It’s hard to deny the promotional success conservatives seem to have had in connecting with America’s youth. Advocacy groups like Young Americans for Freedom and Turning Point USA, the latter of which purports to have more than 1,300 high school and college chapters, flourished during the Trump era, while a deep roster of celebrity speakers––from Ben Shapiro to Matt Walsh to Candace Owens––has been a perpetual energy source for right-wing campus activism.
And yet, for all of this organizing, conservatives just can’t seem to get young people to the polls. Year after year, election after election, Republicans have been hemorrhaging voters in the 18–29 demographic—and while most pollsters, activists, and strategists on the right can agree on the urgency of the issue, no one, it seems, can settle on a solution.
Thomas Sheedy, the 23-year-old founder of the secular Atheists for Liberty, told me that the party’s failure to reach across all age groups has a lot to do with religion. “This is a movement still pretending to be more Christian than it really is,” he said, “because they have to appeal to baby boomers and a donor class of religious conservatives.” Judging by the numbers, Sheedy might have a point: More than a third of Generation Z––currently in their late teens and early twenties––in America identify as religiously unaffiliated, according to the American Survey Center. And only 9% identify with the white evangelical Protestantism currently driving the Republican Party—which is 2%, 7%, and 9% lower than millennials, Generation X, and baby boomers respectively.
But the last decade has seen Republicans grow increasingly driven by evangelical politics, often in direct opposition to the views held by a growing majority of young Americans. Hardline abortion bans, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, and various morality laws—including online pornography restrictions and book bans—have overtaken the austerity politics and hawkish foreign policy that steered past iterations of the party. (Meanwhile, Republican politicians consistently show a complete disregard for combating—or even acknowledging—the impacts of human-made climate change, yet another major disconnect between young people and the party.)
These policies might be a natural fit for a party wherein, as of 2020, 56% of voters were 50 or older––a 17% increase since 1996, according to Pew. But this “trad extremism,” as Sheedy put it, is stunting the party’s growth among the young and nonreligious alike; his hope is to convince more conservatives that “demographic change” favors an increasingly secular electorate, meaning that the party must become more “big tent minded” if it wants to survive the century.
Of course, the more immediate task is winning next year’s election, especially after a streak of two devastating cycles and a third disappointing one, all of which saw the youth vote buck historical fluctuations by drifting further left.
In Ronald Reagan’s reelection bid and George H.W. Bush’s 1988 victory, Republicans won the youth vote by double digits. As recently as 2000, Republicans had a nearly equal share of the 18–29 vote, before dipping to 45% in 2004. The demo’s heavy tilt toward Democrats, though, began in 2008 with Barack Obama––who won 66% of the youth vote––and has yet to rebound. In the so-called Trump referendum election of 2018, the Democratic Party netted a record-high 67% share of young voters, while the elections of 2020 and 2022 saw only marginal lifts back in the GOP’s favor.
This trend presents a bitter pill for the party, said Kristen Soltis Anderson, the cofounder of Echelon Insights, a political polling firm that closely tracks young Americans. Nearly 40% of voters will be millennials and Gen Zers in 2024, according to the Center for American Progress. But Gen Z, Anderson said, is markedly more progressive than the generation that came before them. Meanwhile, millennials, now in their 30s and 40s, appear to have become more pro-choice with age.
“Republicans have been gambling for the last decade and a half that young voters who start progressive will naturally become Republican voters as they get older,” Anderson told me, noting that this transformation panned out for Republicans in past generations. But when it comes to millennials and Gen Zers, she added, “That gamble has not proven to have been correct.”
So what changed? A great many conservatives, like Dennis Prager, will point their finger at education. The 74-year-old cofounder of PragerU—an outreach group aimed at converting young people to the right—put it in simple terms: Young people vote Democrat not because they’re naturally averse to the right’s stances on issues like climate change, reproductive rights, and gun violence—but because they’ve somehow been indoctrinated by an academic and media ecosystem that shields them from conservative ideals. “The left has told them that God and religion are essentially fairy tales, depriving young people of the greatest source of meaning and community humans have ever known,” he told me, promoting something along the lines of reeducation. “If Gen Z and millennials would be exposed to conservative ideas and values, millions of them could be influenced,” Prager added, claiming that “conservative speakers [on campus] can undo in just 90 minutes much of the woke indoctrination students have received in all their time at college.”
