A little more than a month before early voting started in Texas, a group of 20-somethings and teenagers with the Sunrise Movement drove to Congressman Michael McCaul’s home in an Austin suburb. It was 5 a.m., and the climate activists from a district that stretches from Austin all the way to Katy wanted to send their Republican representative a message: They would do everything they could to replace him with Mike Siegel, a Democrat who has promised to back the Green New Deal and who came within 5 points of winning the district in 2018.
In the weeks that followed, Sunrise activists from across the country—alongside the Texas Democratic party and former presidential candidate Julian Castro—made hundreds of thousands of calls for Mike Siegel and Julie Oliver, another Green New Deal candidate running in an Austin district.
Some of the volunteers who helped Sunrise call hundreds of thousands of voters in just a few days aren’t old enough to vote themselves, says Rachele Merliss, a 23-year-old organizer with the Austin chapter. “[Young people] feel the urgency of the climate crisis in the way that older people don’t,” she says. That urgency makes them some of the most effective phone bankers for Green New Deal candidates. It’s also led to at least one viral TikTok featuring progressive Texas candidates, as the group of young activists works to turn out young voters in Texas. “A lot of politics can be dark and stressful,” Merliss says. Look no further than the raging pandemic, the ongoing protests around police brutality, or the wildfires and hurricanes that have battered the West Coast and Gulf Coast. Sunrise’s “massive army of young people,” as Merliss calls them, is one of this year’s political bright spots.
