Spoiling for a fight, or at least an argument worthy of a viral video, the liberal radio host Brian Shapiro sidled up to a folding table where two members of Turning Point USA’s Arizona State University chapter were disseminating literature about the conservative group and its founder, Charlie Kirk.
“I’d like to ask you some questions about Turning Point,” Mr. Shapiro said as a colleague began to record the encounter. “Did you agree with Charlie on, like, transgenders and guns and all that stuff?”
The two students looked at each other. “I’m here representing our organization,” one of them finally said, making clear he was not interested in any video, viral or otherwise. “We don’t make comments on things.”
“OK, that’s cool,” Mr. Shapiro said quickly, backing off.
The radio host was in Arizona at the behest of National Ground Game, a fledgling Democratic organization, and as a foot soldier in what has become a messy battle for the youth vote in the 2026 midterms and beyond.
In what will be the first election cycle since Mr. Kirk’s assassination last September, and with President Trump’s support among young voters rapidly eroding, the fight for the country’s youth pits three forces against one another. Turning Point USA remains formidable but is struggling to maintain its influence; Nicholas J. Fuentes, the 27-year-old white nationalist, is urging his followers to either stay home in November or vote for Democrats, in hopes that the Mr. Trump’s MAGA coalition will collapse and potentially give way to a more extremist Republican Party; and National Ground Game is seeking to replicate Turning Point on college campuses but has its work cut out for it.
The political climate for winning back Mr. Trump’s share of the youth electorate would seem to favor Democrats. Polls indicate that the president is losing support among young voters who helped him capture the swing states of Arizona and Wisconsin in 2024. A national survey conducted by The Economist and YouGov in February, roughly three weeks before the start of the Iran war, concluded that Mr. Trump’s approval rating among voters ages 18 to 29 was 25 percent, half of what it had been a year earlier.
National Ground Game is seeking to exploit those vulnerabilities even as polls show that voters give Democrats in Congress record-low approval ratings. The group is still finding its way, and its visit to Arizona State in Tempe, the first in a monthlong swing through college campuses, did not go as planned. But Turning Point and Mr. Fuentes have plenty of challenges of their own.
The Democrats
National Ground Game arrived at Arizona State in the early afternoon of March 23, only to be informed by a student official that it did not have the proper permit to be there. Upon learning that Turning Point would be hosting an event on campus that evening, National Ground Game’s founder, Zee Cohen-Sanchez, proposed that the two groups engage in a debate. She was rebuffed by a Turning Point associate who said their event was for Arizona State students only.
Instead, the Democratic group staged its own debate that evening in a rented office warehouse, between one of its influencers, Steven Bonnell II, and a few conservative students. About a dozen people showed up to see Mr. Bonnell, known online as Destiny, argue that Mr. Trump’s tariffs were hurting the U.S. economy, and that Kamala Harris would not have invaded Iran had she been president.
Inauspicious as the debut was, Turning Point’s “Pick Up the Mic” event that same evening also lacked the rat-a-tat Socratic pyrotechnics that had made Mr. Kirk a sensation.
About 70 students attended, a sliver of the crowds that Mr. Kirk once drew. Even their most pointed questions — Why was the Trump administration so reluctant to release the Epstein files? Was Mr. Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, a C.I.A. operative? — met with long-winded and nonconfrontational rejoinders by the Turning Point podcasters onstage, Jack Posobiec and Blake Neff.
Turning Point officials acknowledge that their influence over the youth vote has become more tenuous this year. “At minimum, young voters are conflicted over the war in Iran and how the Epstein files were handled,” Andrew Sypher, the group’s chief field officer, said in an interview. “Those issues are causing divisions for young people who are already concerned about affordability, A.I. and whether their college degree is worth going into debt over.”
But, Mr. Sypher said, “The headwinds we’re facing now are anti-Trump. They’re not pro-Democrats.”
When Ms. Cohen-Sanchez founded National Ground Game just after the 2024 election, “we were stepping into a total void,” she said. “The left has been really terrible at connecting its work on the ground with its influencers online. And Charlie and the Republicans have been so good at it.”
Mr. Kirk also made headway in “changing the culture,” Ms. Cohen-Sanchez said, by lending a youthfully hip veneer to Christian nationalism. The electoral impact of his efforts was clear in 2024, when Democrats like Ms. Cohen-Sanchez, a Las Vegas-based political consultant whose work dates back to the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, belatedly realized that they had taken the youth vote for granted.
National Ground Game’s response to the perceived stuffy political correctness of Ms. Cohen-Sanchez’s party has been to “be more crass, to speak the truth,” she said, and to openly use expletives. (The group named its monthlong swing through college campuses the “Unf*ck America Tour.”)
Though National Ground Game’s website describes its objective as “building the Democratic counter-T.P.U.S.A.,” it has not yet caused Mr. Kirk’s juggernaut to break a sweat. Federal records show that the group has raised about $855,000 since its inception, less than a tenth of what Turning Point has in its coffers. Turning Point said last month that it had more than 1,400 college chapters. National Ground Game has 10.
In an effort to gain more followers and donations, Ms. Cohen-Sanchez’s group engages in what is known as “clip farming,” or showing up at conservative events and creating a stir to yield a videotaped moment that goes viral.
That is what happened in April 2025, when National Ground Game dispatched 35 progressive influencers to the campus of Texas A&M, where Mr. Kirk was hosting a debate with students. Their efforts to goad Mr. Kirk into a sparring match did not succeed, but a video clip of them standing on the periphery of the event and loudly asserting that he was “terrified” to debate one of their leading influencers, Dean Withers, amassed over 50 million views on Instagram.
“The end goal is to have students see Democratic influencers showing up on their campus and striking down the MAGA argument,” said Mr. Withers, a 21-year-old progressive social media personality.
Advancing a pro-Democratic argument of their own is a more nettlesome task, Ms. Cohen-Sanchez conceded.
“We’ve tried to stay out of the Palestine-Israel conversation because we know it’s only going to drive a wedge between Democrats,” she said. But ignoring the topic altogether for the sake of coalition building has its costs, said Mr. Withers, who is no longer affiliated with National Ground Game.
“We can see how much the Israel issue matters to youth, across partisan lines,” he said. “And not addressing it could cause a certain level of disinterest.”
The White Nationalist
The greater obstacle to the conservative movement’s effort to woo young voters may be one of its own, Mr. Fuentes.
His misogynous and antisemitic views have made him an outcast among many conservatives, who also worry that he could be a factor in the midterms. “Young people right now are looking for someone to follow, like they followed Charlie,” Jonathan Coon, the Turning Point chapter president at Arizona State, said in an interview. “That makes Fuentes enticing to some of them.”
Mr. Fuentes has made denigrating Israel and what he calls “organized Jewry” a centerpiece of his online persona. “I’m like, the Jew guy,” he said on a recent afternoon at a restaurant in the Chicago suburb of La Grange, not far from where his parents live.
Wearing a hoodie to obscure his identity because of death threats, Mr. Fuentes cuts a curious profile in right-wing leadership. A self-described loner whose social life consists largely of weekend dinners with his parents and twin sister, he spends most of his time inside his house, online.
His bigoted musings have caused his late-night streaming show, “America First,” to be banned from YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. He has no meaningful connections inside the Trump administration and has been barred from large-scale conservative gatherings such as the annual Conservative Political Action Conference and all Turning Point events.
But even his many detractors recognize Mr. Fuentes’s acerbic on-air charisma and marvel at how widely his clips have circulated on social media, despite all the constraints placed on him. Turning Point officials privately acknowledge that his following has grown since Mr. Kirk’s killing, a view echoed by National Ground Game.
“I’ve been seeing kids on campuses wearing America First hats,” Ms. Sanchez-Cohen said. “They lost Charlie and they’re looking for someone new. And it’s not Erika.”
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Fuentes concurs with this assessment. “I’m not being ghoulish. It’s just reality,” he said at the restaurant. “Charlie was this aspirational male figure that guys could look up to in a way they can’t with Erika. So they’re diminished now. The gatekeeper is gone, and the gate is wide open.”
Mr. Fuentes said his goal was to “suppress 5 to 10 percent of the young male votes that would otherwise go to Republicans” with the hope that a Democratic majority emerges and thwarts Mr. Trump’s agenda for the remainder of his term. “And I want Vance and Rubio both to go down,” he said.
His plans for achieving this are not exactly intricate. On his show, which streams on the Rumble platform, Mr. Fuentes aims to continually exhort his audience to withhold support from all Republican candidates, each of whom he intends to grade using a scorecard that determines how “America first” they are. “Spoiler alert, they’re all going to be graded ‘not America first,’” he said.
Mr. Fuentes maintains that he can also exert influence at the college grass-roots level, adding that his confederacy of right-wing male followers extends across 30 campuses. He declined to say which campuses he was referring to. None of the chapters has held a public gathering, and they appear to lack the resources to target specific voters. Mr. Fuentes acknowledged that he had no plans to canvass young voters in person. He also has discontinued his annual America First Political Action Conference out of concerns for his personal security.
Would he disseminate some sort of manifesto on college campuses to explain his don’t-get-out-the-vote posture? “I thought about starting a Substack column,” Mr. Fuentes said. “It’s a good idea. I should do it. Just, you know, lazy.”
A Dry Run for 2028
If young conservatives this year shy away from evoking “America’s golden age,” as Mr. Kirk often did at the dawn of Mr. Trump’s second term, they have not yet descended into gloom about their electoral prospects in November.
“I don’t think unhappiness with the administration necessarily equates to voting Democrat or not voting at all, the way Fuentes wants,” said Mr. Coon, the Arizona State chapter president of Turning Point USA. “It’s going to depend more on who speaks to the issues they care about most.”
Mr. Coon added that affordable housing topped the list of students’ concerns.
Regardless of the outcome in November, the greater electoral test will likely be in 2028, a presidential campaign year, when turnout tends to be higher and outcomes can be decided by a superior field organization. By then, Democratic outfits like National Ground Game may still be overshadowed by Turning Point’s vast reach on college campuses.
But that advantage is not guaranteed to last, said Ryan Marty, an associate producer for Mr. Kirk’s podcast, which continues to broadcast daily after his death.
“Remember where Charlie started,” Mr. Marty said, “with some crappy fold-up table and two GoPro cameras.”
Robert Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades.
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