The night before he kicked off his run for Congress, Iowa Republican Joe Mitchell sent a copy of his campaign announcement to his friend and mentor, Charlie Kirk.

“He was fully supportive,’’ said Mitchell, 28, a former state representative who launched his bid for an open House seat in northeastern Iowa on Sept. 8, two days before Kirk, 31, was fatally shot on a Utah college campus. 

As the founder of Turning Point USA, Kirk was a conservative firebrand whose skillful use of social media, talk radio and campus visits helped drive more high school and college students to the right during the Trump era. Many of those young conservatives now view his assassination as an inflection point and predict it will propel a new generation toward political activism, including running for office. 

“Charlie was the single largest force in our generation, and the loudest and most powerful voice that we had as conservatives, as millennials, and as Gen Zers,” Mitchell said. “His death leaves a huge void, and I think it will be filled by the millions of voices and people that he influenced.”

Montana state Rep. Braxton Mitchell – no relation to the Iowa Republican – is among them. Now 25 and serving his third term in the state Legislature, he attended his first Turning Point youth conference when he was still in high school. The flight to Washington marked his first time on an airplane, and it set him on a course for a career in politics.

“We need people of all generations serving in our state capitols, in the halls of Congress, on our school boards,’’ Braxton Mitchell said. “And that was a big thing that Charlie pushed. …[He] has supported a lot of us over the years.”

Building a bench

Republicans have largely been spared the deep divisions and demands for generational change that have roiled the Democratic Party in the aftermath of its steep losses following octogenarian President Joe Biden’s ill-fated decision to run for reelection last year.

“There hasn’t been that reckoning that the Democrats have had, because a lot of conservatives are happy with the leadership we have right now,” said Adam Pennings, the executive director of Run Gen Z, a group founded by Joe Mitchell that recruits and trains younger GOP candidates seeking elective office at all levels of government.

While Democrats have seen an influx of people in their 20s running for Congress in recent cycles, the right has fielded far fewer Generation Z House and Senate candidates. 

This year, GOP officials cited two examples, though they do not track candidates by age. Besides Iowa’s Mitchell, who is seeking the 2nd District seat that Senate hopeful Ashley Hinson is vacating, 28-year-old Mason Foley is one of several Republicans vying to succeed former Rep. Mark E. Green in an upcoming Tennessee special election. Either would be the first Gen Z Republican elected to Congress, where millennial Texas Rep. Brandon Gill, 31, is currently the party’s youngest lawmaker.

Pennings’ group is working to bolster those ranks, building a bench that he hopes will dominate the conservative movement for years to come. 

“There are a lot of young people waiting in the wings. Look at city councils, look at county commissioners, look at statehouses,” he said. “Then when their congressperson moves on, they’ll step up.’’ 

Former Iowa state Rep. Joe Mitchell, center, poses with President Donald Trump and other Run Gen Z-backed candidates at an event in Des Moines, Iowa, in January 2024. (Courtesy Maria Sorensen/Run Gen Z)

Joe Mitchell said young people have a significant stake in shaping government “because they have to live with the consequences for so many more years.”

“We have to have representation in Washington for every generation,” he said, adding that “there shouldn’t be a quota for that by any means.” 

Kirk built a movement by championing conservative Christian values and publicly tangling with liberals over culture war issues such as racial diversity initiatives and transgender rights. His videos drew millions of views, and his political organization is widely credited with helping Donald Trump make gains among younger voters, who had traditionally leaned to the left.

“If it weren’t for Charlie Kirk, I would not be the vice president of the United States,’’ JD Vance said Monday when he hosted the “The Charlie Kirk Show.”

Moving right

Gen Z voters moved toward Trump in 2024, a shift driven largely by higher turnout, according to a Pew Research Center election analysis. In 2020, Donald Trump captured 35 percent of the vote among those born in the 1990s and 2000s, but four years later, his voter share among this age group had climbed to 42 percent, the Pew survey found. In 2020, the president lost voters born in the 1990s and 2000s by 26 points. But four years later, he cut those margins in half, losing them by 13 points with 42 percent of the vote, Pew found.

In an interview earlier this year on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast, Kirk recalled setting a goal in 2021 to move the youth vote 10 points to the right over the course of the decade. 

“We believe Democrats were taking [younger voters] for granted,’’ he told Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender. “We think that your side had no message whatsoever and an ideological monopoly. We saw some of the fault lines there, and to President Trump’s credit, he also harmonized with the strategy by going on podcasting and using TikTok.”

Santiago Mayer, executive director of the left-leaning Voters of Tomorrow, a Gen-Z-led pro-democracy group, questioned the durability of those conservative gains among younger voters. 

“There’s this misconception that young people became MAGA all of a sudden, [but] when you look at the actual numbers, Kamala Harris still won that age group,’’ he said. “The movement to the right was actually not that significant. It was largely just disillusionment on the left, with young voters who chose to stay on the couch instead.”

Already there are signs younger Americans may be moving away from the GOP. A poll released in the spring by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School found just 15 percent of Americans aged 18-29 believed the nation was headed in the right direction, and 31 percent approved of the job Trump was doing.

Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said the GOP was “committed to earning every vote and continuing Charlie Kirk’s movement that has inspired a new generation of conservatives.”

Pennings, of Run Gen Z, said that in the days immediately following Kirk’s death, a half dozen young conservatives had reached out to the group, saying the assassination had prompted them to seriously weigh a run for office for the first time. He’s bracing for more.

“This has been truly a turning point, and I think a lot of young people are getting very fired up, and they’re taking their sadness and they’re trying to turn it into action,” Pennings said. “We’re all still in mourning, but this is going to be something to watch.”