On Tuesday, Fox Business warned its conservative audience of a crisis imperiling the GOP. Electoral losses like the historic blue tsunami that hammered Republicans last week revealed that a vital group is “abandoning the GOP” due to its own missteps. What’s more, the issue comes as new forces threaten to drag the party “further to the right.”
As Fox host Stuart Varney noted, young voters are largely being credited for the massive midterm defeat. Not only has polling shown that the youth turnout was its second-highest for a midterm in three decades, but that Gen Z voters cast for Democrats by huge margins. This is a major turn of events since 2024, when President Donald Trump’s winning coalition was contributed to by a notable surge in young voters. “OK,” Varney asked Maggie Anders of Young Voices, a PR firm that represents young, classically conservative figures. “How does the GOP win back young voters for 2028?”
“I think the GOP needs to pursue more of a message of abundance moving forward rather than sacrifice,” said Anders. “The GOP was largely focused on what the Democrats were doing, why socialism is bad, rather than telling young Americans what they actually stood for.” According to Anders, young people are grappling with exploding healthcare and housing costs while inflation keeps mounting and wages refuse to keep up. “The GOP has a real responsibility to pay attention to young people’s economic concerns and not just dismiss them as an entitled and spoiled generation,” said Anders. “We tend to do that a lot – get off my lawn kind of thing.” Trump himself has repeatedly called the affordability crisis a Democratic “hoax,” and spent much of the midterms attempting to reassure voters that the cost-of-living situation wasn’t so bad, even though polls showed Americans considered it a top concern.
Anders also pointed to another issue for Republicans: the ages of its candidates. As she notes, in these elections, Democrats “put forward young, fresh-faced candidates who were very charismatic, while the GOP, even in races where there wasn’t an incumbent, put forward some older faces that were about as exciting as a Sears catalog, or had a lot of this baggage and history of fraud or extramarital affairs. And this is just not inspiring to the American people.” This was a clear reference to, among others, the winning Democratic candidate for the Senate in Texas, 37-year-old James Talarico, who trounced scandal-ridden, 63-year-old Ken Paxton, who was running under the endorsement of the country’s oldest president ever.
This prompted Varney to bring up a new group that is rising among Gen Z Republicans. “The American Ascent,” he said, noting, “They want to push the GOP further to the right.” As Varney suggests, this group seeks not only to introduce younger leadership into the party, but aims to instill it with the sort of isolationist, “America First” ethos increasingly associated with Vice President JD Vance. But Anders’ reply contained a strong note of skepticism. “I want to know what further to the right means,” she said, wondering, “Is it more MAGA?”