Sam Schwartz just finished caravaning around the country in an RV for 28 days with half a dozen fellow Gen Z activists. The 20-year-old gun reform activist stopped in 15 districts across 11 states on a mission to get Democrats elected to Congress.
On Sunday, he boarded a plane from Palm Beach, Florida, to Chicago to attend the Democratic National Convention with two of his traveling companions: his girlfriend, Emma Levine, 20, and Highland Park shooting survivor Drew Spiegel, 19.
Being at the DNC to celebrate the Harris-Walz ticket is a natural culmination of their cross-country Tour to Save Democracy, said Schwartz.
The trio will document their experience on social media to keep the Gen Z voters they met on the road engaged in the political process. They also plan to share what they heard on their monthlong tour of vulnerable Republican districts.
“It’s not that young people have different concerns. They’re literally the same,” said Schwartz, citing gun violence, reproductive rights and climate change. “It’s just that, for young people, they’re definitely more pressing issues because we’re going to inherit the planet and country.”
The college students believe electing Vice President Kamala Harris and turning red congressional seats blue will advance all these causes.
Activism arises from tragedy
Schwartz is a rising junior at the New England Conservatory of Music. He always knew he wanted to score movies, but when his cousin Alex Schachter was murdered in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when they were both 14, he launched into activism too.
“I was not ever politically active before that,” Schwartz said. “I knew next to nothing. I really couldn’t tell you the difference between a Republican and a Democrat.”
Suddenly, he was attending rallies, talking to Florida legislators and writing op-eds in the local papers in honor of his cousin.
He saw Democrats pushing for universal background checks and blanket bans on assault weapons like the one that killed his cousin, and he saw Republicans pushing against these efforts.
A mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, in March 2023 was a major turning point for him because of its similarities to the Parkland shooting five years earlier. A lone gunman walked into a school with a semiautomatic rifle again.
“I kinda mentally snapped and said why don’t we sit outside the Capitol Building? Let’s just wait and not go until we get some type of movement,” he recalled.
Hundreds of students joined in person in Washington, D.C., and thousands joined virtually. Thirty-one congressional Democrats also joined the six-day sit-in for varying periods.
Schwartz asked each lawmaker why they hadn’t enacted the gun reform promises they had made on the campaign trail. Each told him it was because there weren’t enough Democrats in office.
These conversations catalyzed the Tour to Save Democracy. Within a year, Schwartz raised nearly $200,000 online and used the money to embark on the nationwide quest.
Spiegel connected with Schwartz after surviving the mass shooting at an Independence Day parade in 2022 in Chicago’s Highland Park suburb where seven people were killed and dozens injured. He was next in line to start walking when the first shots were fired.
“The older people around me were like, ‘Oh, it’s fireworks. It’s the Fourth of July after all.’ They saw the chaos and thought it was a local 5K coming through,” recalled Spiegel. “But Gen Z — my generation — we immediately knew it was a mass shooting. It’s because of how we were raised. I grew up hearing about mass shooting after mass shooting.”
Spiegel was also compelled to escalate his activism following the Nashville school shooting. He had recently moved to Nashville from Deerfield, Illinois, to study at Vanderbilt University.
Illinois passed an assault weapons ban after the Highland Park shooting; Tennesee passed laws that placed police officers in schools.
“In Illinois, we have Democratic lawmakers who took action. In Tennessee, we have Republican lawmakers who put more armed people in schools. That was disappointing and I’ve been speaking out ever since,” he said.
28 days on the road
The Tour to Save Democracy began with a rally in San Antonio, Texas, to promote small business owner Michelle Vallejo for Congress. The seat she’s fighting for has historically been blue but was flipped red in 2022.
Then, Donald Trump was shot on the second day of the tour and they had to cancel several of their events for security concerns. It’s an ironic reminder that gun violence knows no limits, said Spiegel.
Eight days later, President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris.
While he “loves” Biden, Schwartz said he was “incredibly relieved” that the Democratic party had a new candidate. He hadn’t been seeing excitement on the tour until Harris was the presumptive nominee.
Within hours, sign-ups for their event in Omaha, Nebraska, the next day doubled. From then on, they regularly saw 120 attendees at rallies where they previously expected 50 to 60, a spike Schwartz credits to enthusiasm around Harris.
The caravaners encouraged attendees to create friendship bracelets representing the issues they cared about most: orange for gun violence, green for climate, pink for reproductive rights, red for health care, and so on.
Schwartz was surprised by the diversity of concerns young voters raised. Most of the time they were inspired by a personal connection like his to gun violence.
Bringing the DNC back to Gen Z
In addition to bringing concerns they heard on the road to lawmakers, the trio sees bringing the DNC to young people as a critical responsibility this week.
“When I’m posting on Twitter, I’m fully aware of the fact that a lot of young people are getting their news from social media,” said Schwartz.
The Tour to Save Democracy is on Twitter and Instagram.
“We try to make (posts) super energetic and exciting to look at so people scrolling on their phones who have no interest in politics can see a fun design and get drawn in through that,” said Levine, an illustration student at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Tour to Save Democracy’s creative director.
The Democratic Party seems to have taken a cue to engage cultural references too. Harris’ campaign embraced and advanced the onslaught of memes that began circulating after Biden endorsed her.
DemPalooza appears be to another attempt to engage youth. Schwartz, Levine and Spiegel giggled as they walked through the expo booths at McCormick Place Convention Center on opening day. The family-friendly daytime programming, which includes a bracelet-making station, is a play on Chicago’s mainstay summer music festival Lollapalooza.
Schwartz had nicknamed the 2023 sit-in on Capitol Hill “LibChella” after California music festival Coachella.
“They copied me,” Schwartz joked.
After the DNC, he will start his junior year at the New England Conservatory. He plans to hold rallies for Democrats on college campuses in swing states on the weekends.
