Will Young Conservatives Dump Trump? CPAC May Have the Answer

As young conservatives flock to this week’s Conservative Political Action Coalition, they will be faced with a stark choice: double down on Donald Trump or rally the troops around a new leader. “As you get older, your ideology changes, your priorities change,” says one person who worked on conservative youth outreach during the 2016 election and the Trump era. “Some of the people hyped about Trump trolling everybody in 2016 have graduated from college and are working, and they want somebody who’s going to win this time and bring the economy back.”

That sentiment is likely to be in the air at CPAC’s annual conference Thursday, which Trump will headline at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland.

Back in 2016, Trump was the new-blood Republican who chose to skip CPAC and attend his own rallies in Kansas and Florida. However, this year’s CPAC lineup will serve as a kind of Trump-fest, featuring a host of notable allies who can bolster the former president’s 2024 campaign in light of his post-midterm slump. Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, and Elise Stefanik are all expected to take the podium, as are former Trump administration officials Stephen Miller, Sean Spicer, and Ben Carson. Also in attendance will be Donald Trump Jr. and Devin Nunes, the chief executive of Trump’s social media company.

There will be one very notable absence: Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s toughest opponent in the 2024 shadow primary, who is not scheduled to speak or attend the conference in any capacity. Instead, he will show face at a seemingly rival event in South Florida hosted by Club for Growth—one of the establishment groups that have soured on Trump.

Despite his association with the Republican establishment, DeSantis has positioned himself as the next countercultural force that young conservatives can get behind—and a far more policy-oriented one at that. Like Trump, he has shown an ability to hit the right targets. He has gone after Big Tech with dubious legal offensives; revoked Disney’s special privileges for criticizing his agenda; chastised the media; and led the pack in rubber-stamping multiple state-level anti-LGBTQ laws. The governor has been rewarded at the polls for all of this, boasting double digits among presumptive Republican presidential primary voters.

Still, some conservatives believe that DeSantis lacks Trump’s authenticity, charisma, and unique gift for pushing the GOP—and its most impassioned voters—in whatever direction he chooses. “I like DeSantis and I get why so many conservatives want him to run, but he isn’t Trump,” says one leading figure at a national conservative youth organization that will appear at CPAC. The source argues that DeSantis has built his brand by opportunistically chasing trendy conservative causes rather than building his own vision, referencing DeSantis’s creation of an anti-election-fraud task force even as he distanced himself from Trump’s “rigged” election theories. “I think he’s still beholden to the party machine,” they told me. “And frankly, he just doesn’t move the needle in the same way.”

Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk—a regular CPAC fixture and the founder of Turning Point USA, one of the most dominant conservative youth groups in the country—has attempted to quell any strife between Trump followers and DeSantis supporters. When NBC News reported that the former president was not pleased with Kirk for featuring DeSantis in several rallies TPUSA hosted last year, Kirk tweeted in response, “Yawn. More manufactured drama trying to split our base.”

The latest presidential straw poll conducted by TPUSA, which held a blowout student summit in July, saw Trump earn an overwhelming 79% of the vote, compared to just 19% for DeSantis. But that was well before the GOP experienced an unexpectedly poor midterm turnout that many Republicans have pinned on Trump. At CPAC this week, the conference’s straw poll will be closely watched to see if spots on the leaderboard are flipped.

Setting aside Trump and DeSantis, the more traditional conservatives running or preparing to run this cycle include former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and former vice president Mike Pence, both of whom would likely have been prime options for the evangelical right in a pre-Trump field. Pence, who will not appear at CPAC but will address the Club for Growth event in Florida this week, recently embarked on a tour of early primary states. He is currently polling in the single digits among likely Republican voters. Haley, who will be speaking at both CPAC and the Club for Growth event, garnered support from 6% of respondents to the latest Harvard Harris poll. The 51-year-old has sought to make the ages of the former president and current a main selling point of her campaign. (Should Trump win the nomination, he would be 78 at the time of the general election.)