Rhea Maniar, a high school senior in Orlando, said the Florida High School Democrats caucus was dead when she became its chair in May 2023. Yet, she saw the opportunity to get her peers fired up about politics as lawmakers made decisions focusing on K-12 education.
Maniar is one of the teens and young adults, aged 17 to 22, launching the Florida Future Leaders Political Action Committee. The leaders of the PAC, who have been involved with the Florida Democratic Party’s youth outreach to high schoolers and college students, decided to launch the PAC to raise funds to drive voter registration. The group filed the PAC on Jan. 17, at the Division of Elections, according to the Florida Department of State.
“Florida High School Democrats was really reliant on in-person things and when COVID hit all of that had to change. So a lot of our chapters just dropped off and then died,” she said. “We were kind of forgotten; We didn’t really exist anymore.”
Maniar, 17, said the lack of funds hampered some of her efforts in the high school caucus.
“We eventually got to a level of regrowth, membership boost, all that good stuff. But there was only so far we could grow without financial resources,” she said in a phone interview with Florida Phoenix.
The partnership between the high schoolers and the college students allows the group to cast a wider net to increase youth voter turnout in Florida, which is one of the main goals of the organization, the PAC’s chair Jayden D’Onofrio said to the Phoenix. D’Onofrio and Maniar met when they were legislative pages in the Florida Senate in 2022. The 19-year-old attends Tallahassee Community College.
“The state party is very supportive of what we’re doing. They understand the value of making sure that we have a means of making things happen on our own,” he said. “They’ve seen how lagged behind we are on the youth vote here in Florida, and how far ahead other states, particularly battleground states were in the last election cycle; we have to change that, and they see empowering youth, empowering us, empowering me as a way of being able to move around the failures of youth organizing that we’ve seen in the past.”
Teen voter turnout
In the 2022 midterm elections, 22.4 percent of 18 and 19-year-old Floridians cast their ballots, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University. Florida was slightly below the national turnout for those ages, which was 23 percent. That was a sharp drop from the 31.5 percent turnout among teens in the state for the 2018 midterm elections.
In the previous presidential election, Florida teens had a voter turnout rate of 52 percent, according to CIRCLE. As of the end of the year, Republicans outpace Democrats by 779,701 registered voters, according to the Florida Division of Elections.
The PAC plans to raise awareness of issues such as the ballot initiatives to legalize recreational marijuana and enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution and politics affecting what’s taught in K-12 and colleges and universities, D’Onofrio and Maniar said.
“Between attacks on AP African American History, the bans on books, AP Psychology, the restrictions on DEI on college campuses, I think those educational issues are definitely top of mind for Florida high schoolers,” Maniar said.
One of the initiatives they plan to spend funds on is hiring college students to direct advocacy on their own campuses. Although they hope to reach every campus in the state, they are prioritizing Tallahassee, Orlando and South Florida, D’Onofrio said.
“This is our way of catching up, being able to finance programs that are going to build on the campus organizing, relate to youth in ways that we haven’t been able to relate before,” he said.
