Month: June 2026

Among the sweeping tent of President Donald Trump’s winning coalition in 2024, there’s a niche that’s often overlooked despite the potency of its role in the burgeoning young right: conservative women.

It’s these women, like Christian conservative influencer Savanna Faith Stone, who say “we’re not really identifying with the MAGA party anymore.”

“Promises that were made have not been delivered on at all, and I think young women are realizing that,” Stone said in an interview with POLITICO. “They’re realizing, ‘Hey, you promised lower gas prices. You promised the economy would be better. Like, that’s why we voted for you.’”

Stone, who turns 21 this week, is one of a flurry of influencers who flocked to San Antonio this weekend, young families in tow, to gather under a bevy of bright pink lights at Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Summit. It’s the biggest gathering of its kind for the young female right — a space for a collective disdain for “woke” culture, a love for God and kinship under the theme of “faith, family and freedom.”

But bubbling under the surface are divisions within the GOP that have enveloped the online voices of the young right and a budding disillusionment among young women with the politics of the second Trump administration. It’s all part of a growing divide between being “MAGA” in 2026 and being “America First.”

Trump is “not America first,” Stone said. She voted for a president who promised no new wars, who was pro-family and would bring down costs. “It’s harder than ever for a young couple to be able to buy a home,” she added.

Young women moved from 33 percent for Trump in 2020 to 40 percent in 2024, while recent polling has shown the partisan gender divide is more stark than ever. Now less than six months out from the midterms, the young female right’s biggest voices are warning women could sit out the midterm elections.

“I cannot express to you the level of alarm bells that should be ringing for the GOP,” as women consider not voting, conservative influencer Alex Clark told POLITICO, adding that young women are looking at everything from the ongoing war in Iran to the persistence of pesticides and it’s breaking their trust.

Clark is a Turning Point darling, a 33 year-old podcaster with half a million followers who grew under the tutelage of the late Charlie Kirk. She’s built a MAHA-focused health and wellness platform that she calls an “unaggressive way to share conservative ideals” with a loyal following. (“You’re trailing my show!” she recalled Kirk telling her in 2024. “Yeah, you better watch out!” she responded.)

She hasn’t shied away from sharing her criticism of the administration. “I straight up told [the White House], ‘People want ‘fight, fight, fight Trump.’ They don’t want ‘ballroom Trump,’’” Clark said. “I feel like some of the magic and the spark that helped us win 2024 is missing.”

Along with other voices like Isabel Brown or Riley Gaines, they’ve become emblems of the Turning Point faction of Gen-Z and millennials. They believe women’s biology will push them to follow strong men — part of what they credit for some young women’s embrace of the GOP in 2024 as the party penetrated the manosphere. Stone drew controversy for saying voting should be one vote per household. Clark told POLITICO she doesn’t think a woman should be president.

But the universe of female influencers is vast and oftentimes at odds. Raquel DeBono, the self-proclaimed NYC conservative of “Make America Hot Again” fame, said in an interview that she “would not be caught dead” at Turning Point’s summit and rejects the rigidity of the online faction that has cast out figures like Megyn Kelly. “If you want to let women into the tent and you want more women to vote conservative, you need to be less cringe and horrible,” DeBono said.

And then there’s influencers like Emily Wilson, of “Emily Saves America,” and Priya Patel, conservatives living in West Hollywood who embrace traditional values but often find an audience in women who don’t. “I read my Bible. I want to get married young. I’m saving myself for marriage,” Patel said. But the pair who co-host “Pretty Political” have followers that are “girls that do Only Fans, makeup artists, graffiti artists” who all “love America,” Wilson said.

Whether city conservatives or Turning Point young moms, they agree on key issues — including around foreign policy or accountability for the Jeffrey Epstein files — that they say are diverting them from MAGA or the White House. And with young voters already a turnout challenge in midterm years, they’re all concerned many young conservative women simply won’t show up come November.

The White House, in response to a request for comment, touted the “most pro-woman agenda in American history” — pointing to women’s sports, decreasing violent crime, expanding the child tax credit and cutting food dyes, as well as “creating the most renter-friendly market we’ve seen in years,” in a statement from spokesperson Anna Kelly.

The administration, Kelly says, has “achieved win after win on issues women care about most — and we’re just getting started. The MAGA coalition is stronger than ever, and women continue to play a powerful role in the movement.”

But GOP women politicians know it’s “100,000 percent” a problem. “It’s something that I have spoken to the White House about, ” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) — who co-chairs the Republican Women’s Caucus — said in an interview. She added the GOP has to be “laser focused” on delivering on affordability, “and if we don’t, we’re failing at earning their trust and support in the election.”

And the Republican Party made the mistake before of not messaging directly to women, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders told POLITICO. “Women want a lot of those same things. We want safe neighborhoods. We want the opportunity to make decisions about how we raise our families,” she said.

Yet there’s skepticism about whether the GOP will take these concerns seriously, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former congresswoman who appeared with Turning Point more than once, texted. “I think about all the single mothers and women out there trying to make it, and it is extremely difficult, with inflation continuing to rise and overall cost of living continuing to rise,” she said. She also called Trump’s tone and language “a major turn off to women.”

These young conservative women — some clad in florals, others still donning their ruby-red Trump hats — don’t regret their vote, and many expressed a desire for the administration to succeed.

But any future for the growth of the budding female right has a bridge of trust to re-build.

“After Trump in 2028, if we want to see this energy continue that we had in 2015 and 2024, if we want that to have any sort of life after 2028 — it has to become an America First movement,” Clark told Playbook. “That is the cry of the base right now.”

​Politics