Isaac James felt an enormous sense of urgency when he founded OutVote, an organization dedicated to mobilizing Gen Z voters. It’s why he launched the initiative (along with his co-founder Ranen Miao) while still a student at Oxford University, where he witnessed from afar the swell of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric that dominated the 2024 election.

At Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, it was a busy time to launch an organization, but James knew that if he was going to make it happen, he needed to do it right away. “I had the luxury of distance and time to look at what was happening in my home country and feel… empowered to make a difference,” James told LGBTQ Nation. In other words, he said, “It literally couldn’t wait.”

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James was horrified watching virulently anti-LGBTQ+ politicians (including the president) get elected to public office in 2024, and also by the decrease in youth voter turnout in certain critical states. At that point, he had already started some pilot programming, but the results of the election pushed him over the edge. It was time to turn OutVote from a passion project into a full-time job.

With the help of a Rhodes Trust grant, James began as the organization’s full-time executive director in August of 2025. “Since then,” he said, “We’ve hit the ground running. We’re heading into 2026 with a lot of optimism and fire.”

James spoke with LGBTQ Nation about OutVote’s strategy for mobilizing a swath of voters that thinks quite differently from generations that came before them.

LGBTQ NATION: OutVote bills itself as “building a renewed culture of civic engagement.” Break that phrase down for me.   

ISAAC JAMES: This post-marriage, LGBTQ generation is faced with a lot of challenges that generations before us did not face. While we can get married, we struggle to buy groceries and can’t even dream of affording a home.

OutVote was built to mobilize this generation, the queerest generation in history. We do that in a few different ways. The main way is through our OutVote fellowship program. This year, the program is targeting three key congressional districts where we think young LGBTQ+ voters can make the difference electorally – North Carolina’s 11th, Iowa’s 1st, and Michigan’s 7th.

In each of those districts, we’re hiring 10 young LGBTQ+ organizers to mobilize their peers to vote through a peer-to-peer relational organizing model. Because we know that young LGBTQ+ people don’t trust institutions. They don’t trust big nonprofits. But they do trust their friends. Our model works to empower friends to speak to other friends about the importance of civic engagement.

How do the fellows get connected with the peers they need to reach?

It’s a competitive selection process where we’re looking to hire a group of people who are already plugged into local nodes of LGBTQ+ organizing. So, in Iowa’s first, maybe that means looking specifically at the University of Iowa within Iowa City, recruiting from an LGBTQ+ student center, or the local community center that’s built for serving young LGBTQ+ people, and empowering them with the training, funds, and resources to effectively mobilize their peers for civic engagement.

What are some of the biggest barriers right now to getting queer members of Gen Z to vote?

I think a lot of queer Gen Z is disillusioned with the political system. Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen struggles with climate change and a lack of AI regulation, and the system not working as it should to protect young queer people who come from a variety of different backgrounds. That disillusionment feeds into a sense of powerlessness, and OutVote is built to reinspire and re-engage the specific demographic to participate in civic engagement and voting and political participation in a way that builds electoral power for Gen Z.

What does that power look like?

Almost a third of Gen Z identifies as LGBTQ – 28%. That’s 10 million+ eligible voters.

It feels like no one is talking about how large this demographic is or treating it with the seriousness that it deserves. This is why OutVote exists: to elevate the needs, desires, and political will of this specific demographic to affect change politically.

Tell me about OutVote’s plan to play the long game with Gen Z voters.

We know when young people vote or are engaged in the civic engagement process early on, they’re more likely to continue being invested in voting year after year and having that practice be core to their civic identity. By building a bench of young LGBTQ+ organizers, especially in key swing states and key districts where organizing queer young people matters, we’re building out a cohort of future leaders in the LGBTQ+ rights space who will be able to affect civic change long beyond this specific election cycle.

We currently have 30 alumni of our programming. We hired 12 fellows in 2024, 18 fellows in 2025, and in 2026, we’re hiring 30. So, we’ll have 60 alumni in our network after just being around for a few years. We want to continue engaging them as leaders and as part of the OutVote network.

How are you feeling about voter turnout as the midterms approach?

In 2025, we had 18 fellows working in Virginia and New Jersey, and they were doing everything from hosting open mic nights to picnic series in the park. We had one outvote fellow organizing in Lynchburg City in Virginia, home of Liberty University. She talked to hundreds of her peers, registered her friends to vote, and Lynchburg City flipped to a pro-LGBTQ+ gubernatorial candidate [after going for Trump in 2024] by just a few hundred votes. We know that youth turnout increased 8%. OutVote was proud to be a slice of encouraging that increase in youth turnout.

I think we’ve seen the same excitement heading into this specific election, and with our efforts going to the next level, we’re excited to see just how much youth turnout can increase this year.

How did your internships for both the Biden White House and the Texas House LGBTQ+ Caucus inform the work you do now?

I was an intern for the Texas House LGBTQ+ caucus at a time when anti-LGBTQ+ bills were at an all-time high in the Texas legislature. Working on the ground with my peers to introduce legislation, including our first-ever piece of legislation to prohibit bullying on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity… showed me the difference that having someone in the room fighting for young LGBTQ+ people could make.

In the Biden White House, I was an intern in the presidential personnel office, where I contributed to building an administration that looked like America. Working for a president and an administration that was working toward positive change for young LGBTQ+ Americans, but then looking around at my LGBTQ+ peers who did not feel represented and did not feel excited by the prospect of engaging in the 2022 or 2024 election cycles, influenced myself and my co-founder to start OutVote.

Over the past two years, as the organization has become more established, what have been some of your biggest successes?

To date, we’ve reached over 2.5 million young LGBTQ+ voters. We’ve had direct contact with over 13,000 in the key swing states where we’ve worked. But I think what stands out most to me are the stories of the young queer people who were inspired and empowered by the work that we were doing to mobilize young queer and trans voters on the ground.

We had a fellow in Arizona mobilizing queer farm workers. We had a fellow in Pennsylvania going to the Black leather bar in Lancaster to mobilize her peers to vote. Seeing community exist in kind of nontraditional and increasingly marginalized spaces gives me a lot of hope and excitement, and has meant the most as we’ve continued to build a bench of young LGBTQ+ organizers who are trained to educate and funded to make a difference in their communities.

You mentioned that a big barrier to voting for a lot of young people is disillusionment. What is your message to those who feel that their vote doesn’t matter?

Voting in many ways is a form of harm reduction. Voting is a way to decide what obstacles you want to protest against… Politicians are not supposed to be copy clones of your beliefs. Politicians are not perfect, but engaging in the system and participating in civic engagement is something that’s more than just about voting; it can be community-centered, community-oriented, and serve as that form of harm reduction for the obstacles you want to protest against in a time that is increasingly pretty scary for young LGBTQ Americans.