At Turning Point USA’s women’s summit, some young women are turning more hard-line—but others are fleeing conservatism altogether.
Illustration by Melinda Beck.
In a San Antonio hotel ballroom in June, about 2,000 conservative women rose to their feet, cheering, as Erika Kirk strode onto the stage in a silvery pantsuit. It was the opening day of the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit, the premier annual conservative gathering for women. “The world has a tendency to overcomplicate the most beautiful and simple things in this world, but to the women in this room who are Christian, it’s actually quite simple,” Kirk declared. “The world will say your life belongs to you. It does not. Your life belongs to Christ.”
The message was straightforward, but Kirk’s task was not: She was there to persuade women to remain in a movement that had splintered since the death last year of her husband, Charlie Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA, the campus organization for conservatives, in 2012. At the 2025 conference, Erika had sat onstage with Charlie as he admonished the female audience to focus on landing a husband before 30. “I think there’s an argument to bring back the MRS degree,” he told a 14-year-old girl who asked for career advice during the Q&A. That moment had offended some of the women in attendance, I heard this year. Sitting beside her husband, Erika had done her best to soften his message, telling the single ladies pushing 30 they still had a shot at a husband, because “God is good.”
This year, Erika Kirk stood at the podium alone. In the nine months since her husband’s assassination, she had been lambasted by fellow conservatives for failing to act like a grieving widow—for even appearing energized by her new job as Turning Point CEO. The right-wing podcaster Candace Owens had been spinning elaborate conspiracy theories about her, some of which had seeped into the ballroom. “You want the truth?” one young woman told me darkly after Kirk’s speech. “I don’t trust Erika.” At one point, a protester interrupted the speech to shout “Erika Kirk protects pedophiles!”—an apparent reference to an Owens conspiracy theory. Kirk reacted quickly. “You can be a woman of the world, as we just saw,” she shot back, “or you can be a woman of the Word.”
These days, women of the world and women of the Word both seem to be increasingly skeptical of Kirk and her movement. I saw that up close, watching the country’s leading conservative organization for youth flail about for ways to keep women in the fold, and to paper over any evidence of its own widely reported divisions on issues ranging from Israel to abortion. The theme of the summit was “Curated for H.E.R.”—Holistic, Empowered, Redeemed—and most explicit mentions of politics had been curated right out of the Instagram-worthy frame. In the hallway, a Turning Point staffer displayed a map that scored states on a “tyranny” scale; another handed me a “No Voter ID, No Vote” sticker. But those political displays were swamped by ones advertising MAHA-friendly “health” products like toxin-free toothpaste, organic makeup, blue-light-blocking glasses, and seasoning made from cow brains. I didn’t hear a single mention of the four states where abortion will be on the ballot this November. The speakers fearmongered about trans women without mentioning any of the political races in which Republican candidates are counting on the issue to help them win. Yet the political stakes hung over the gathering. Over 30 million women in the US today identify as Christian and conservative, enough to sway an election, as Katie Gaddini notes in Esther’s Army, her new book on these women, and certainly enough to pack the ballroom of a Marriott for a weekend. But there were cracks in the hot-pink façade. This year’s conference was smaller than last year’s 3,000-strong gathering by about a third, according to most accounts. For the first time since the Young Women’s Leadership Summit started in 2015, the word young had been dropped from the title.
The changes at the conference reflected what we’re seeing throughout the country. Though Donald Trump improved his share of the young women’s vote by six percentage points in 2024 versus 2020, an overwhelming 61 percent of young women backed Kamala Harris in that election. And long-term tracking of their political bent shows a clear leftward shift: A 2024 Gallup analysis found that about 40 percent of young women identified as liberal, up from 28 percent two decades ago. The partisan gender gap between young women and men has nearly doubled over the past 25 years. Melissa Deckman, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, reports that Gen Z women have become the most liberal cohort in US history. Deckman also found that, as The Guardian put it, they are “expected to outpace their male peers” in voting and political organizing. These women came to political consciousness in 2016, Deckman explained, when a man who boasted about sexual assault defeated a woman to win the presidency. “I think that, combined with the policies, really turned off a generation of young women” from conservative politics, she told me.
Still, the women who remain in the conservative movement are critical to its future. The movement has long relied on women to spearhead the causes in which they have a special layer of credibility, from abortion to the accelerating attacks on trans women, the latter conducted under the guise of protecting women’s sports. In this election cycle, women are leading campaigns that conservatives are banking on to notch wins in the culture wars and tip the balance toward Republican candidates. In Missouri, for example, the governor’s wife, Claudia Kehoe, is the only listed officer on the ballot campaign to repeal a pro-abortion-rights amendment passed by voters in 2024. The initiative would also institute a ban on gender-affirming healthcare for minors. The figurehead for that fast-moving front in the culture wars is the former swimmer Riley Gaines, a star at the conference, whose experience sharing a pool and locker room with a trans woman has spurred anti-trans legislation named for Gaines in Georgia and West Virginia.
The young women I met who look up to speakers like Gaines were running Turning Point USA chapters on their campuses, volunteering at crisis-pregnancy centers, and making content for right-wing news sites. To keep these women engaged, Turning Point was serving up a glitzy vibe that was part megachurch worship, part dance party. The official lookbook was heavy on frilly white dresses and florals. Everywhere I looked, there were pins that read “Pretty girls don’t vote for socialists” and hair bows—so many hair bows. I ran into a friend who was also covering the event. She told me about how she had grown up Christian and conservative in the South but defected in college, where her world opened up. She and I stood watching as a dozen young women near the stage danced to Justin Bieber blasting through the speakers. One had an American flag wrapped around her shoulders. These women seemed to be having a ball, and given the leftward bent of their generation, their wholesome fun had a countercultural edge. “If there had been something like this when I was young,” my friend said, “I don’t think I ever would have left the conservative movement.”
If there was one issue that the women at this conference were counting on to keep their sisters in the conservative fold, it was abortion. Even as 13 states have banned abortion outright in the years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the number of abortions in the US has risen, thanks to the increased use of abortion medication mailed across state lines. The dawning realization that abortion bans aren’t preventing abortions has helped a once-fringe faction of the movement known as abortion “abolitionists” gain traction with a call to punish women taking these pills. The Texas Republican Party’s platform this year endorses penalties for abortion seekers, as do at least 14 state bills so far this year. At the conference, the increasing popularity of this position was chillingly obvious. The conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey confided from the main stage that she had once written a “completely weak and hypocritical” post on Facebook arguing that rape and incest exceptions for abortion were acceptable. But in the comments, a fellow abortion opponent had disagreed, prompting Stuckey to reevaluate her stance. “I realized that I wasn’t thinking about this issue from the baby’s perspective, and I certainly wasn’t thinking about the issue from a biblical perspective,” she said. “I was thinking about the issue from a perspective of ‘What can win the most people?’ or ‘What’s the most popular?’”
Now Stuckey was done with privileging what was popular. In fact, barely two weeks after the conference, she, Gaines, and the influencer Alex Clark, who hosts Turning Point’s wellness podcast Culture Apothecary, signed a petition calling to remove “legal immunities” that prevent people who have abortions from being punished under anti-abortion laws.
I heard this sentiment from women in the audience, too. “I’m very pro-life; I want abortion to be abolished,” said one 42-year-old woman who wore earrings shaped like her home state of Texas. “I think if you put in regulations and laws, you’re not going to have people readily stepping up to kill their child for convenience.”
The woman from Texas was disappointed in leaders like Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins, a speaker at the conference, who say they oppose criminalizing people who have abortions for now. Hawkins, during her speech, skirted these political differences; instead, she too called on the audience to be brave when people hate your ideas. “‘That which God has commanded me to do, I will not fail to do for any man alive,’” she declared, quoting Joan of Arc. “In modern language, it means this: ‘What God has called me to do, I will not abandon for the approval, pressure, or fear of any person.’ Not for any person. Not for the online mob or algorithm. Not for your peers who will roll their eyes at you in your dormitory hallways.”
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Nation elevates progressive ideas, movements, and elected officials achieving real change across the country into the national conversation. At the same time, our journalists are exposing how crypto and AI-funded super PACs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to knock out candidates they oppose, reporting on the devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and sounding the alarm on attempts by red states to quickly redraw electoral maps, disenfranchising Southern Black voters.
We can play this critical role because of support from readers like you. This June, we’re raising $20,000 to power The Nation’s independent journalism in the run-up to November’s immensely consequential elections.
It’s in our power to build a more just society, and your support at this critical moment brings us closer to that bold vision. I hope you’ll donate today.
Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
Hawkins sounded almost feminist as she channeled the 15th-century martyr, mocked the “tradwife” influencers for promoting an unattainable lifestyle, and talked about her own 15-hour workdays. She and Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders—who told attendees, “When I started at the White House, my kids were 5, 3, and 1. Let that sink in for just a second”—represented a “You go, girl” careerism that evidently still fits into what Turning Point’s vision of femininity allows. But that wasn’t all that was on offer. The conference also featured the Christian influencers Millicent Sedra, who told women to “start serving” their husbands “with gratitude,” and Savanna Faith Stone, who thinks women shouldn’t have the right to vote.
The political and philosophical differences between these women were being papered over by a sense of tribal affiliation that hinged on the attendees’ belief that white Christian femininity was under siege. Indeed, whiteness was the undeniable unifier. Turning Point USA commentator Savanah Hernandez appeared to be the sole non-white speaker among 25 headliners. But she certainly wasn’t going to talk about that. Instead, she called on the rank-and-file to brave the backlash.
“We have to deal with it on the scale of millions of people yelling at us,” Hernandez scolded. “You’ve got a couple women at your church, or a couple other parents at your kids’ school, or a couple girls in your class. Like, you can do it.”
For Ann Dailey Moreno, a 29-year-old music teacher who has written for right-wing media outlets, a highlight was Hawkins’s bit about Joan of Arc. In 2020, Moreno was an aspiring actress living in New York City. She felt alienated by the Covid lockdown and the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder. That sense of alienation drove her interest in conservative media and politics, which isolated her even further. “I was dehumanized and lost all of my friends when I became conservative in 2020 and came out about it,” she told me.
Indeed, 2020 marked the year conservative women became “activated,” Gaddini writes in Esther’s Army. Trump’s election loss, Covid mandates, and Black Lives Matter protests radicalized many right-leaning women who hadn’t been politically active. They began to homeschool their kids, defy mask mandates, and run for school-board seats. This galvanization spanned local and national politics, as a record 37 Republican women were elected to or already serving in Congress that year. The quickly spreading group Moms for Liberty grew out of this moment, founded by three conservative mothers to take over school boards. The effort has since fizzled out amid infighting, but I heard echoes of the sense of embattlement that had animated it among the young conference-goers. Turning Point leaders were making increasingly unpopular MAGA politics feel rebellious, a modern rebrand with upgraded aesthetics for a younger generation.
The main reason the women seemed to love this message is that it came from fellow women. Because even some of the attendees here had trouble hearing it from men like Charlie Kirk. Moreno had been brought to tears at last year’s summit by his blunt words about her marriage prospects. But she had stayed in the conservative fold and was back at the conference, still single at 29—but with a new role model, courtesy of Hawkins.
“Joan of Arc was never married,” Moreno told me with a smile, “and she kicked ass.”
While several of the women I met at the summit seemed ready to get more hard-line on abortion, outside of the Marriott, I’ve met women who have seen the consequences of abortion bans and fled conservatism altogether. This phenomenon is visible on the ground in Idaho, where a citizen-initiated measure to repeal the state’s near-total abortion ban will be on the ballot in November. Melanie Folwell, a lifelong Idahoan who is leading the campaign for the ballot measure, told me she knew someone I should speak with—a former homeschooling Catholic mom of seven who had gathered hundreds of signatures for the effort to repeal the abortion ban.
Even over the phone, I could sense Suzanne Gallus’s infectious energy. Gallus lives in a small city in deep-red northern Idaho. She grew up Catholic, drifted away from the church, and found her way back to the faith as a new mom. With young kids, her house was hectic, so she started going to the traditional Latin Mass. “I was really drawn to that because it was just very quiet,” Gallus told me. “It became my getaway.” There she met women with large families who homeschooled, and she began to homeschool her kids too. But rifts started to form between her and her community a decade ago as her daughters grew into adolescence; girls at the church started to ridicule them for wearing pants. Then Gallus, who had been an avid mountain biker in her 20s, took an old bike out for a test ride one day. One of her daughters was astounded: “She goes, ‘Oh my gosh, Mom, I didn’t know you knew how to ride a bike!’” Gallus said. She realized she had been so busy raising her kids that she hadn’t found time to show them who she was.
Get unlimited access: $9.50 for six months.
“I need new friends,” Gallus remembered thinking, “and I need to get my girls out of this.”
She joined a triathlon team, switched to a new Catholic church, and enrolled her kids in public school. The school became her new community and supported her through a personal tragedy in 2020, when her 16-year-old daughter, Dorothy, died by suicide after struggling with anorexia. The following year, Gallus got involved in supporting school-board candidates to run against a crop of Moms for Liberty–style conservatives. A year later, the Supreme Court overturned Roe, Idaho banned abortion outright, and Gallus had an activation of her own: “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, what just happened?’”
The loss of abortion rights was a seismic moment for women across the political spectrum, and a surging number of abortion-rights ballot initiatives passed in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision, in states ranging from Vermont and California to Michigan and Missouri, while Democrats had an unexpectedly positive showing in the 2022 midterms. But over time, results for Democrats have proved mixed. In Michigan in 2022, the abortion-rights ballot initiative helped Democrats win a blue trifecta in the state. But in Missouri two years later, voters endorsed abortion rights on the ballot while reelecting Senator Josh Hawley and other conservative Republicans. Kamala Harris made abortion rights a major part of her campaign for president and lost anyway.
After 2024, some Democratic consultants declared the issue over with. But Gallus’s story and those of other women in Idaho show that couldn’t be further from the truth. Idaho has lost more than a third of its obstetricians in recent years, which has made many women of childbearing age afraid to live there. The Idaho grandmas missing their grandbabies are being radicalized as a result. “We have a lot of mothers to adult children who talk about the heartbreak of not having their kids and grandkids near them, because it’s just too risky an environment,” Folwell told me. (Women 65 and over are shifting leftward just like young women are: In 2023, 25 percent of women 65 and older identified as liberal, compared with 21 percent in 2013 and 14 percent in 1999, according to Gallup.) “If you have any kind of high-risk pregnancy, the supply of doctors who can help you here is so narrow at this point.”
In addition to Idaho, three other states—Nevada, Virginia, and Missouri—will have abortion-related initiatives on the ballot this fall. But Idaho is the only state with a ban where voters will have a chance to repeal it, the only state where we’ll see the impact of four years’ worth of news stories about what this ban has meant—including miscarrying women being airlifted out of the state by helicopter because they couldn’t get the care they needed there.
The young women helping to rally support on their campuses for Folwell’s campaign are far more typical of their generation’s views on the issue than the ones I met at the Turning Point conference. A staggering 76 percent of Gen Z women in 2025 said they wanted abortion to be legal, and data suggest the issue may be one of the major factors driving the progressive shift of these women. Gen Z women like Natasha Kokkodil, a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas, ranked abortion as their most important political issue in 2024. “It is truly the cornerstone issue, the essential ingredient in protecting our other rights,” Kokkodil told me. When I spoke with her in July, she’d just completed a political training run by URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, a reproductive-justice group driven by young people. There’s no single progressive organization for young people comparable in size and scope to Turning Point USA, but smaller organizations like this one are training a new generation galvanized by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
In July, the Idaho campaign submitted 110,000 signatures to put the initiative on the ballot, far surpassing the 70,000 required. Gallus gathered 714 of those signatures herself. In one of the deepest-red corners of America, Gallus knocked on the doors of Trump-supporting strangers and listened to their struggles. The woman who told her about traveling to Mexico for abortions before Roe. The couples struggling with infertility. The woman who confided that her sister’s child, born out of wedlock, had been raised by the child’s grandmother. And while many of the women she spoke with weren’t defecting from conservative politics entirely—if 2024 is any indication, plenty of them might vote for abortion rights and Republicans—it seemed to her that cracks were starting to form in some of their belief structures, just as had happened in hers. She had realized something the women of Turning Point knew: that women’s transformation often comes through conversations with other women. One by one, the women in one of the reddest counties in the country told Gallus their stories. And then they reached for her clipboard to sign their names.
Amy LittlefieldAmy Littlefield is The Nation’s abortion access correspondent and a journalist who focuses on reproductive rights, healthcare, and religion. Her latest book is Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights (Hachette).