Year after Kirk's assassination, Trump loses ground with young voters despite TPUSA expansion

Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on September 10, 2025, while speaking to students at Utah Valley University in Utah. He was a prominent conservative activist, close ally of President Donald Trump, and co-founder of Turning Point USA, an organization built to mobilize young Republican voters. The assassination was captured on video. One year later, the organization he built has grown substantially—yet the political landscape it operates in has shifted in ways that complicate the picture of Republican strength among the young voters Kirk spent his career organizing.

Turning Point USA now operates 3,500 high school chapters across the United States, a 180 percent increase since Kirk's death. The organization also runs more than 1,500 college chapters, representing a 60 percent jump. By the numbers, the infrastructure of youth conservatism has expanded dramatically. The group's network gives Republicans significant organizational reach heading into the November midterm elections, and memorials planned for this week—one at Utah Valley University where Kirk was killed, another at the Republican Party's first-ever midterm convention in Dallas—underscore the organization's continued prominence in GOP politics.

Yet the expansion of Turning Point's campus presence masks a troubling trend for Republicans. Trump's approval rating among men ages 18 to 29 has fallen sharply. In August, only 32 percent of young men approved of his performance, down from 43 percent in February 2025. This represents a significant erosion of support among a demographic Trump had been gaining ground with. In the 2024 election, Trump won 46 percent of young men's votes, a seven-point increase from 2020. The gains of that election cycle are now reversing.

Two factors are driving this shift: economic pressure and the war in Iran. A Harvard Youth Poll conducted in March and April found that half of Americans ages 18 to 29 said inflation affected them significantly, while 45 percent reported they were struggling to make ends meet or had little financial security. The war has added concrete costs on top of these baseline anxieties. According to Moody's Analytics, the conflict has added an average of $750 in household expenses per family. For young voters already stretched thin, this is not abstract policy—it is money missing from their paychecks.

Within Turning Point USA itself, the war has become a source of internal tension. Debates over U.S. support for Israel have intensified. A poll from YouGov and The Economist found that only 16 percent of young people thought U.S. military action in Iran was the right decision. This suggests that the organization's expansion in numbers may not translate cleanly into political power if the young people it recruits are increasingly skeptical of the foreign policy positions the Republican Party is pursuing.

The assassination of Kirk and the subsequent Trump administration crackdown on what it termed "domestic terrorist organisations"—including the loosely organized antifascist movement known as Antifa—set the stage for this moment. Kirk's death became a rallying point, and Turning Point's growth reflects the energy that moment generated within conservative circles. But a year on, Republicans face a paradox: they have built a more extensive youth organizing apparatus than ever before, yet the young voters they are trying to reach are increasingly unhappy with the economic conditions they live in and skeptical of the wars their government is fighting. The question heading into the midterms is whether organizational reach can overcome the gravitational pull of kitchen-table economics and war weariness.