TU Dems is a student organization seeking to engage like-minded young voters.
TU Dems is a branch of a national organization called College Democrats, and is part of the state-wide College Democrats of Oklahoma which has branches at OU, OSU and USAO. Yang became president of this club last spring and its other officers are Anna Hart, Eli Merkert and Beckham Schell, all sophomores.
Yang recently attended the first annual CDOK convention in Stillwater where they attended several workshops about engaging with politics as a college student, finding jobs in politics, the structure and finance of local political campaigns and finding a strong voice. They said, “It was a great experience and I highly recommend that anyone interested in politics attend next year.”
TU Dems was dormant for a semester before Yang and Schell decided to take over the organization. It previously chartered but did not have active members or officers for several years. Yang and Schell planned to start their own political club on campus before discovering that TU Dems had an existing charter.
When asked about their vision for the club, Yang said, “I want to encourage people my age and younger to participate in our democracy. It’s like we’ve been given a broken steering wheel and we’re expected to steer. We need to use what we’re given, because if we don’t drive with the broken car we don’t drive at all.”
Yang and the other officers believe that politics starts at a local level. They believe in the power of grassroots movements to catalyze real political change. College students and youth in general represent a demographic that is often politically informed and opinionated but whose influence is not always recognized at a local, state or national level. TU Dems seeks to empower like-minded college students to use their voices and their votes to advocate for change. Some of the topics on which TU Dems focus on are abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights and the liberation of the Congo, Palestine, Lebanon and Sudan as well as other areas where people are oppressed by political regimes. They believe that all TU students, and all people, deserve to feel safe and comfortable in their own skin.
The club is currently pushing for the participation of informed youth voters in the upcoming election cycle. The way that the American voting system works is famously inequitable and TU Dems is seeking to level the playing field, at least on campus.
TU Dems meetings take place every other Thursday from 6:30-7:30 p.m. in the SGA conference room. There will be events every week in October leading up to the election as well as an event called Pie a Politician in November whose proceeds will go to families in Gaza and Lebanon. Yang can be contacted through email for any questions: jly6261@utulsa.edu.
