TAMPA, Fla. — Backed by strobe lights and slick graphics, Charlie Kirk told the room of voters, investors and elected officials that the 2024 presidential election spelled the end of one political chapter and the start of another.
The youth vote had handed President Donald Trump the White House, according to Kirk. And with the help of organizations like his student-oriented Turning Point USA the momentum from November could create a historic shift.
With only one catch.
The data revealing Gen Z’s lurch to the right also confirmed a persistent trend away from some conservative values. The throughline seemed to be that the youngest portion of the electorate sought whichever side offered the most significant swing away from the status quo.
Pacing above the starstruck faces of his 5,000 most promising activist proteges at last week’s Student Action Summit in Florida, Kirk made it clear that this did not pose a fatal threat to the Trump-transformed Republican Party of the future.
The era of radical conservative counterculture had arrived.
“This is the greatest generational realignment since Woodstock,” Kirk proclaimed. “It’s time for us to reconsider almost all of our political orthodoxies.”
Since 2015, Trump’s MAGA movement has broken the “three pillars of neoliberalism,” Kirk said in an interview with the Deseret News: “invade the world, invite the world and import a bunch of stuff you don’t need from China.”
But Trump’s path to victory after four years in exile also shattered the political orthodoxies of many in the world of Democratic campaigning, particularly the belief that the rising generation was theirs for the taking.
Is Gen Z more conservative?
In a viral interview from March — which Kirk quoted several times during the conference — Democratic data scientist David Shor explained to New York Times columnist Ezra Klein why the results of Trump’s reelection “shocked” him.
According to survey data from Shor’s Blue Rose Research, Trump won at least 50% of support among voters under 20 across every race and sex demographic except for women of color, who voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris.
More than 70% of young white male voters cast a ballot for Trump. In fact, 20-year-old white men were significantly more likely to support Trump, at around 74% of the vote share, than 75-year-old white men, at around 58%.
Although these results represent an unprecedented gender-gap, with 18-year-old men 23 percentage points more likely to support Trump than their female counterparts, young women also shifted six points toward Trump since 2020.
And the shift among voters of color was even greater, with Gen Z and millennial black voters moving toward Trump by 14.5 points and Latinos by 22.5, dwarfing the increase of 4.5 percentage points in support for Trump among young white voters.
“Young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers,” Shor said, “to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.”
Overall, exit poll data found that Harris won the youth vote by between 4 and 7 percentage points, but this is around 10 points less than President Joe Biden’s vote total, a larger swing than with any other group.
Yale’s Spring 2025 Youth Poll suggested this might be just the beginning.
When asked to vote on a generic ballot for 2026, older Gen Z and younger millennial voters, ages 22-29, backed Democrats by a 6-point majority. But younger Gen Z voters, ages 18-21, backed Republicans by nearly 12 percentage points.
Or, is Gen Z more skeptical?
Explanations for this shift among the nation’s youngest voters include a reaction to restrictive measures taken during COVID-19, an international anti-incumbent streak following the pandemic and the role of social media.
The percentage of young voters getting their news from TikTok more than quadrupled over the past four years, Shor found, increasing from 9% to 39%, with those relying on the platform for news shifting 6-points toward Trump.
In May 2024, an internal analysis by TikTok found that there were nearly twice as many pro-Trump posts, at 1.3 million, compared to pro-Biden ones, at 650,000, in the six months since November 2023.
“I think Trump won the young vote from TikTok and Instagram,” said Caitlin Torres, a 16-year-old from Florida attending the Turning Point summit with her mom. “The last four years before Trump came I think everyone was like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on? I think Trump will be better.’”
But this inclination to oust whoever currently is in power might indicate little about underlying ideological trends, according to Jean Twenge, author of “Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents — And What They Mean for America’s Future.”
In articles for The Atlantic and her blog, Twenge acknowledged the 10-point shift among young men, and the 6-point shift in young women, toward the Republican presidential candidate since 2020.
But this has been accompanied by a 4-point decrease in the percentage of young white adults that identify as conservative since 2016, and an increase in independent party affiliation, Twenge pointed out.
The past decade also saw a notable increase in the share of young adults who support abortion, giving legal status to undocumented immigrants and recognizing discrimination as a continued obstacle for black people.
Instead of representing a growing popularity of conservative beliefs among young voters, the surge in Gen Z GOP support in 2024 might instead point to a more pessimistic generation, Twenge told the Deseret News via email.
“I think many people assume that more Gen Z’ers voting for Trump must mean more are conservative,” Twenge said. “They’re … missing Gen Z’s focus on the negative that pushes them to vote against incumbents and incumbent parties.”
Placed in the context of surveys that show Gen Z as being much more likely to want “significant changes” to government, Twenge said 2024 appears less like a conservative revival and more like a push for revolution.
Turning Point’s bottom-up revolution
What any observer of the U.S. Republican Party can attest is that the remaking of the party around Trump has been nothing short of a revolution, both in style and substance, according to Kirk.
In the years before Turning Point Action’s COO Tyler Bowyer hosted the first Trump rally in Phoenix Arizona, the conservative movement was dominated by think tanks, elitist ideology and a resistance to change, Kirk said.
But that all changed when Trump blew up the party in 2015.
“He was fun. He was entertaining. He was boundary pushing. He was provocative. He was open. He would take questions. He was a cultural phenomenon,” Kirk said in a Deseret News interview.
What this did — in addition to fluster party stalwarts — was make the conservative movement more aggressive in its fight “to take back the country,” more attractive to young people and more agile for the changing media landscape.
Maybe more than any other group, Turning Point USA, which Kirk started in 2012 at the age of 18, has embodied this ethos on the activist front, exploding in popularity over the past few years with Kirk’s viral confrontations with students on college campuses.
Over the previous decade, Turning Point USA has recruited students across the country to form over 900 college chapters and 1,200 high school chapters that serve as clubs to promote political engagement and inform on conservative viewpoints.
Trevor Wurth, a 25-year-old who serves as treasurer to his chapter at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, attended the Student Action Summit in sports coat and white and gold Trump “47″ ball cap.
Turning Point has the potential to influence American politics for decades, Wurth said, because of its ubiquitous presence on college campuses, its emphasis on educating voters in their most formative years and its ability to make conservatism cool.
“I think it’s kind of funny. They always say that it’s trendy to be the one that goes against power. That’s kind of what the conservative movement has become,” Wurth said.
On TikTok, Kirk has over 7.3 million followers, with some videos receiving as many as 50 million views, according to TikTok data viewed by The New York Times, which also identified Kirk as the most trust individual among young Trump voters on TikTok.
Will the Gen Z shift hold?
But Kirk knows social media clips alone can’t sustain support among the next generation of prospective conservatives.
As he concluded his remarks on Friday, Kirk, speaking in his signature curt cadence, fretted that political incompetence could squander this, “the greatest opportunity,” to keep young people on board.
To make sure their activism produces political outcomes, Kirk has become increasingly involved in elections through Turning Point Action, launching a ballot-chasing effort in swing states that drew national attention and becoming more active in GOP primaries.
The group, and its associated PAC, have gone all-in on supporting Kentucky businessman Nate Morris to replace outgoing Sen. Mitch McConnell, and are “looking at (South Carolina Sen.) Lindsey Graham very closely,” Kirk told the Deseret News.
This effort is different than the tea party wave of 15 years ago that pulled Kirk into national politics, he told the Deseret News, because it is youth-led, giving it more energy, volunteers and “longer staying power.”
But Kirk’s vision for Turning Point is deeper than election outcomes. The entire impetus for Turning Point’s mission at America’s institutions of secondary and higher education is the belief that politics is downstream from culture.
If conservatives fail to win the argument of ideas by showing demonstrable improvements to young people’s lives, then Kirk fears the restlessness of Gen Z could produce more left-populist victories like that of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City.
Mamdani, with his stream of polished social media clips and his extreme views on defunding law enforcement and socializing grocery stores, serves as a foil to Turning Point USA, and a foreboding sign if conservatives can’t make life more affordable and meaningful for young voters, Kirk said.
“Politics should not be the most important thing,” Kirk told the Deseret News. “Honestly, you want to change the world? Improve yourself, get married, have children, go to church.”
This success sequence can’t be scaled in the same way campus activism can, Kirk said. But it can be broadcasted boldly by Turning Point and, more importantly, by its young members in a way that resonates with young people that feel like something is missing.
The absence of responsibility and direction are at the core of Gen Z malaise, according to Ian Butcher, a former Turning Point vice president who attended the student summit with two other recent graduates of Cedar Valley High School in Eagle Mountain.
The high school chapter was recognized at Turning Point’s largest annual gathering in December for hanging a 30-foot by 20-foot American flag in their school common area, according to Butcher, who said the nonpartisan club focused on promoting civic engagement and patriotism.
Butcher was attracted to political activism after hearing about Turning Point at family dinners, he said, and seeing Instagram reels of Kirk’s American Comeback Tour where he did over 200 hours of campus debates on over 65 campuses in 2024.
“That was so influential to so many people online and in person,” Butcher said. “I think if they keep doing that, to keep reaching those young voters — these conferences are amazing, they educate people — just keep doing what they’re doing.”
