Gen Z Republicans to the GOP: Hello???

DES MOINES, Iowa — On a bitterly cold weekend shortly before the Iowa caucuses, nearly 100 young conservatives packed a downtown hotel to profess their love for the Republican Party.

But many of them weren’t sure the party loved them back.

The fourth annual Run GenZ conference was an opportunity for aspiring conservative elected officials to learn how to kickstart their careers in politics. In between sessions on personal narrative building and women’s leadership, they noshed on a taco lunch in the hotel lobby and discussed a common belief that the Republican Party needs better youth representation — but isn’t doing enough to get it.

It was a fraught topic, particularly at the conference. Just weeks earlier, every Run GenZ member on the Republican National Committee’s Youth Advisory Council — an initiative started last year to ameliorate concerns about youth engagement — resigned from the council, including Run GenZ’s founder and president, 26-year-old former Iowa state Rep. Joe Mitchell. In their letter of resignation, the leaders lambasted the RNC’s attempt to reach young voters as a “fundraising ploy” with no actual vision.

“It really was a do-nothing committee,” said Missouri state Rep. Mazzie Boyd, 25, a Run GenZ “Rising Star,” the group’s moniker for a current or former elected official who serves as a mentor for their coalition. “I resigned from the RNC Youth Advisory Council due to the lack of innovation to actually get young voters,” she later explained. “The RNC was only having members of the council pose for pictures, which does nothing for that goal.”

The drama with the committee highlights a major problem facing the GOP, and one that hung over the conference in Iowa: Republicans are struggling to attract younger voters.

Recently, headline after headline has focused on President Joe Biden’s problems with young voters as young progressives have grown increasingly critical of his handling of the Israel-Hamas war and his advanced age.

But the left still has a big advantage over the GOP among this cohort. Eligible Gen Z voters have historically backed Democrats by large margins. And while a Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics youth poll from December found that people ages 18-29 expressed less excitement to vote in 2024 than at that point in the 2020 cycle, the biggest drop-off in enthusiasm came from young Republican and independent voters, forcing young elected officials and right-leaning youth groups to pick up their older counterparts' slack.

According to young Republicans at the conference in Iowa, the problem isn’t the party’s message, but its delivery. Just like party leaders, this cohort prioritizes the economy, national security, the border and tax cuts. They love former President Donald Trump. But they are frustrated with what they view as a partywide inability to experiment with new techniques for outreach. Engaging young people is an issue the GOP can’t ignore, they say — but many of them feel that’s exactly what it’s doing.

“I’m not sure if it’s a lack of trying, or just methodology,” said 30-year-old former Clermont City Councilman Ebo Entsuah, who’s running for Florida state Senate this cycle. He pointed to the party’s hesitation to use modern methods of reaching young voters, while Democrats continue to capitalize on platforms like TikTok. “The left do[es] a really good job of using all of the mediums at their disposal,” Entsuah said. (The Democratic Party’s TikTok account has 497,000 followers; the Republican Party doesn’t have an account. Republican candidates for president have railed against the app for its owner’s ties to Beijing.)

“I think the Democratic Party is doing a very good job at allowing young students to have a voice,” said Ty Sweeney, a 20-year-old from Salem, Indiana, who is planning his second school board run this year. “When you look at two parties, and one says, ‘We want to accept you, we want to listen to what your concerns are.’ And the other one says, ‘Sit down, you’re too young, you’re not ready.’ You’re going to be more receptive to the other.”

Sweeney looked around at the group of 20-somethings that filled the lobby of the Embassy Suites. “We are simply stuck in our ways as the Grand Old Party. It’s literally in our name,” he said. “Not that we shouldn’t look to older people with guidance, but we’re allowing them to dictate our futures.”

Despite generational trends in party affiliation, there are conservative voices and organizations that have clout with young Americans. But some young Republicans argue that the party’s national committee isn’t collaborating with them effectively.

“Groups like Turning Point USA are doing an effective job at reaching young voters. The Republican Party itself seems to be focused on traditional advertising, traditional messaging to older voters,” said Charles Kolean, chief strategist for R.E.D. PAC, a conservative group that promotes property rights and has worked with local candidates in states such as Louisiana, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Since 2012, the popular conservative student group Turning Point has ruffled feathers on both the left and the right with its antagonistic social media strategy and controversial leaders who have repeatedly advocated for change at the RNC. At a 2022 Turning Point conference, for example, a majority of attendees backed RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel’s top opponent,who spoke at the conference, in a straw poll. McDaniel won a fourth term as chair, despite the hairy election. But Turning Point’s past opposition to her reign has, in part, complicated any ability for the two groups to work together, with representatives of both sides publicly criticizing one another.

Boyd, the Missouri state representative who left the RNC’s youth advisory council in December, has advocated for the RNC to team up with Turning Point — which had a table at the Iowa conference — as well as other groups and outlets that hold sway over young conservatives, like Young Americans for Liberty and The Daily Wire. “The RNC can only do so much,” she says. “You kind of have to utilize the people that everyone wants to talk about.”

But the RNC isn’t showing signs of taking advice from Boyd and the other Run GenZers who quit the youth advisory council. Current members of the council have said those who resigned “didn’t show up” for meetings, and in a letter to RNC members obtained by POLITICO Magazine, the council co-chairs and members wrote that the “handful of members” who left “weren’t significantly contributing to our efforts.”

In response, Mitchell admitted to missing a youth advisory council Zoom call, but added that the council wasn’t “going out of their way to ask the experienced members of the committee, like myself or the other representatives, on ideas, and they were solely focused on, ‘Here, share the RNC's content.’ … That was the only plan they had.”

According to the initiative’s current co-chair, C.J. Pearson, the group’s efforts are “going incredibly well.” He said the council has invited content creators and social media influencers to GOP debates (like the one at the University of Alabama in December), giving current students an opportunity to interact face-to-face with presidential candidates, and has worked on “messaging strategies” for the presidential nominees, as well as “a comprehensive guide that teaches the candidates how to leverage social media effectively.”

Adding to those efforts, RNC Chair McDaniel hosted a discussion with young voters in Iowa the weekend before the caucuses. And on Monday, she hosted another young voters roundtable in Manchester, New Hampshire. “Some groups that claim to turn out young voters have failed cycle after cycle. That’s why the RNC has stepped up and created the Youth Advisory Council to fine-tune effective youth get-out-the-vote and messaging strategies to grow our Party,” RNC Spokesperson Keith Schipper said. Last month, Schipper specifically called out Turning Point by name, using the same phrase to say they’ve failed to turn out young voters “cycle after cycle.” Indeed, previous reporting by POLITICO Magazine suggested that some of Turning Point’s much-touted grassroots army involved people who say they’ve never actually worked with the organization at all.

“If the RNC was actually concerned about winning, they wouldn’t attack conservative organizations busy in the field doing hard work of engaging young people,” said Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet. “They would look to partner with us.”

Whether it’s outside organizations or infrastructure to blame, the conference-goers I spoke to in Iowa hadn’t felt the effects of the Republican Party’s efforts. “They ignore and they don’t utilize social media in any kind of a way to make any legitimate connections with young people,” said Nolan Jackett, a 20-year-old electrician from Wisconsin who has run for school board twice. “Young people are not going to go to the party and to events or politicians. They have to go to young people, and they are absolutely failing at doing that by sitting there on their hands doing nothing.”

But despite their misgivings about the party’s outreach efforts, young conservatives at the conference did heap praise on one of the candidates then running for president (other than Trump, who got his fair share of adulation) for connecting with young conservatives: Tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy came up over and over again as an example of a politician who knows how to speak to Gen Z.

Ramaswamy suspended his campaign after his distant fourth-place finish in Iowa this month, but he left his mark on young Republicans. While there’s not yet a consensus on who young Republicans backed in the caucus — the National Election Pool’s Entrance Poll showed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (who suspended his campaign on Sunday) leading among young voters, while AP Vote Castshowed Trump ahead with this demographic — early estimates show Ramaswamy performed better with young caucusgoers than he did with their older counterparts.

Part of his appeal was his embrace of Gen Z conservatives’ favorite mode (digital) and trademark style (meme-ified) of communication. “He’s the only candidate that’s on TikTok, where the youth is, when all the other candidates say, ‘Let’s ban this,’” Sweeney said before his departure from the field. “They’re banning the very thing that is giving kids across the country a voice.”

Ramaswamy’s success isn’t so much about what he says as how and where he says it. With free drinks and a frat-bro vibe, Ramaswamy capitalized on Gen Z’s cultural zeitgeist. He even teamed up with influencers like Jake Paul to tout his Trumpian, anti-establishment ethos, which resonates with members of a generation that doesn’t trust the country’s traditional political institutions. Indeed, the young politicos at Run GenZ’s conference who have or want to run for office were skeptical of Republican party infrastructure.

That screw-the-establishment posture was cultivated by Trump, who still sits atop a throne in the hearts and minds of many young conservatives, most of whom have never known and cannot imagine politics without him. That overwhelming influence has afforded him some slack among Gen Z, and while they’d prefer to see him up his social media game (court-mandated gag orders notwithstanding), they nonetheless have grown to crave his shameless, humoristic style. So much so that, even though Trump isn’t TikToking, he’s inspired an entire ecosystem of conservative meme-makers to do his digital dirty work for him.

“Trump uses meme culture in a way that no other politician does,” said Jackett, the only young Republican at the conference I saw sporting a MAGA hat.

Even Trump skeptics can’t resist his gravitational pull entirely. North Dakota state Rep. Claire Cory, 25, is wary of the former president’s notorious reputation. “He’s controversial. … The mean tweets and stuff like that,” she said. But he’s still the man who piqued her interest in politics, and if he’s on the ballot against Biden in November, she said, he can count on her vote. “[Trump] was different. It was exciting,” she said. “He had a momentum about him that was attractive. He had the MAGA movement, he had huge rallies, everything like that. And that’s kind of where I was like, ‘I want to be a Republican.’”

On the second day of Run GenZ’s conference in Des Moines (which just so happened to be the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol), Trump made a surprise visit to the group of nearly 100 young leaders. “The room went crazy when [Trump] came in,” Mitchell said. “No other candidate would have that reaction from this room.” (In comparison, Haley, the only Trump challenger who spoke at the conference, got a polite round of applause.)

If the Republican Party is leaving young conservatives feeling sidelined, the twice-impeached, four-times-indicted former president is firing them up. Mitchell said Trump’s “cultural appeal” is almost as high as it was before the 2016 election, which many Gen Zers were not eligible to vote in. “His indictments have propelled him in pop culture to be spoken about on The Breakfast Club, and the Nelk Boys and Joe Rogan’s podcast,” Mitchell explained, referencing YouTubers and podcasters who hold major influence with millions of young Americans.

“He is the most famous man on the planet.”

Still, these Gen Z Republicans’ love of Trump won’t be enough to shore up the party’s future with young conservatives — let alone young moderates and independents — on its own. Run Gen Z’s goal isn’t to turn out voters in the presidential election, but to draw young people into the political process. Running for local office, helping shape a conservative policy agenda, supporting down-ballot candidates — all of that is bigger than one person.

In 2024, Trump is the Republican Party. But whether he wins or loses, reclaims his place behind the Resolute Desk or ends up behind bars, there will come a day when Trump exits the political arena. And when that happens, it’ll be this generation more than any other that inherits the fate of the party he leaves behind. The future of the party will be up to these young Republicans at the conference in Iowa — and it doesn’t bode well that, beyond Trump, they feel overlooked by the GOP.

That future could look bleak for Republicans if they fail to reach Gen Z and millennial voters, a combined cohort that will account for a majority of potential voters by 2028, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution.

Entsuah, the former city councilman running for the Florida state Senate was blunt about the potential consequences of alienating the youth voting bloc: “It’s simple: the House, the Senate, the presidency,” he said. “If it continues on this trajectory and that generation gap is continually growing … then the party is going to be outnumbered, and there will be many more losses to come.”