Gabe Fleisher, 14, runs the Wake Up to Politics email newsletter. It’s grown from a following of one, his mother, to more than a thousand readers.
• In April 2011, I started sending my mom a rundown of things happening in the day, which I called The Daily Rundown. She would forward it to family and friends. Slowly, it kind of grew and grew, and I now call it Wake Up to Politics.
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• In 2012, I was interviewed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That’s when it went from people who I had some connection with to people who were complete strangers.
• I love writing it every single day, and I love being able to inform people. I think it’s so important for people to know what their leaders are doing.
• This election cycle, I was able to go to two presidential debates in Iowa. I got press credentials.
• Putting aside the political climate today, I think it would be difficult to wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and write about politics if it wasn’t something that excited me. There’s a lot about American government that really fascinates me.
• I really love the game of politics because, obviously, it’s the most important game in the world.
• The state of discourse in this country does sadden me, and like anyone else, the more time I spend paying attention to politics, the more I kind of notice how much we have devolved into…craziness, really, is the only way to describe it.
• After Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, was charged with assaulting a reporter for Breitbart, Donald Trump tweeted a picture of Michelle Fields, the reporter, with Trump, holding an object in her hand, and he questioned what that was. I responded, and it was just two words because to me, it was clear that she was holding, as many reporters do, a pen. Political discourse being what it is, people took that as an attack on their candidate, and pretty soon hundreds of people were replying to me. Some wrote very rude and nasty, profane remarks about me.
• It was saddening to me that a two-word tweet could generate so much hate. I stay nonpartisan in my writing. I have made observations about all sorts of candidates, Donald Trump included, and I have never been subject to those kind of attacks before.
• I have found that there are young people who are very informed about politics and older people who are not very informed, so I think lowering the voting age is something that merits attention, but it certainly doesn’t deter me that I can’t vote in November. It doesn’t stop me from writing or thinking about the election.
