To his credit, the New York Young Republican Club’s designated elections guy started strong.
“Your Republican leaders have failed you!” Mario Nicoletto, 25, the campaign committee chairman for the tri-state area’s biggest and loudest conservative youth
group, thundered from a lectern dragged out into the middle of the club’s living room — a cozy space stuffed with leather couches and framed photos of the slain activist Charlie Kirk. “The boomers, the millennials, the Gen X, the folks in D.C. who do not care about us — they have failed us!”
To Nicoletto’s right, TVs set to Fox News flashed undeniably dismal numbers: Republicans down in Ohio, in Michigan, god — even in Texas. Nicoletto went on, telling the few dozen club regulars in attendance that he would “spend every waking moment” in the coming years signing up new Republican voters. “We are going to take the city back in 2028!”
There was a smattering of applause, a few hoots. The TVs were all on mute, and silence crept into the room. “Let’s get some music on!” Nicoletto said, relinquishing the mic.
At 25 years old, Tuesday night was Nicoletto’s first real taste of defeat. In one of the most disastrous midterm elections in history, Donald Trump’s Republican Party was wiped almost entirely off the map in several states. As of Wednesday morning, Senate seats in Maine, Iowa, Ohio, Texas, South Carolina, and North Carolina have flipped blue, and the president has been stripped of his majority in both chambers of Congress. Almost immediately, Trump lashed out, placing the blame for the catastrophe anywhere but on himself — despite the war in Iran, brutal tariffs, a stagnant economy, and skyrocketing gas prices. Young people everywhere, including several I spoke to on election night, call this multi-faceted clusterfuck “the affordability issue.”
As results started to come in, I chatted with Annie, a young woman who had joined the club a few years ago.
“I’m 26. I wanna buy a house, I want to have a family — I can’t do those things,” she said. “I’d like to see the party just talk about that more — and more than just talk about it, figure out a way to help us!”
Annie thought that Donald Trump had done a great job of this in the 2024 election. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, she said, a Democratic Socialist, had also focused on affordability and won big from the other side. But in 2026, she says, Republicans were at a loss for any kind of coherent message.
“The immigration thing, it indirectly helps,” Annie said, referring to Trump’s deportation agenda. “That’s great, that’s cool… but then we’re going to war with Iran! I wish I could be in the room when they made that call to do that. It’s just like, ‘What the hell were you thinking?’”
I couldn’t blame Annie for her exasperation. She’d spent most of the night thus far running a gauntlet of press — at least three different Scandinavian writers and a Japanese TV crew — all of whom wanted to know “how she was feeling.” I didn’t bother to ask that question, as the vibes in the room basically spoke for themselves. The people who were watching the TVs looked glum. Everyone else was mostly focused on drinking, and looked to be having a fine time.
The question I was asking was what comes next. Trump has two more years in the White House, and then the GOP has to make a choice. Republican strategists I’d talked to last month — the older, sober, grizzled types, at least — had predicted this kind of blowout loss and warned that the party was headed for a “reckoning.” Some seemed gleeful that the Trump era was ending, the siren song of neo-conservatism once again sounding faintly on the wind. But the young people in the Manhattan clubhouse were part of a different movement — MAGA — and no matter how bad their losses got, they weren’t ready to let it, or its leader, take the blame.
“Life takes all of us at a certain point,” says Becky Oliveira, 25, the club’s design chairwoman and “second lady” who is engaged to club president Stefano Forte. “I see no reason to push him out the door when there’s still work to do. This donor class, these old-guard advisers, this old-guard ecosystem that exists around him, is what needs to be taken out.”
Like many of her peers, Oliveira is protective of Trump — after all, he has been the singular figure of conservative politics for her entire adult life. The dismay in the room, then, stemmed less from the electoral losses than the existential fear that their wing of the party — the brash, radical, Trump-loving new right — would find itself cast back into the wilds, alone and adrift as their political party was reclaimed by the kind of neo-con wonks who dominated the Republican side of the swamp until 2016.
This is the secret of the young Republican movement. For every die-hard ideologue, there are more than a handful of people who really just want to be able to hang out with likeminded friends: people who like the same memes and laugh at the same jokes that might rub people in New York’s overwhelmingly liberal young adult monoculture the wrong way. Sure, some of them are deeply devoted to a specific (and sometimes dark) vision of right-wing governance, but a lot more just want to be able to talk shit about their annoying coworkers and mainstream Democrats in a city famous for libbing out.
“I don’t know how many people I’ve met [through the club] that are like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I can have normal conversations,’” Oliveira said. “That doesn’t change regardless of who wins nationally. When they come here they find kinship and solace.”
In two presidential elections, at least, Trump turned that sense of belonging into massive electoral success — a sense of purpose, and power, and movement that many young Republicans will do anything to preserve. If the RINOs and fuddy-duddy neo-cons take back the party, the young Republicans will feel cut off from the free-wheeling culture of based memes and swamp-draining that helped them feel, for the first time in most of their lives, as if they had political power and agency.
“I don’t want to get rid of MAGA! If they scapegoat the only thing that’s been getting them votes the past decade, then the party’s going to become irrelevant,” Nicoletto said. “We need to stand with Trump — no matter how bad things get.”
Still, as the results came in, Nicoletto wasn’t entirely sure “how bad things get” could be.
“I have never seen an election of this scope, and this scale,” he said. “What comes next is a mystery to me.”
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