Both the dissident online right and left-leaning corporate media have spent the past few weeks convincing themselves that the future of the MAGA movement is the weirdest kids in the room. These strange bedfellows, both eager to see the American Right move past its politically successful 2024 incarnation, believe that the key drivers of post-Trump conservatism are not union workers from Macomb County, churchgoing moms in rural Georgia, or even contractors in the Rio Grande Valley. Instead, it is the twentysomething male Zoomer, still living at home and spending inordinate amounts of time online, and steadily dosing video games, pot, and porn. These budding young edgelords, we’re told, are the inevitable inheritors of control over the GOP.
New data show that this scenario is far less likely than Nick Fuentes—who opposed Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign—and his ilk want you to believe. In a new Manhattan Institute survey of nearly 3,000 voters, we sought to understand what today’s Republican coalition really looks like: who’s in it, what they believe, and which parts are politically stable. Rather than a tidy split between Reaganites and Buchananites, or “normie cons” and “post-liberals,” we found two much messier blocs.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
Roughly two-thirds of the coalition are what we call “Core Republicans”: longstanding GOP voters who have pulled the Republican lever for years. They are consistently conservative on economics, foreign policy, and social issues. They still prefer cutting spending to raising taxes, still see China as a threat, still support Israel, and remain firmly opposed to DEI and gender ideology.
The other major bloc—just under 30 percent of today’s GOP—is what we call “New Entrant Republicans,” voters who joined the coalition in the Trump era. They are younger, more racially diverse, and more likely to have voted for Democratic candidates in the recent past. They are the ostensible audience for much of the eccentricity that now preoccupies conservative politics.
Ideologically, they are less conservative than Core Republicans on almost every major policy question we tested: taxes and spending, foreign policy, immigration, DEI, and transgender issues. Asked whether to close deficits through spending cuts or higher taxes on middle- and upper-income households, Core Republicans choose spending cuts by almost three to one. New Entrants slightly prefer higher taxes.
On paper, then, these new additions look a lot like the disaffected Democrats they were until recently. But many of them have also absorbed the ugliest content sloshing around online. One-third of New Entrant Republicans believe in all or most of the six conspiracy theories we tested—including about vaccines, 9/11, and the moon landing—compared with just 11 percent of Core Republicans. Sixty-three percent of that highest-conspiracy group previously voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden.
The same pattern appears on political violence: 54 percent of New Entrants say that violence is sometimes justified, versus only 20 percent of Core Republicans. Among those in the coalition who justify violence, six in ten previously voted for a Democrat; just one-third have never voted Democratic.
Looking at the smaller segment that either self-identifies as racist or anti-Semitic, or tolerates racists and anti-Semites in the coalition, reveals something counterintuitive: they are usually more liberal than non-tolerators on issues like DEI, taxes, and transgender policies. Seventy-eight percent of New Entrant “tolerators” take a liberal position on at least one of those questions.
In other words, the GOP’s new voters are not ideologically consistent paleoconservative populists. They’re disgruntled Obama-to-Trump or Biden-to-Trump voters whose politics are all over the map. Many have imported conspiratorial and bigoted worldviews into the GOP without simultaneously adopting a coherent conservative program. The racist in your X mentions who thinks the moon landing was faked and that George Bush arranged 9/11 is just as likely to want higher taxes and abortion-on-demand as he is to support eradicating DEI bureaucracies or doing anything to rein in the welfare state.
This runs directly against the way Washington prefers to talk about the Right. It is more comfortable to imagine a neatly organized struggle between “national conservatives” and “classical liberals” than to admit that a big chunk of Trump’s 2024 coalition simply doesn’t think about politics in those terms. There is a strong temptation to take the most online, most chaotic part of the coalition and treat it as the future of conservatism.
Democrats have dealt with a version of this problem for a decade. Their professional class—the Hill staffers and nonprofit operatives along the Acela corridor—sits well to the left of the median Democratic voter. Republicans may now be developing a mirror-image problem. The rising staffer class on the right is probably more radical than the voters it presumably serves. Many young GOP professionals engage in what Richard Hanania has called the “Based Ritual”: one-upmanship contests in which ambitious young conservatives signal their authenticity by being more explicit, more transgressive, and more hostile to liberal norms than the next guy.
Russell Greene has made an important complementary observation: Capitol Hill jobs filter for this type of person. Junior staffers are underpaid, living in an expensive and increasingly dysfunctional capital, watching Congress forfeit its authority to the executive branch and K Street. The people willing to accept those trade-offs tend to be unusually ideological, unusually online, and often buffered by family wealth. The result is a staffer pool that is angrier and stranger than the country it nominally represents.
Layer on top of that the incentives of the new media economy. As Corey Walker has argued, creators who depend on monetized views quickly find themselves owned by the audience, nudged by algorithms and engagement metrics toward their most obsessive viewers. These tend to be younger and more conspiratorial than the coalition as a whole. Coleman Hughes has described how Nick Fuentes has ridden this wave with a two-face strategy. He’s just a bookish, patriotic Catholic for mainstream podcasts; then there’s the Holocaust denial, rape fantasies, yearnings for Catholic Taliban rule, and demonizing America for the hardcore fans over on Rumble.
But politicians don’t share influencers’ incentives. Their task is not to maximize watch-time but to assemble durable coalitions that can win elections and then govern. That’s why it is so dangerous when elected Republicans take their cues from anonymous right-coded X accounts rather than from voters who reliably show up in elections.
So what should Republicans do with the fact that their larger coalition now contains a sizable contingent of people more progressive on policy, more conspiratorial, and more bigoted than the old base?
First, remember that online is not real life. The loudest voices in the right-wing attention economy speak to, and for, a particular segment: younger men, often nonreligious, often alienated from institutions, steeped in Internet-fueled irony and grievance. Our survey suggests that they are numerous enough to matter.
But they are not the median Republican voter. The coalition’s beating heart remains the normie Republican Washington keeps forgetting: older, more churchgoing, more hawkish, more pro-Israel, and uninterested in burning the country down.
Second, draw clearer lines about who sets the agenda. The party should not pretend that everything is fine. Genuinely dangerous ideas are circulating on the right. But the answer is not to reorient Republican politics around the preferences of conspiratorial schizophrenics. It is to make those voters choose. If they want a politics of order, prosperity, and national strength, they are welcome. They don’t get to drag the rest of the coalition into Holocaust denial, street violence, and ethno-fetishism.
Finally, future Republican leaders need to think about coalition-building the way successful presidents do. Most presidents who reshape politics do so by changing the map, not by preserving their predecessor’s coalition molecule-for-molecule. Ronald Reagan did not simply inherit Gerald Ford’s voters; he created Reagan Democrats. Donald Trump did something similar, twice, by pulling in working-class and minority voters from places Republicans had long written off.
The next Republican standard-bearer will almost certainly not be able to replicate Trump’s unique blend of celebrity, humor, and pragmatic policy shifts. Rather than treating the Fuentes-adjacent as the irreplaceable heart of the party, they should think creatively about whom they can bring in anew—and, if necessary, which parts of the Trump coalition might have to be let go.
Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images