(((Not That Crown, Maybe)))

For the last decade, the new GOP establishment has been MAGA and the insurgent “New Right” crowd that now appears best positioned to lead the party out of the Trump era. For the most part, I think that’s been a good thing. The pre-Trump GOP establishment had become lethargic, lazy, and out of touch with voters. It couldn’t lay a finger on Democrats during the Obama era, blamed its failures on “changing demographics,” and essentially threw in the towel. Change was needed. But now I worry that the new GOP establishment—including plenty of overconfident Republican operatives around my age who, even in overwhelming defeat, like to sit around packing Zyns and competing to see who can drop the most “based” take—is over-indexing on the losses Republicans suffered among young men in the midterms. And I worry that they're becoming similarly inclined to handwave away the party’s broader political problems by blaming changing demographics. I’ve seen a lot of self-reflection on the timeline about the drop-off among young men in the days since the midterm shellacking. I get it. Many of us are young men ourselves. It’s hard for us to understand why others in our demographic would stay home or break for Democrats. But it’s worth remembering that 2024 was the aberration in terms of GOP support from this group, not 2026. None of this is to say Republicans shouldn’t focus on winning back young men. But Republicans lost ground among almost every demographic in 2026. Focusing exclusively or disproportionately on young men—and convincing ourselves that the way to win them back is to get even more racist on the internet or sound a little more like Nick Fuentes—would be a major mistake. I’m much more worried about the middle-aged white suburbanites increasingly exhausted by Trump who defected to Adam Hamilton in Kansas. Or the Hispanics across the Rio Grande Valley who voted enthusiastically and overwhelmingly for Trump just two years ago, only to jump off the bandwagon and vote for James Talarico this cycle. Those voters represent a much bigger problem for Republicans than a largely imagined epidemic of “based” young dudes defecting to support socialist-aligned, Islamist-sympathetic extremists on the left like Abdul El-Sayed. If the new GOP establishment responds to its first major electoral setback by retreating into demographic fatalism and doubling down on the very cultural and political instincts that alienate everyone outside its own online bubble, it risks becoming exactly the kind of failed establishment it replaced.