Parkland - Dave Cullen Page 0,101

was across the stage from Cameron, and seconds later she added, “We’re also going to double it.”

Had they planned this? Staged it? Jackie and Cameron had no time to confer with the group—had they acted on their own? A few days later, Jackie said she had seen the check during the event, but the rest of the MFOL panel was taken aback. “We all came to the same conclusion, I think. We all looked at each other, and we were like, ‘No, we can’t take that! Are you kidding?’ We’ve had tons of great foundation [support] for March for Our Lives, and these kids literally were begging for money onstage.”

What happened later, behind the scenes, embodied what the Parkland kids are trying to do. “I talked to the Naperville girl after she gave the check and she was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t even think about giving it to ChicagoStrong, but that is such a good idea!’” Jackie said. So she tried to steer the conversation toward “How are we going to continue the relationship between Naperville and the surrounding suburbs, and the Chicago students?” she said. “Because I don’t think that they realize they should create that connection and continue it after.”

That’s really the whole ball game. Thirty Parkland kids cannot turn 435 House races around—or influence thousands of races on local ballots. One night in Naperville, Bismarck, or San Antonio won’t even jump-start a struggling campaign. But it can fire up a movement.

“Teenagers are sometimes nervous to make friends and stuff,” Jackie said. “So creating a network of kids and organizations that can help each other without us being the mediators is so important. Because we’re not superheroes. This Road to Change is connecting people along the way—so they can work together in the future.”

The Parkland, Chicago, and Naperville kids all talked about that afterward, Jackie said. “And they were like, ‘We definitely want to work with them in the future.’ And we all went to dinner afterwards together, so we definitely connected.”

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The Parkland kids had either helped amp up interest in the midterms, or picked the right year to engage with voters. A Pew Research Center survey that summer found 51 percent of voters—and 55 percent of voters supporting Democrats—enthusiastic about the midterms. Those are the highest numbers ever recorded since it began asking twenty-one years ago, and double digits above five of the last six midterms at the same point.

By summer, signs had been accumulating that gun control was finally becoming a viable issue on the Left. The established wisdom has always been that Democrats don’t vote on guns. Neither do most Republicans. But a small subset does—sometimes enough to sway a primary. This asymmetry allows a tiny minority to consistently defeat huge majorities, or to convince politicians they will.

In late spring and early summer, national polls identified gun legislation as the third or fourth priority for voters heading into the midterms—after the economy and health care, but ahead of immigration and taxes. That’s up from rarely making the list in recent years. CNN’s polling unit regularly asked voters to rate issues in importance on their next vote for Congress. Gun policy had soared to 49 percent “extremely important” and 30 percent “very important” a week after Parkland—numbers some predicted would fall just as fast as they had risen. But their next poll in May had “extremely” important ticking down just four points—still more than double the figure from 2002—and “very important” rising one.

But would these trends translate to votes? In late July, TargetSmart released an analysis of Parkland’s impact on voter registration. Six battleground states showed an increase of 8 to 16 percent among voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine. The numbers are actually better than they look at first blush. The Miami Herald did a great analysis of the Florida numbers, in much more detail. In Florida, young voters added 7 percent new registrations in 2.5 months. This may sound modest, but that’s 7 percent of people choosing to register for the first time in their lives. A better comparison is looking at comparable time frames. For all Florida voters, fewer people registered in the 2.5 months immediately after Parkland than before. But in the under-twenty-nine group, registration surged by an unprecedented 41 percent.

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Cameron had a personal message for the group’s skeptics out in gun country. “I have guns in my home,” he told one audience. “My friend David does as well.” Both their dads work in law enforcement, and the guns are stored responsibly in