Those young Republicans were young — for Republicans

After Politico reported on the existence of an overtly racist group chat involving a number of leaders of Young Republican groups around the country, some members of their party hoped to wave it all away.

“The reality is that kids do stupid things,” Vice President Vance said on a podcast on Wednesday. “Especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.” He added that “I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives.”

Vance is being consistent here. In February, he advocated for the re-hiring of an administration staffer who’d been found to have made racist posts on social media. “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” he insisted at the time.

But, of course, the people engaging in this racism aren’t kids. The guy in February was 25. Mother Jones sussed out the ages of most of the participants in the group chat, finding that all were at least in their mid-20s. Some held elected office; others worked for the party or party organizations.

There is a sense in which they are relatively young, however: they are awfully young for Republicans.

Older Americans, who vote more often, are usually registered with one of the two major parties. Young people, though, tend to register either as Democrats or as independents and members of third parties. Among registered voters under the age of 30 in June, only 1 in 5 were registered as Republicans.

As Politico notes, the Young Republican organizations whose leaders were involved in the group chat target Americans between the ages of 18 and 40. Voter data from June shows that only about 20 percent of Republicans fell into that age range.

Compare that with Democrats, more than a third of whom are 40 and under. Among independents and members of third parties, nearly half are.

Relative to Republicans overall, then, a 30 year-old is sort of a kid? If we grade on a curve.

That’s not the game that Vance is playing, though. He claims that these people who hold leadership positions within his party are too immature to avoid making racist and antisemitic comments to one another — an assertion that you may evaluate for yourself.

It is true that younger Americans are more receptive to fringe-right ideologies. Pilot research conducted as part of the 2024 American National Election Studies found that adults 40 and under, and particularly young men, had slightly warmer (though still cold) feelings to explicit racists and fascists.

There wasn’t a big difference by either party or ideology, though, except that moderates and independents had warmer feelings than partisans. It’s possible, then, that this is to some extent in part a function of actual naïveté among younger people about these ideologies.

But that’s average Americans, not politically active members of the GOP. And research looking at another facet of the group chat target — antisemitic and pro-Hitler comments — shows that this is a more comment sentiment among young people on the right.

The study, released in 2022, includes a summary of its findings:

“We oversampled young adults because unlike other forms of prejudice that are more common among older people, antisemitism is theorized to be more common among younger people. Contrary to the expectation of horseshoe theory, the data show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right.”

Vance’s effort to wave this away as kids being kids, then, fails on both fronts. Only relative to his unusually old party is a 30 year-old a kid. And only within a particularly toxic subset of young people — one that has some overlap with the party — are the views expressed in that group chat normal young-person behavior.

As at least some other members of his party appear to recognize.

Photo: A middle-aged man visits the president. (White House/Flickr)