Seeing Red

Meet the female future of the Republican Party: aggrieved, outnumbered, defiant. They love Trump, they tell Nancy Jo Sales, but they’re not racist or sexist— they promise

- Nancy Jo Sales

The College Republicans at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were having a cookout, which they had advertised on their Facebook page with a picture of Ronald Reagan grilling hot dogs. It was a sweltering evening in August, a week after protesters toppled the bronze statue of a Confederate soldier on their campus known as Silent Sam, and a month before Christine Blasey Ford testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Brett Kavanaugh had attacked her at a high-school party in the 80s. There were about 60 students gathered in an out-of-the-way courtyard off red-brick Connor Hall, all of them white, and most of them conspicuously polite boys (“Would you like a Cherry Coke, ma’am?” one asked). The girls, only about a dozen, looked like college girls everywhere today, in T-shirts and tank tops, shorts and leggings. Except that they were not like college girls everywhere, most of whom lean to the left and vote Democratic, or tell pollsters they plan to.

“They say we’re white supremacists, racist, misogynistic, and we have internalized misogyny,” said Cammie McMahan, 19, the College Republicans’ secretary, who wore a G.O.P. T-shirt, and a frown. I’d asked her and her friend Caitlyn McKinney, 19, what it was like being a conservative woman on their overwhelmingly liberal campus. “Name-calling is the first place they go,” said Caitlyn, who has that lilting North Carolina accent that makes everything sound gentle, even when it’s not. “They say they want to be all intersectional and everything,” said Cammie, “except when it’s us.”