A group of young conservatives gathered in Washington this summer to talk about how unaffordable housing is, how hopeless their generation feels, and how the American Dream is slipping away — and then turned around and praised Donald Trump's economic agenda. The cognitive dissonance was apparently not on the conference agenda. Fox News Digital was there to capture every word.
The Problems Are Real, The Solutions Are... Republican
Let's start with the facts, because they are genuinely grim. A Pew Research Center survey published in July found that 87% of Americans say buying a home is harder for young adults today than it was for their parents' generation. A Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies report found that nearly half of renters spent more than 30% of their income on housing in 2024. A Federal Reserve report released in May found that nearly half of Americans ages 18 to 29 needed financial help to cover a basic expense over the past year.
These are not talking points from a DSA pamphlet. These are mainstream data points that paint a picture of a generation getting economically squeezed from every direction. And the young conservatives who spoke to Fox News Digital at Young America's Foundation's America at 250 conference in Washington, D.C., this July do not dispute any of it.
Courtney Graves, a rising senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and granddaughter of immigrants who fled Communist Latvia, put it plainly: 'I think a lot of young people are feeling a little bit hopeless right now. They want to be able to have a home when they grow up. They want to be able to have a nice life and a good-paying job. And what we've been seeing is that when those things don't come to fruition, people tend to go to the extremes.' Hard to argue with that. She's describing a real phenomenon with real stakes.
The Solution Is Free Markets, Trust Them This Time
Here is where the story takes its turn. Graves, having accurately diagnosed the problem, arrives at a conclusion that has been field-tested for about forty years with mixed-to-catastrophic results for working people: free markets will sort it out. 'I think free markets are the way to have a successful and prosperous life,' she told Fox News. 'It's what leads to job growth, it's what leads to being able to buy a home at the end of the day.'
She also acknowledged that Republicans have a messaging problem on this front, which is a polite way of saying young people look at the current housing market and do not immediately think 'yes, more deregulation please.' That's not a messaging problem. That's a policy problem. When the median home price has outpaced wage growth for a generation, telling people the invisible hand will eventually fix it requires a level of faith that borders on religious.
Brody Baker, a University of Iowa student, offered a different defense of the Trump administration: at least you know what's happening. 'I think we get more clarity of what's happening with the United States as of today,' he told Fox News, adding that Trump deserves credit for acknowledging that gas prices are high and the economy is hurting people. The bar, apparently, is honesty about the problems his administration is presiding over. Cleared. Barely, but cleared.
Border First, Rent Later
Jackson Barrick, a University of Minnesota senior, told Fox News that immigration and border security weigh more heavily on him than pocketbook concerns. He called Trump's immigration enforcement agenda 'fantastic' and 'a really good step in terms of making sure that we have a good future going forward in the United States and protecting the homeland.'
This is worth sitting with for a moment. The Harvard housing data, the Federal Reserve data, the Pew data — all of it points to an economic crisis hitting young Americans right now, this year, in their actual lives. And for a meaningful slice of young conservatives, the answer is: we need to focus on the border first. That is a choice. It reflects genuine values and genuine priorities. It also means the rent check is someone else's problem to solve, apparently.
None of this is unique to young conservatives, to be fair. Every generation of young voters has organized their politics around identity and values as much as material self-interest. But there is something striking about a generation getting economically crushed in real time that is still, in large numbers, prioritizing culture war issues over the housing crisis. Both parties are watching this dynamic very carefully heading into November.
Everybody Is Scared of AI, At Least There's That
The one issue where the young conservatives at this conference sounded like basically every other young person on earth: artificial intelligence. Nick Kammerzell, a recent University of Georgia graduate, told Fox News that AI is what scares him most about America's future. His specific concern was censorship and bias embedded in the technology. 'I think a lot of young people are becoming very dependent on it as their source of truth,' he said. 'I think there's a lot of opportunities for abuse and manipulation with that.'
Pew Research Center data backs up the anxiety, if not the specific framing. A survey published in June found that 48% of adults ages 18 to 29 expect AI to have a negative impact on society over the next two decades, compared with just 37% of those 50 and older. Young people are more worried about AI than their parents are, full stop. That tracks.
Brody Baker also raised alarms about social media algorithms shaping what young people see and believe, which is the kind of media literacy concern you would hear at a progressive campus event or a conservative one, and that convergence is genuinely interesting. Everyone under 30 has apparently figured out that the feed is not their friend, even if they can't agree on what to do about it.
What Both Parties Are Actually Fighting Over
Fox News framed this story as Republicans and Democrats battling for Gen Z voters ahead of the midterms, with the GOP trying to hold Congress and Democrats trying to take it back. That framing is accurate. Both parties have identified Gen Z as a swing bloc with real influence in close races, and both parties are throwing resources at the problem.
The Democratic Party's challenge, as Fox News accurately noted, is that democratic socialism is gaining ground among young voters and the party has to figure out whether to run toward that or away from it. The Republican Party's challenge is the one Graves identified herself: young people are feeling hopeless about the economy, and 'free markets will fix it eventually' is not landing as a satisfying answer when you're spending 40% of your paycheck on rent.
What neither party seems willing to fully grapple with is that young voters are capable of holding contradictory positions simultaneously, being economically anxious and culturally conservative, being skeptical of Trump and still voting Republican, being worried about AI bias from one direction while using the same AI daily. The electorate is not a monolith. Both parties keep trying to find the master key. There isn't one.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to look at these young conservatives, nodding along about the housing crisis and economic hopelessness, and then hear them praise the agenda of the party that has spent four decades opposing the kinds of structural interventions that might actually fix any of it, and conclude that this is perfectly coherent politics. It is not. Diagnosing the disease correctly and then insisting the prescribed treatment is the same one that hasn't worked since Reagan requires something more than optimism. It requires a very specific kind of ideological commitment that overrides the evidence in front of your face.
That said: this is not purely a conservative problem. Plenty of young progressive voters have their own version of this, supporting politicians who campaign on housing affordability and then, once in office, quietly make peace with the zoning laws and developer interests that keep supply strangled. Every political coalition has its sacred contradictions. The difference here is that the economic data is so stark, and the gap between the diagnosed problem and the proposed solution is so wide, that it deserves naming out loud.
The midterms are coming. Gen Z is going to matter. And both parties are going to spend the next few months pretending they have answers to a housing crisis, a cost-of-living squeeze, and an AI-warped information environment that neither of them has come anywhere close to seriously addressing. The young conservatives at this conference are not wrong about what's broken. They just voted for the guys holding the hammer who helped break it.
Comments