Carter Sampson is the membership director of the College Republicans at UGA, which has seen increasing involvement in response to a tense political climate.
Q: In the wake of all the violence with Charlie Kirk, do you feel like it’s inspired more conservatives in our generation? As the membership chair of College Republicans, have you seen a growing desire to be a part of the club as a result of that?
A: We absolutely have seen membership numbers just with us rise. A lot of people DMing our Instagram and joining our GroupMe want to get involved. Our GroupMe became a lot more active, with people posting as soon as it happened updates on Charlie, and then in the days following, you know, “Oh, are we going to do an event? Are we going to do these meetings?” And that’s something we really haven’t seen before: the initiative from our members. It’s been more of an exec thing in the past. And then nationally, I think the number’s sitting at about 55,000 right now, but it could have grown: 55,000 applications for new charters of Turning Point USA, and that’s just been the ripple effect of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And that’s just been for the conservative movement, but I also think that a lot of people on the left have been inspired by Charlie as well, maybe not for his ideas, but just the tragedy that happened.
Q: What encouraged you to get involved with the College Republicans?
A: I kind of felt that political tension was becoming more of a moving trend. If you look now, young people are way more politically involved, and actually some of it’s in a bad way. It’s a lot more violent, a lot more oppressive on both sides of the aisle, and I just felt like by getting involved, I could not only be politically active, but also make a little bit of impact.
Q: What does it look like to become a member of the club?
A: So in the spirit of just being a political party, we don’t require dues or anything like that. It’s more of a community of politically active teens. So it consists of weekly meetings, and we kind of serve as a bit of a middleman between us and political leaders in our community on the state level as well as a few on the national level.
Q: Do you think that our generation does a good job of educating themselves on issues or do you think people just speak because they have a platform now on social media?
A: It’s the whole generation, so you’re gonna have some of both. I do believe that we have extremely intelligent individuals. I think we’re smarter than a lot of people give us credit for. But, you know, there are the people who are speaking out about these issues without due diligence and the research and things like that. In terms of our capability, and people who have already shown that they’re educated enough to speak out on these issues, I think we’re just as capable as anybody.
Q: How have you seen engagement in politics in our generation shift recently?
A: I definitely do think specifically in Georgia, Gen Z has become a lot more involved in politics. I mean, if you’ve not seen recently, we just elected an 18-year-old, young Black man to the Georgia Republican Party Committee. Ja’Quon Stembridge is now the assistant secretary, and this is a guy that had no prior public office. He isn’t a middle-aged man that has been in politics forever or has donors. He ran on the idea of wanting to get Gen Z involved in politics.
Comments trimmed for length and clarity.
Caroline Scurlock is a journalism major in Reporting I covering the city-county government beat in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.
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