by Dave Cullen
Her goal was not a decisive win in November and sweeping gun reform the following spring. It was passing one reasonable law after another, to reduce gun violence without cramping the style of responsible young gun owners. “When they have kids, when they grow up with this all the time, and they’ve seen the positives that these laws will create from a young age, they will understand,” she said. “It’ll take a generation. And it’s unfortunate, but I just hope that when we have children, they will probably, hopefully, end up in a society where these laws are implemented.”
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The tour wound down toward a finale at Sandy Hook, with a reunion of all the kids from both buses. The penultimate stop was New York City, and many of the kids from the Southern Tour had already rejoined them there. Spirits were high. It was exciting to be in the big city, but Lauren Hogg was downright bubbly. She bound around the auditorium on the Upper West Side, chatting, giggling, and hugging old friends and new. The pop band AJR made a surprise appearance, and closed a short set with “Burn the House Down,” which the MFOL kids had adopted as their theme song. Lauren said they played it all summer long on the bus. The bouncing beat, and the lyrics about casting aside doubt to take a stand against injustice had saved her on all those long, dreary rides.
Lauren sang along to the first verse and danced in her seat. As the first chorus approached, she could barely contain herself, until the stage door flew open, and Emma, Matt, Cameron, and a dozen more friends rushed out to join the band, while she dashed up the short steps, with more friends at her heels. They sang along, and danced about with silly moves, but no one matched Lauren’s glee. Still not out of the woods, but on her way.
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Cameron Kasky, who had gathered the team in his living room, was the first leader to depart. September 15, he tweeted: “Taking a break from Twitter for a bit so I don’t lose my mind. I encourage you all to try the same if you think it’s becoming too much.” Four days later, he announced his departure from MFOL on Fox News Radio. “If I thought that my friends and the people I worked with couldn’t do it without me, I would not have done that,” he said. “But alas, all of our efforts looking forward looked like they didn’t really need my involvement.” He could have helped, but he wasn’t crucial, he said. “These kids are the real experts. Look, I have some very intelligent friends. Some friends who can intellectually run circles around me, but I’m not the expert in pretty much anything. I’m a Spider-Man fan, and I can tell you with great platform comes great responsibility.”
Cameron looked back on the bus tour plaintively, describing a person he met in Texas who had bought a semiautomatic to protect his family. “I learned that a lot of our issues politically come from a lack of understanding of other perspectives.” Just as disheartening were all the young firebrands locking horns in debate with the sole intention of beating each other. “I’m working on some efforts to encourage bipartisanship,” he said.
And he lamented his own role in that. “I’m very regretful of a lot of the mistakes that I’ve made along the way,” he said. “One of the things I never really did was watch myself. If I was on a screen I kind of tried to run away from it. I’m not entirely sure why.” His deepest regret was setting out to embarrass Marco Rubio. He said there were seventeen people in the ground, and he was looking for someone complicit in the killer getting the weapon. He saw Rubio. “I’m not going to kick myself for it, because I’m seventeen,” he said. But then he did. “I went into that wanting less conversation and more to embarrass Rubio and that was my biggest flaw. I even name-dropped the murderer.” He didn’t even think about that at the time, but it had weighed on him since. “Looking back, it ticks me off so much when people do that, because then you’re getting that person’s name out there and making them a celebrity. That’s one of the worst things you see come out of these horrific mass murders, is name recognition.”
Cameron didn’t stop tweeting entirely, but he scaled back from his earlier frenetic pace. Three weeks later, on October 9, he revealed why—in a series of tweets: “Lately, I’ve been a lot less active not only online, but in general. I understand the timing is pretty inconvenient with midterms around the corner, and I apologize. I’ve been struggling with depression and anxiety in a stronger form than I’ve ever seen it.” He asked people to be kind to each other, simply because they are people. “And sometimes, people hurt. And it’s OK to hurt. Waking up is hard for me lately, and for the first time ever, it’s not because I was staying up late. And that’s just something I have to deal with. I started medication today and I’m hoping that’ll put me on a better path, but please . . . Remember that the sun will rise in the morning and the world will spin on. It’s so hard, I know. It really is. But we can do it.”
And then Cameron really took a Twitter break—for a while. He was back to tweeting heavily leading up to the midterm elections. And he never lost his sense of silliness. In November, he landed in the hospital for an intestinal virus, and tweeted, “I actually like being in the hospital. I get to wear a dress all day withOUT being judged.”
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Most of the group remains committed. They expect MFOL to endure, and plan to lead it for a long time, but no one really knows for sure. Five or ten or twenty years from now, MFOL may be a powerhouse organization, or it may have faltered, or evolved into something new. But somehow, in some way, the fight will go on. And when Jackie, Emma, David, Matt, or whoever is still fighting hands the reins to the next generation, their vision for this movement will prove a force more powerful than the NRA.
They will need some big wins for that to happen. They expect some punishing losses as well. But they had to score some blows the first round. That was coming November 6.
As their mobile home for the summer pulled into its final stop in Newtown, Connecticut, August 12, MFOL had another frantic agenda. They had to get those waves of new voters to the polls. They had thousands of new affiliates in the field, and the big task for the fall would be building a stronger infrastructure, “so a random kid from Texas could talk to someone in Idaho and connect and organize together,” Jackie said. They had twelve weeks to tighten up their organization for Election Day, and two years to prepare for 2020.
Three days later, Jackie was back in Parkland for the first day of her senior year. A week later, I asked about school, and she groaned. “Oh God. It feels like a side project for me now. Every year of my life it would’ve been my main priority, and now it kind of feels like an extracurricular. Every day I go to school, and then I go work on March for Our Lives for the rest of my night. I don’t really know what my main thing is, but I’m pretty sure it’s March for Our Lives.”
As she looked forward into a gloriously uncharted future, and wistfully back at the past—at the crazy summer on a tour bus, and the thousands of aspiring activists pouring into her life—a single face stood out. Jackie had met Natalie Barden at the Teen Vogue summit in June. Natalie was in fifth grade when she lost her little brother, Daniel, at Sandy Hook. For five years, Natalie avoided the gun conversation; it was just too painful to talk about. Parkland changed that. Parkland changed everything. Natalie went to the march on Washington, “and was moved beyond belief,” she wrote.
“When she saw us do it, she felt empowered,” Jackie said. “Because when her little brother died, she was ten.” Natalie was Jackie’s lead organizer in Newtown, helping her plan the four-hour rally with food trucks, entertainment, speakers, and a meeting of MFOL kids and Sandy Hook survivors. “She did an amazing job,” Jackie said. “When you have a connection to the issue, it doesn’t even feel like a job.”
Jackie felt like she was passing the torch, but she was really lighting activist flames. “March for Our Lives does not belong to us anymore,” Jackie said. It belongs to every kid in America who is ready to heed the call.
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The Third Rail
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The midterms. The first big test finally approached. MFOL upped the pace. August 30, David Hogg appeared with Ne
w York City mayor Bill de Blasio on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to announce the group’s next big initiative, Mayors for Our Lives. They had enlisted more than fifty mayors from both parties around the country in a program to register new voters under thirty, particularly at high schools and colleges.
They would need them. All indications still pointed to enthusiasm in their swath of the electorate, but the gun issue was getting less and less attention. The Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexual misconduct, and the country was riveted by the battle over his confirmation in late September and early October. Pollsters reported the fight energizing the Right. And the Supreme Court suddenly leapt to voters’ number one issue in a Pew poll, pushing gun policy down to fourth. CNN had it down to fifth in August, right behind “corruption,” presumably due to Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Trump. Endless political upheavals would follow.
And journalists were sometimes speaking about the Parkland kids in the past tense. In October, Katy Tur’s MSNBC show did a “Battleground College Tour,” speaking to students on different campuses each day. She mentioned Parkland as a huge factor in the spring that had seemed to disappear. Keeping guns a priority would be a challenge. On bad days, it felt like this time might be like all the other times: The nation would gasp at another slaughter, vow to really do something, and then forget. Guns never seemed to stick.
Also in October, Ariana Grande posted an Instagram story urging her fans to register, posting imminent deadlines in each state, with a swipe-up link to the MFOL website. So many people followed the link to register that it temporarily crashed the site. And MFOL announced twelve more cities on its Vote for Our Lives tour, a final sprint for the last three weeks to Election Day. “I was so exhausted,” Jackie said. “The last two weeks, I was starting to burn out. And I was like, ‘Well, I’ve got to stick it out. It’s like when you’re really tired, you stay up for two more hours, it’s like, ‘Stay up! You have to do this.’”
Her grades were taking a hit. The same was true for all the kids who were back in school. Teachers had been very forgiving in the spring semester, but that was over. Even after she scaled back to one AP class, an academic breeze for Jackie, her grades were ugly. Choices had to be made.
Emma was coping with college—a big adjustment for everyone, but strange to enter as an icon. “A lot of people here feel like it’s weird that they know about me without me having gotten to know about them,” she said. Shortly before Election Day she reported classes going well, but she was struggling still with the social transition. “You can’t bond at the base soul level when you first meet somebody at school like I did with these [MFOL] people,” Emma said. “I’m working on it. Nobody else is ready to share traumatic experiences with each other.”
It helped to bring someone with her who understood. She had made it through the terror holding hands with two friends, and one of them, Lenore, was her roommate at New College of Florida. That helped. “She and I are the only two people who know what each other was going through,” Emma said. “We already have little movies set up, communicating with pictures instead of words, because sometimes it’s hard to always figure out what words we’re feeling.”
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As Election Day beckoned, hopes ran sky high. Election day—the concept was anachronistic in much of the country, where more people voted in the lead-up weeks than on the day. And early voting was through the roof. All the demographics MFOL was counting on seemed to be coming out.
Dreams were taking shape. When MFOL marched on Washington, pundits were batting about a “blue wave” scenario, and a big enough wave might actually turn over the House. That seemed like a best-case scenario all spring. Because of gerrymandering, and Democrats being concentrated in cities, it seemed highly unlikely that they could win much more than the twenty-three seats needed to retake the House. And because of a fluke of history, most of the thirty-five Senate seats up for election were Democratic incumbents, several in deep-red territory. They had to defend seats in Montana, West Virginia, North Dakota, and Missouri, states Trump had won by 18 to 41 points. And they had few pickup opportunities, mostly in the Deep South. Tennessee? Arizona? Texas? All seemed like fantasies. The conventional wisdom through the spring and into the summer was that the best the Dems could hope for in the Senate was to give up a few seats. They would have to wait until 2020, when the Senate map reversed, and they could make a potential killing.
But late polls showed some of the long-shot races coming into reach. And with all that early voting, all bets were off. Beto O’Rourke was the breakout star of the year, an unabashed progressive, winning over huge swaths of Texas. A week out, polls showed him within three points of the Republican incumbent, Ted Cruz. A Democratic senator from Texas? Two blue houses of Congress? The fantasy might actually materialize.
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Election night brought reality crashing down. Much of the MFOL crew and their allies, along with parents of the victims, gathered at Hurricane Grill & Wings to celebrate the returns. David was there, and Emma, Jackie, Daniel, and the Deitsch brothers. As polls closed from east to west across the country, the mood turned sour. Twitter felt like a Democratic wake. The House was going blue, but the Dems picked up only two dozen seats. The Senate was going the other way: probably five seats lost. No Texas miracle. The Dems were picking up a lot of governorships, that was nice, but no historic black woman to lead Georgia. And there was a painful personal blow: they were losing both big races in Florida. They were about to have gun safety foes in their governor’s mansion and for both of their senators.
But none of that was the worst of it. Their generation might have let them down. There were only preliminary numbers available, but early exit poll numbers were indicating that young voters made up about the same share of the electorate as in previous elections.
“I’m shaking with anger right now,” Jackie said. “It’s like the same feeling I was getting the night of February fourteenth. I’m so angry and I don’t know what to do with that anger.” But maybe she did know. “We’re not going to stop fighting,” she said. “I can tell you, I’m doing this for the rest of my life.”
There was anger, then guilt. “I felt like I disappointed some of the families that lost their kids,” Jackie said. She looked around the room. Guac’s family: Tío Manny and Patricia Oliver. She looked at the Guttenbergs and saw their daughter, her lost young ballerina friend, Jaime. “I was just like, ‘Damn, we couldn’t do this for them.’ But they comforted me. Patricia, she was like hugging me and telling me to relax, and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’”
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The gloom was premature. By Wednesday morning, they regained sight of the best-case scenario they had envisioned in the spring: a big surge in youth voting, candidates unabashedly running on gun safety, candidates winning on gun safety, and maybe, if all that happened, the Democrats taking control of the House to begin implementing their agenda. They had accomplished all four.
The early returns proved misleading. The late-counted vote trended heavily Democratic. They took back two of the Senate seats that appeared lost the night before, both in deep-red states, Montana and Arizona—in the latter, the first Democratic senator elected there in thirty years. But the House was truly startling. When all the races were over, the Democrats had picked up forty seats—their biggest night since the post-Watergate landslide of 1974. And Democrats won the popular vote in House races by 8.8 million, beating even the number in 1974. They had also flipped 349 state legislative seats, six state legislative chambers, and seven governorships, mostly from large battleground states. Those would be crucial to the big redistricting fights ahead, following the 2020 census.
Voter turnout among the under-thirty voters was 31 percent, dwarfing the 21 percent from the previous midterms. It was the highest-recorded turnout since the premier organization studying them, at Tufts University, began collecting data in 1994. And those new young voters swung overwhelmingly liberal. They supported Democratic House candidates by a
35-point margin, exceeding even the margin for Barack Obama’s election. Their vote had been apparently decisive in the Democrats’ winning the Senate seats in Montana and Nevada, and the governorship in Wisconsin.
And people were finally voting on guns. Exit polls showed gun control as voters’ fourth-most-important issue, surpassing any previous result. And they were finally voting on both sides. Professor Robert Spitzer, a gun politics expert at SUNY Cortland, said that about 16 or 17 percent of people voted on guns as a primary issue in the past, mostly against gun safety. NBC News’ exit poll indicated that 60 percent of voters favored stronger gun laws—even 42 percent of gun owners. Gun country hadn’t quite boarded the MFOL bandwagon, but 42 percent was a hell of a start.
Candidates had been watching those polls all year, and many decided it was finally safe to come out of the gun closet. “Candidates embraced the gun safety agenda this cycle to a degree not seen since at least the 2000 elections,” Professor Spitzer said. It could be hard to take the pulse of 435 different House races, but the Democratic Party’s “red to blue” list was telling. That’s their list of districts they hope to flip each cycle. In 2016, only four of thirty-six candidates in those races included gun safety in their platforms. This time, it was thirty-eight of fifty-nine candidates.
