Fox Business warned its conservative audience on Tuesday that the Republican Party faces a generational crisis of its own making, after electoral losses including last week’s historic “blue tsunami” revealed that a vital bloc of voters is “abandoning the GOP” due to the party’s missteps — even as new forces threaten to drag it “further to the right.”

Host Stuart Varney noted that young voters are largely being credited for the massive midterm defeat. Polling showed not only that youth turnout was the second-highest for a midterm in three decades, but that Gen Z voters broke for Democrats by huge margins. That marks a major turn of events since 2024, when a notable surge of young voters contributed to President Donald Trump’s winning coalition. That whiplash — from coalition power to a “blue tsunami” in two years — has turned the youth vote into an urgent debate inside conservative media itself.

“OK,” Varney asked Maggie Anders of Young Voices, a public relations firm that represents young, classically conservative figures. “How does the GOP win back young voters for 2028?”

“I think the GOP needs to pursue more of a message of abundance moving forward rather than sacrifice,” Anders said. “The GOP was largely focused on what the Democrats were doing, why socialism is bad, rather than telling young Americans what they actually stood for.”

According to Anders, young people are grappling with exploding healthcare and housing costs while inflation keeps mounting and wages refuse to keep up. “The GOP has a real responsibility to pay attention to young people’s economic concerns and not just dismiss them as an entitled and spoiled generation,” she said. “We tend to do that a lot — get off my lawn kind of thing.”

Trump himself has repeatedly called the affordability crisis a Democratic “hoax” and spent much of the midterm campaign attempting to reassure voters that the cost-of-living situation was not so bad, even though polls showed Americans considered it a top concern. That gap between the White House’s framing and the costs voters treat as a top concern is the terrain any Republican outreach to young voters would have to cross.

Anders also pointed to another problem for Republicans: the ages of their candidates. Democrats, she said, “put forward young, fresh-faced candidates who were very charismatic, while the GOP, even in races where there wasn’t an incumbent, put forward some older faces that were about as exciting as a Sears catalog, or had a lot of this baggage and history of fraud or extramarital affairs. And this is just not inspiring to the American people.”

The remark was a clear reference to, among others, the winning Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, 37-year-old James Talarico, who trounced scandal-ridden 63-year-old Ken Paxton, a rival who ran under the endorsement of the country’s oldest president ever. The age math sharpened her point: the generational gap was on the ballot itself.

That prompted Varney to bring up a new group rising among Gen Z Republicans. “The American Ascent,” he said, noting, “They want to push the GOP further to the right.” As Varney suggested, the group seeks not only to introduce younger leadership into the party, but to instill it with the isolationist, “America First” ethos increasingly associated with Vice President JD Vance. Politico reported that allies of Vance launched the group.

Anders’ reply carried a strong note of skepticism. “I want to know what further to the right means,” she said, wondering, “Is it more MAGA?” The exchange laid out the two competing answers now on the table for the party: an affordability-first pitch aimed at winning back the voters who just defected, or the harder-right, Vance-aligned project taking shape through American Ascent. With Varney setting the clock at 2028, the argument over which approach speaks for the party — and whether either can reverse the youth defection — is already underway.