The year is 2020. And our responsibility couldn’t be greater.
Our collective responsibility—to have our voices be heard, and to play an integral role, as the largest voting bloc in electing the next President of the United States.
Our responsibility, as the editors of Her Campus, to you—to inform you, to challenge you, to hear you, by covering the Topic of the Year in a way that adds value to the discourse and respects all college women (more on that later).
Our responsibility to those around us—to represent and reflect how you feel, what you want, when others look to us to understand young women, what you stand for, and where you fit in to 2020.
And we’re ready for all of it.
Launching today—and staying live all year—is our Election 2020 hub (which you can find by going to hercampus.com/election2020), and you can think of this as your control center for all things election, with new content being added every day. Here you’ll find pieces on the candidates, the issues, the latest news, info on how to vote, and more. For each of these sections, and everything else we put out, we’ll be creating content through the lens of our audience, keeping in mind how these national items are brought to bear on you. Look out for a voter registration page for college students in partnership with DoSomething.org, and some words specifically for the Her Campus audience directly from the candidates themselves.
Another key component of our coverage will be pieces written by young women, with your points of view, your experiences, your circumstances, and how those come to shape your place in this election. From women working on campaigns, to women reconciling differing political views, to women who have a lot to gain (or lose) depending on the results, we’ll be showcasing your voices and your stories (and if you’d like to write something yourself, reach out to pitches@hercampus.com with your idea).
This brings me to one of the most important aspects of Her Campus’s Election 2020 coverage. And that is this: we stand for all college women, and as much as people like to try to put this generation into a box—you can’t. College women are diverse in a myriad of ways, but one of the most poignant of those types of diversity right now is diversity of thought, and diversity of political thought. No, college women don’t all support a certain candidate, or feel a certain way on any given political issue. And that’s ok. Everyone learned in 2016 that we don’t get anywhere by living in a bubble, sticking our heads in the sand, and pretending that the other side’s view cannot possibly be supported by many people, let alone by rational people. We gain so much more by opening ourselves up to other viewpoints, regardless of whether or not we find a way to understand or agree with them. So to that end, we will be highlighting and sharing the voices of women (and candidates) with diverse viewpoints and political leanings all year long, in an effort to reflect and represent the diversity of the audience we serve, and to model the inclusivity we believe is right. For the sake of clarity—our coverage of Election 2020 will be nonpartisan.
First-person, personal, subjective pieces will make up a key part of what we bring you, but the flip side of that is our simultaneous focus on ~data~. We have the unique privilege to be able to gather information from so many of you via surveys, and we’ll be running a series of surveys throughout the year to find out where you stand and how it’s changed as the year has gone on—and we’ll be sharing the results right here. We’ll also be looking at these results against those of the surveys we ran during election 2016, so we can show you those changes as well. Hundreds of you already took our first survey of 2020, which we’re highlighting the results of in a series of posts that begin going live right here today.
You’ll also notice our Election 2020 graphics, created by Her Campus designer Neula Ha and her team with absolute intentionality. Today, patriotism looks different for everyone, especially young people, so the traditional red-white-and-blue of the campaigns of yesteryear doesn’t necessarily resonate. Instead, our design team has chosen an adjacent palette that feels less Uncle Sam and more accessible for what civic engagement looks like now.
Speaking of civic engagement—are college women actually engaged? It’s an abundantly clear-cut yes, with over 98% of you telling us in our first survey that you plan to vote in this election, and three-fourths sharing that you are “very concerned” about the election’s outcome. Plus, you’re already getting involved, both with political issues in general (31% of you attend marches and protests, 17% reach out to elected officials, and 14% are involved in a political club on campus), and with this election in particular (21% of you donate to campaigns, and 8% are volunteering with a campaign). You’re doing your part, and we’re here to do ours.
So we hope you will visit our Election 2020 hub all year long and engage with its content on our site and on social media, and that you won’t hold back in telling us what you think. We’ve got a lot in store for you and can’t wait to cover, follow, contribute to, dissect, and grapple with Election 2020, together.
HCXO,
Stephanie Kaplan Lewis
Co-founder, Editor-in-Chief, Her Campus
Read our entire Election 2020 hub here, for everything you need to know leading up to November 3.