young Republicans stick with MAGA — Democrats had just completed a sweeping takeover of Congress, but inside the New York Young Republican Club’s living room on election night, the message was defiance. The young Republicans gathered there made clear they intend to stick with MAGA, even as the wider party absorbed one of the worst midterm defeats in recent memory.
A Movement Refuses to Fold
Mario Nicoletto, 25, the club’s campaign committee chairman for the tri-state area, opened the night by blaming the party’s older generations for the rout. Speaking from a lectern in the club’s living room—a space filled with leather couches and framed photos of the slain activist Charlie Kirk—Nicoletto told the few dozen attendees that the party’s leaders had let young voters down. He pledged to devote himself to registering new Republican voters and to winning back New York City by 2028.
The applause was thin. Fox News played on muted televisions as Republican losses mounted in Ohio, Michigan, and even Texas. By Wednesday morning, Senate seats in Maine, Iowa, Ohio, Texas, South Carolina, and North Carolina had flipped to Democrats, and Trump had lost his majorities in both chambers. The president quickly blamed others for the result, despite the war in Iran, steep tariffs, a stagnant economy, and soaring gas prices.
Affordability Dominates the Conversation
For the young people in the room, the election hinged on what they called “the affordability issue.” Alexis, 26, who joined the club a few years ago, said she wants to buy a house and start a family but cannot. She credited Trump with addressing those concerns in 2024 and pointed to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist, as another politician who focused on affordability and won. In 2026, she said, Republicans offered no coherent message.
She described the immigration crackdown as only an indirect help and expressed exasperation at the decision to go to war with Iran. “What the hell were you thinking?” she said, recalling her reaction to the call.
Alexis had spent much of the night speaking with foreign press—at least three Scandinavian writers and a Japanese television crew—all asking how she felt. The mood in the room answered that question. Some watched the results glumly; others drank and seemed at ease. The more pressing question was what comes next.
Protecting Trump, Blaming the Old Guard
Becky Oliveira, 25, the club’s design chairwoman and its “first lady,” who is engaged to club president Stefano Forte, said she sees no reason to push Trump out while work remains. She argued that the donor class and the old-guard advisers around him are the real problem.
Like many of her peers, Oliveira is protective of Trump, the dominant figure in conservative politics for her entire adult life. The unease in the room came less from the losses themselves than from the fear that the party’s establishment wing—the neo-conservative policy hands who ran the Republican side before 2016—would reclaim control and leave the MAGA movement adrift.
Friendship and Kinship Behind the Politics
The club’s appeal is not purely ideological. For every committed activist, there are many members who simply want to spend time with people who share their memes and humor in a city where young adults are overwhelmingly liberal. Oliveira said new members often express relief at finding a place where they can have normal conversations.
That sense of belonging, which Trump turned into electoral success in two presidential elections, is what the young Republicans are determined to preserve. If the party’s establishment takes over, they fear losing the political agency and cultural community they found through MAGA.
Nicoletto put it plainly: he does not want to see MAGA discarded. If the party scapegoats the movement that has delivered its votes for a decade, he said, it will become irrelevant. His conclusion was that Republicans should stand with Trump regardless of how badly things go.
