candidate because I didn’t want him to win,” Reddy tells me, snapping a hairband on her wrist.
In the summer of 2016, she moved in with a host family in Madison, Wisconsin, as a fellow for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, where she worked on the ground for the upcoming state and national elections. Her summer in the city made her want to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which she did just two years later.
‘It may have felt like this in the sixties with the civil rights movement too, or in the late seventies with women and the ERA movement.’
Hadiya Afzal, a friend of Reddy’s and who grew up wearing a hijab in a Muslim family in a suburb in Illinois, says it was Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric that motivated her to run for the Dupage County Board in 2018. The Depaul political science major lost the election, but was recently accepted to the Arena Summit Academy in Iowa, which trains young candidates to succeed in elections.
Along with a surge of young political involvement is a record wave of young women, and young women of color running for—and winning—political seats. A record number of young women candidates ran during the midterms, too, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
Emily’s List, a political action committee that supports female Democratic politicians, says it has heard from 22,000 potential female candidates, half of whom were under the age of forty-five. In 2016, the organization says, there were just 920 potential female candidates total.
Reddy says she has been inspired by powerful women all her life: “Most of my teachers have been women, and they’ve all had this very strong female vibe.”
If more young people keep running for office, it’s going to mean that more heroes, friends, mothers, daughters, visionaries, queens, rulers, and women gain much-needed experience in leadership, as well as the representation they’ve been missing, lending a voice to the largest generation of voters yet.