James Fishback came in a distant third last week in the Florida GOP gubernatorial primary. In spite of his dismal 10 percent showing, many right-wingers felt his campaign sets a path for future victories. Why? Because he did pretty well among young voters.
He came close to winning the small number of precincts where voters under 35 were the largest demographic. He won the vote at a number of college campuses (but this vote count only amounted to 30 people in most places).
This has led a number of people to predict Fishback may be the future of GOP politics. Politico pondered right before the election that while Fishback may lose, his politics might win. The outlet thought his online antics, youth support, and policy agenda could be a blueprint for more successful candidates to follow. These predictions fixate on the notion that young people, particularly young men, are poised to take over the Republican Party. Fishback may only have gotten 10 percent, but his youth support predicts the future.
That’s a dubious prediction. Voters under 40 make up a very small percentage of voters in GOP primaries. Young people can change who they vote for over time. How millennials voted ten or twenty years ago in one Republican primary doesn’t tell us much about how they vote now. The same is true for Zoomers. Boomers and Gen Xers are still going to be the vast majority of GOP voters for the foreseeable future. There’s not going to be a mass die-off in the next five or ten years.
Most importantly, it overlooks Zoomers’ actual politics. Young voters are the core demographic behind the DSA surge across the country. Elections and polls since 2024 have shown Gen Z, even the men, veering to the Left. Conservatives are pinning their hopes on the generation most opposed to deportations and America itself to save the country.
While most of the Right will acknowledge that young women are increasingly liberal, they insist the young men are extreme right-wingers. While data demonstrates Zoomer men are more right-leaning than millennial men were a decade ago, that doesn’t mean a substantial number of them share the same agenda as the Online Right. The majority of young men are also queasy about the ICE raids and will likely vote Democrat in the midterms.
The young men involved in conservative politics are very right-wing. But we shouldn’t extrapolate from that that the entire generation is like that. And if you want right-wing candidates to win GOP primaries, you’re going to need to focus on older voters rather than relying on young people. There’s nowhere near enough of them involved in Republican primaries to decide who’s the nominee.
Conventional wisdom on the Right imagines that the only way to win young men is to offer a far-right agenda. Pastor Dale Partridge recently posted: “Immigration and deportations is all that matter to anyone under 40.” Conservative operative Mike Howell declared at a conference this month that young men will leave the GOP in droves if mass deportations don’t happen.
These opinions are the product of a RW bubble. You can only believe them if you think the opinions of RW Twitter and Republican staffers are the majority position of Gen Z. Actual Zoomers think very differently.
No generation is more hostile to Trump’s deportations than Zoomers. Sixty percent of Gen Zers say the Trump admin is deporting too many people. Seventy-five percent say the raids make America much less safe. And it’s not just the women saying this. A Third Way poll found that 60 percent of young men are concerned with the “expansion of immigration raids to target anyone who looks or sounds foreign.” Even among Republican Zoomers, support for mass deportations isn’t as strong as one might think. A 2025 NBC poll found that 56 percent of Republican young men support Trump’s deportations. That same poll found only 30 percent of young men backed them.
One could argue these figures are driven by Gen Z’s diversity. The generation is barely majority white after all. (That does beg the question as to why the Right sees this generation as its salvation when its demographics are grim, but we’ll leave that aside.) Those who still see Zoomers as the BASED generation will argue white Gen Zers get these issues more than their elders.
That’s not true either. Pew Research found that white Zoomers are the least bothered by demographic change among all generations. The much-despised Boomers are far more likely to be upset by it than Gen Zers.
It’s true that Zoomers who are involved in conservative politics are more right-wing than their elder peers. That’s an important development and can have a political impact. But that is only a tiny fraction of the generation and doesn’t indicate Zoomers will vote for a far-right agenda.
The Fishback example is hard to make much of a big deal about. He got decent youth support because he was very entertaining. If he had done a more “serious” campaign with fewer hijinks and jokes, he would’ve done poorly among the young. But his ability to create viral content about taxing OnlyFans thots and giving funny nicknames to Byron Donalds is what got him attention. While he did talk about immigration and criticize Israel, much of his campaign was dedicated to random issues that would get him attention. He offered a whole range of proposals that hardly made for a coherent platform.
It did attract young people, but at the end of the day, it only got him 10 percent in a primary against weak candidates.
Young people can have a major impact on right-wing politics in America. These are the people who have the time and energy to work on campaigns. They’re the ones who can door knock and phone bank for insurgent right-wing candidates. Older people don’t have the time for that. Young people do.
Right-wing youth also punches above their weight in the new media environment. Their memes, streams, and viral posts shape conservative discourse now. They can get politicians to talk about certain issues simply through online influence. You wouldn’t have Republican congressmen talking about repealing the Hart-Celler Act without the youthful Online Right. (You can read Whitepill to learn more about this story.) You would also not have mainstream conservative commentators debating Israel without this influence. Many of these anons will be the federal judges, politicians, and conservative operators of tomorrow. That’s a big development.
But it’s hard to translate this online movement into a real-world grassroots movement. Influencers have an audience, not a constituency. We’ve seen several extremely online candidates who built their campaigns around the youth vote get blown out in primaries this year. Thomas Massie, the most serious of all these candidates, was able to win the youth vote in his primary. He still lost by 10 points because the olds turned on him.
Some argue that this is a reason to leave the GOP. But if you can’t win Republican primaries, raise money, or organize effectively in the real-world, how do you expect to take down the two-party system? It’s particularly foolish when the youth vote is veering to the Left rather than to the Right.
We’re potentially decades away from Zoomers being the deciding vote in GOP primaries, and it’s unknown how they might vote in 10 or 20 years. It’s fun to run an entertaining meme campaign, but it can only translate into a victory if it wins over old people. Trump did this in his election victories.
Gen Z does offer some hope for the future. But one can’t build a campaign entirely around the Zoomers. There’s not enough right-wing ones to win elections.
Order Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.
One white pill, young right-wingers are getting jobs in government and other relevant institutions. Unlike boomers and Gen X’s who went the used car salesman route.
I think we’re less than a generation away from senior management in most bureaucracies being led by our guys.
As I've said elsewhere, last 3 elections were men v women. Next 3 will be old v. young.