Who Will Emerge as the New Face of the GOP?

In the following excerpt, Derek and Kristen Soltis Anderson dive into why young voters, especially men, shifted so drastically in the 2026 midterms. 

Derek Thompson: Great to have you back. I want to start with the youth vote, which is your realm of expertise. After 2024, young people lurched right, and there were 10,000 podcasts published and 10,000 opinion pieces published about how Democrats had lost young people, and in particular young men, forever. And guess what: I was one of them. What happened to young voters in 2026?

Kristen Soltis Anderson: Young voters in 2024 did not want to vote for Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, but they were not conservatives. And I think that was the key error that allowed Republicans to feel overly confident about their standing with the youth vote; they thought that [this was] Democratic overreach or this was backlash against Woke 1 or whatever it was. Republicans assumed that this meant you had this younger, more conservative generation in Gen Z that was going to rise up and carry on the future of their party. That if the millennials had all become kind of Obama-pilled and may have been more lost or more left-leaning for the long haul, that Gen Z was still this malleable group. And what happened in 2026 was we saw that there was not an ideological shift to the right among young voters, including young men, that was durable.

When you look at the underlying data, young women have been trending leftward consistently, election after election after election. And in poll after poll that I do, ideologically as well, just setting aside their voting behavior, their issue preferences have moved to the left. For young men, I think some of what Republicans grabbed on to was young men feeling under siege, feeling uncomfortable with Woke 1. There was some of that, but it didn’t mean that young men were all on board with this pure fiscal conservative approach or that every young man in America was suddenly going to church twice a week. I would go into focus groups of very well-meaning older conservatives who would say they’re so excited because they’ve heard reports that young men are all going to church all the time, and this is great; the future of the country is secure. And I think it was just over-reading anecdata, plus the results of the 2024 election, to think that something ideologically had happened that had not.

Thompson: So let’s talk about what actually happened to young men. In Texas, James Talarico, according to exit polls by The New York Times, pulled off a D+67 shift between 2024 and 2026 among men under 30. I just need to read that again because if listeners were just pouring coffee while I read that statistic, they might’ve missed it.

Let’s try it again. Men under 30 shifted 67 points toward Democrats in Texas. Now that’s just Texas, but there were similar numbers in other states. I don’t even recognize that number as a two-year electoral shift. How did Republicans lose so many young people and so many young men, in particular, in just two years? What specifically happened, do you think?

Anderson: I think three things happened. I think the biggest one and the most obvious one is mishandling of the economy, the cost-of-living crisis, and Republican failure to have anything coherent to offer in the face of that crisis. You will hear Republicans talk about “Well, we said we would do No Tax on Tips” or “We did the One Big Beautiful Bill” and try to say that there were bits and pieces of that that they could use to sell as an affordability argument to voters. But I haven’t seen a bit of data that shows that voters were really buying that that was the case. Instead, they were going to try to buy things at the store or buy gas and were finding that it was all quite expensive or that the rent was going up.

And if you are a young man who feels uncertain about your economic future, you don’t know what AI is going to mean for your ability to be employed and build the life that you want to imagine, you are feeling uncertain and unsettled about all of this, you may have looked askance at the Biden-Harris administration and said, “Well, these folks screwed this up. I’m not interested in voting for them.” But nothing over the last two years has given you confidence that Republicans had a better idea for how to fix it. And I think you add on to that tariffs and the war in Iran, and you get bigger problems. Then there’s also the fact that the war in Iran, I think it is, first and foremost, a driver because of the cost-of-living concerns.

I will have voters in focus groups talking to me about the Strait of Hormuz who—and I say this with no shade intended toward them because I don’t know how many of us could have picked out the Strait of Hormuz on a map a year ago, but they can. Average voters can, and that is very significant. But I also think for young men, the kind of anti-war, “I don’t think that America ought to be involved overseas” message, this was a big piece of the kind of Joe Rogan message of why Donald Trump was the right person to be the president in 2024. And [then] you go from being the president who’s the “no foreign wars,” “get us out of the Middle East” president to electing conflict in Iran.

And again, I think the original sin from a communications perspective of that conflict was we just did it and then tried to backfill a justification later instead of laying the groundwork: “Hey, the nuclear program is going faster than we thought,” and so forth. So I think Iran, both as a cost-of-living piece and as a breaking the anti-war promise, is a piece of it. But I think the third thing was that Republicans rested on their laurels and just kind of disengaged culturally. You had, in 2024, Republicans showing up in places where young men were. And in, I think, 2025 and 2026, I didn’t see as much of that. It was as if the right kind of retreated into its own bubble and assumed that if you just went and spoke at a Turning Point conference, that counted as you doing youth vote outreach, and you just didn’t see the kind of robust attempts at engaging in the culture that I think you did see in 2024.

Now, this is a tale as old as time. Parties love to win and then rest on their laurels, and you have to evolve or die. And the other party that loses feels a great incentive to evolve, and they usually do. And that’s what’s happened here. But Republicans, I think, have just missed the boat on that cultural relevance piece. And you mix that with the conflict in Iran and the cost-of-living crisis, and you get a recipe for complete disaster wipeout among young men.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Kristen Soltis Anderson
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman