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By Anna Rahmanan
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At 9:30 p.m. on Friday, August 7, the future of the Republican Party gathered for a “cigar caucus” at the Hilton Boston Park Plaza. Ten hours later, delegates could attend a 7:30 a.m. “gym caucus,” followed by a prayer breakfast.
The events were part of the Young Republican National Federation Summer Conference. The first day of the conference happened to fall on International Beer Day, a coincidence that also happens to capture a change taking place among younger conservatives—and it’s one that comes with its own risks.
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The federation recruits Republicans aged 18 to 40 and says it trains future candidates, campaign staff and activists, but the people preparing to inherit the party are increasingly rejecting a ritual once closely associated with political networking: drinking.
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Will Donahue, chairman of College Republicans of America, told Newsweek that President Donald Trump, a lifelong teetotaler, has helped normalize abstinence on the right.
“I think the embracement of sobriety is largely driven by President Trump’s sobriety,” Donahue said. “That’s really been a driver in the party for a long time, and it’s well known that if you work around him, it’s expected that you don’t drink and don’t smoke.” The shift may also reflect the influence of the Make America Healthy Again movement and younger conservatives’ growing focus on fitness, appearance and performance.
“This younger generation is obsessed with health, MAHA, looksmaxxing,” Donahue said, referring to a trend focused on improving physical appearance. “Alcohol drinking rates have been dropping for the past five or six years. I don’t think it will affect the older generation, but I think among younger people it will keep dropping.”
The worrying sign for young Republicans, however, is not that they march to the beat of the same drummer. It’s that America doesn’t necessarily follow the same rhythm. The numbers suggest Republicans are changing faster than the rest of the country.
According to Gallup, the share of Republicans who said they drink alcohol fell from 65 percent in 2023 to 46 percent in 2025, a 19-point drop. The national drinking rate fell from 62 percent to 54 percent over the same period, an 8-point decrease.
In other words, alcohol consumption among Republicans fell more than twice as fast as it did among Americans overall. Young adults also cut back, but more slowly. The share of adults aged 18 to 34 who said they drank fell from 59 percent to 50 percent. Democrats remained roughly steady at 61 percent, making Republicans the least likely of the two major partisan groups to report drinking.
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No More Two-Martini Lunches
The twist is that Republicans were simultaneously the partisan group least likely to view moderate drinking as unhealthy, despite the influence of MAHA. Gallup found that 44 percent considered one or two drinks a day bad for health, compared with 58 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of independents.
That suggests the Republican decline is not driven solely by health concerns: Among politically active conservatives, sobriety is also becoming a marker of seriousness, discipline and proximity to Trump.
“The two-martini lunch is basically dead,” Donahue said. “It is taboo to drink.”
Donahue, who is nearly 27, said the atmosphere at College Republican gatherings has changed significantly since he joined the organization in 2020.
“When I started in the College Republicans back in 2020, the conferences were places where students would go to drink and party,” he said.
“This new generation doesn’t do that at all,” he added.
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He described older members of Gen Z as more interested in nightlife and partying than the students now entering conservative politics. The coronavirus pandemic may have played a role, he said, by interrupting social habits during formative years.
“For a couple of years, you weren’t social,” Donahue said. “I’m not sure if that’s the driving force behind it. There’s a mix of factors, which I think is good because times are tough, and we want a generation of political consultants and politicos who don’t engage in that type of behavior and are serious about the country.”
The change is visible elsewhere in the MAGA ecosystem as well. At Butterworth’s, a D.C. restaurant popular with conservative politicians and operatives, chef Bart Hutchins initially resisted stocking mocktails before requests from Republican customers persuaded him to add alcohol-free Guinness, a zero-proof Negroni and verjus—the juice of unripe grapes—according to a report in The Guardian.
Tucker Carlson, who quit drinking in 2002, told the outlet that alcohol-free beer was no longer confined to “sad rehab cases like me. I think it’s normal young people,” he said.
The late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk presented sobriety as a competitive advantage. “The top-performing people I’ve ever been around are very against alcohol,” Kirk said on his podcast.
Donahue said the move away from alcohol has been accompanied by other changes in how young Republican activists socialize. Recreational drug use, he said, has largely disappeared from the circles he knows, while nicotine patches have become common.
“The drugs are completely gone,” he said. “I don’t know anyone who is not on a nicotine patch.”
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Echo Chambers
The risk for Republicans is that political activists may mistake their own subculture for the broader generation.
“When you exist in these political spheres, you eat, breathe and sleep politics, so you surround yourself with an echo chamber,” Donahue said.
He said binge drinking and partying may remain common in other parts of campus life, particularly around sports, while politically engaged students increasingly socialize with one another.
That gap illustrates that Gen Z is not uniformly abandoning alcohol. A July 2026 survey by IWSR found that 74 percent of legal-drinking-age Gen Z consumers across 15 major markets drank alcohol, up from 66 percent three years earlier and close to the 76 percent rate among adults overall.
In the United States, Gen Z participation reached 71 percent, slightly above the national participation rate of 70 percent in the same study.
However, the average number of drinks per occasion fell overall from 4.4 in 2024 and 2025 to 3.9 in 2026. Younger adults appear to be drinking more deliberately rather than simply giving it up.
The same caution applies to their politics: Young Republicans may be drawn to Trump’s sobriety, the MAHA movement and a culture of personal discipline without accepting every part of the Republican platform.
A December 2025 Third Way survey of registered men aged 18 to 29 found that 38 percent were initially undecided in the 2026 congressional contest. The survey also found that 67 percent wanted the Republican Party to become more moderate, compared with 17 percent who wanted it to become more conservative.
The Split 'Is Going To Get Deeper'
Research from Tufts University’s CIRCLE has similarly found differences between younger and older Republicans on immigration, climate change and abortion. Donahue said those differences are also visible on foreign policy and economics.
“Our generation is more radical on foreign policy and immigration,” he said. “We are less radical on economics. That is a trend I’m starting to see.”
He said Republican leaders have done too little to recruit, train and promote younger conservatives.
“The party has had zero interest in the past five to seven years in engaging with the youth and bringing them up and training them,” Donahue said.
That failure, he argued, is encouraging younger Republicans to develop their own ideas and institutions rather than inherit those of the party establishment.
“The older generation has no interest in talking with the younger generation, and that radicalizes them,” Donahue said. “I think that split is going to get deeper.”
Perhaps, then, the trouble for the Republican Party is not that its heirs are refusing the drink, but that they may also refuse the inheritance.
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