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Pharma millionaire and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump after failing to defy expectations in the Iowa Caucus. Despite winning less than 10 percent of the vote, Ramaswamy's campaign brought an issue into the race that Republicans need not ignore: young Americans.
There are close to 70 million Generation Z citizens (born between 1997 and 2012) in the United States, making up about 20 percent of the population. By 2016, most of us couldn't vote, but in 2020 our turnout beat records and by 2030, all of us will be able to vote.
Older Republicans tend to face this fact with pessimism, and to some degree, it's understandable. Patriotism, for example, is indeed low among young people. We shouldn't be surprised though. It's not about what's in our water, but what's in the classroom—and most importantly, on our screens.
Ramaswamy, probably because he saw the campaign as more of a long-term investment than anyone else, took his youth outreach strategy seriously. And it paid off. Although he didn't deliver a surprise blow, a close look into the exit polls shows that he did well with those between the ages of 17 and 29. In fact, Ramaswamy came four percentage points away from Nikki Haley among this demographic, almost three times closer to matching her when compared with the total results. Furthermore, Ramaswamy performed more than five times better with younger Americans than with those older than 65.
Let's remember: Ramaswamy had no name recognition, and even as he attempted to out-Trump Trump, with my "soft" generation he came a few percentage points away from a former governor and UN ambassador. Among active and young conservatives at Turning Point Action, Ramaswamy joined Tucker Carlson as the favorite potential running mates for Donald Trump.
Throughout the campaign, Ramaswamy was consistently attacked for being on TikTok. He responded that "part of how we win elections is reaching the next generation of young Americans where they are.... So while the Democrats are running rampant, reaching the next generation three to one, there's exactly one person in the Republican Party [who] talks a big game about reaching young people, and that's me."
Ramaswamy had a point. It's simple game theory: on any platform, if Democrats are ubiquitous and Republicans are absent, what can we expect? Republican strategists have stuck to a traditionalism that goes beyond the philosophical, refusing to engage with social media like their opponents do. Even for those who find campaigning on TikTok sacrilegious, consider that Republicans have also failed to reach younger voters on Snapchat, an app with more than 100 million U.S. users, half of whom are under the age of 26. In the 2022 midterms, the National Republican Senatorial Committee spent a mere $4,600 in political ads on the platform. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, on the other hand, spent over $64,000.
The idea that Gen Z is an impenetrable market for Republicans is not only false, with many overestimating how liberal the generation is, but futile. Sorry for breaking it down for you, Mr. Republican Strategist, but there are other biological facts aside from male and female—like the fact that Millennials and Gen Z will soon be the majority of voters.
For all of Ramaswamy's imperfections, he brought this issue to the forefront, palling around with influencers like Jake Paul and talking about the "black hole" in the hearts of America's youngest. While he was doing the podcasts, his counterparts stuck to the good ol' Fox News hits. For this reason, he overperformed with the youth. Republicans writ large can overperform with us too. The first step is to acknowledge our existence.
Juan P. Villasmil is an Intercollegiate Studies Institute editorial fellow at The Spectator World and a Young Voices contributor.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
