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By Giulia Carbonaro
Senior Reporter
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After turbocharging his victory in the 2024 presidential election, some young Republicans are now turning against Donald Trump, Gen Zers attending this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) have suggested.
“I think they’ll get destroyed in the midterms,” 18-year-old attendee Alexander Selby told CNN at the annual event in Grapevine, Texas, when weighing the Republican Party’s chances in the November elections. “I just… I get the vibe a lot of people who are new who just voted for Trump because they thought it was cool, in high school, are just now being like, ‘I can’t stand the guy’.”
The University of Pittsburgh political science student and other young attendees pointed to the Iran war as a key turning point.
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“He campaigned on no new wars. I didn’t really believe that when he did it, just cause if you look at the people who surround him, it’s very obvious he was never going to do that,” Selby said. “A lot of people—conservatives, young conservatives—right now are kind of disillusioned with Trump and I’d consider myself one of those.”
Another CPAC attendee Benjamin Williams, a 25-year-old marketing specialist for Young Americans for Liberty, told the Associated Press (AP) the Iran war "does feel like a betrayal. We did not want to see more wars. We wanted actual America-first policies, and Trump was very explicit about that," he said.
Trump’s Dwindling Popularity Is Chipping Away At His Base
Trump’s popularity among U.S. voters took a nosedive since the start of the ongoing war in Iran, according to the latest polling compiled by statistician and political analyst Nate Silver for his Silver Bulletin. A week ago, the president had a net approval rating on -13.9 in the Silver Bulletin; on Thursday, it had dropped to -16.7, a record low for his second term.
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The president’s dwindling support among Americans—including within some of those same groups that formed a core part of his base in 2024—spells bad news for Republicans in this year’s midterms, especially considering the party in power traditionally does not do well in these elections.
A Generational Divide On Full Display
Many young men attending this year’s CPAC talked of growing unhappiness with the president among their peers, suggesting a significant shift away from Trump for this group of voters which overwhelmingly supported him in 2024.
According to data from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), 56 percent of men born between 1997 and 2012—Gen Zers—voted for Trump in 2024, against 41 percent of women in the same age cohort.
And while much has been said of young American men’s disillusionment with the U.S. political system, the economy, and the way immigration was being handled under Joe Biden, many of these same voters are now feeling like Trump failed to keep his promises to them.
At the center of this perceived betrayal is the U.S. and Israel’s joint strikes on Iran on February 28, which started the ongoing war in the Middle East which has caused energy prices to spike in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Auburn University sophomore Sean O’Brien told the news agency that he was “not happy” with talk of sending U.S. troops into the Middle East, describing such an idea as a potential “full betrayal.”
Crucially, CPAC attendees revealed a generational divide among conservatives in their feeling toward the president and his intervention in Iran. Older conservatives were much more forgiving than their younger peers.
“I don’t believe he started a new war. He was acting in response to a 40-year-old war by Iran,” 70-year-old retired defense contractor Joe Ropar of McKinney, Texas, told AP. “How long were we supposed to wait? I think he did what he had to do when he had to do it.”
But there are also older Republicans who are unhappy about the conflict. Outside of the conference, several conservatives—including those within the MAGA community—have expressed skepticism and even outright criticism of the war in Iran. Earlier this week, podcaster Steve Bannon, a MAGA loyalist, said that the conflict has become “a hard slog” which could cost the GOP crucial voters in the midterms.
Vying For Unity Ahead Of the Midterms
A growing GOP divide forming over Trump’s war in Iran risks making the party even more vulnerable to dramatic losses in this year’s midterms, which will see the Republican Party’s hold on the House and its razor-thin majority in the Senate in jeopardy.
“President Trump is not on the ballot, but his policies are,” the Rev. Franklin Graham said in Grapevine on Thursday, as reported by the Dallas Morning News. “We need a united front and go out and win these midterms. If we don’t, we’ll be through.”
A recent AP-NORC poll shows that Trump still enjoys the support of a majority of Republicans, with 86 percent of conservatives saying they approve of the president’s job performance. But his popularity is certainly at risk of fading as a majority of Americans (59 percent) say U.S. military action in Iran has been excessive.
Among Republicans, however, only 26 percent thought the Trump administration’s actions in the Middle East had gone too far.
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