How Republicans Can Win Gen Z Women

Gen Z women, the most liberal demographic in the country, are becoming a powerful share of the electorate. Yet conservatives are misreading what actually drives our political decisions. While the legacy media fixates on a supposed surge of right-leaning youth, the reality is more complicated. Young women are not moving right because Republicans keep repeating the same mistakes Democrats made with young voters in the last election cycle. 

Last year, I wrote about former presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’s failed attempt at being hip with the cool girls during her 2024 campaign. During a year when women were suffering sexual violence in conflicts from Gaza to Ukraine, and when the prospect of marriage and family felt economically out of reach, Harris had countless opportunities to show young women she understood our concerns. Instead, she fixated on the fact that British musician Charli XCX made a pop culture reference about her, invited social media influencers to the Democratic National Convention, and appeared on a sex podcast while Americans were dying in a hurricane. Harris’s endeavor to win over the youth was more than wildly unsuccessful. It was vapid, unserious, and embarrassing. It communicated a belief that young women’s concerns begin and end with oversexed pop culture. 

Unfortunately, the opposing party took one look at this abysmal playbook and rushed to copy it point for point. Contrary to the misinformation peddled by left-wing reactionaries, the political Right has taken great strides to advance women’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It was the Republican Party, after all, that advanced women’s suffrage. President Trump made history with his cabinet picks, the elevation of Susie Wiles and Karoline Leavitt to positions of prominence, and his wife Melania authoring the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which criminalizes non-consensual AI deepfake pornography. Bulldogs like Nancy Mace are fighting for womanhood to be recognized as an objective biological reality rather than an identity open to manipulation or erasure. Yet none of this is what the Republican Party markets to young women.