One thing which is surely a headscratcher in advance of the November elections — which we’ve heard ad nauseam are going to be a disaster for the GOP, based on polling from outlets whose results get consistently worse as fewer and fewer people answer polls — is the distinct lack of a smart message coming out of Republicans this cycle.

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It’s strange, because the coalition that put Republicans in power in 2024 was identifiable, and motivating them to return for the 2026 cycle was a pretty straightforward proposition.

And one part of that coalition was young, single, white males. They fell to the GOP decisively compared to previous cycles, tipping the presidential election to Donald Trump and making the difference in several House and Senate races, which secured a Republican majority.

Which has been mostly squandered, mostly due to a GOP Senate Caucus which is governed by the whims of some of its female (and feminized and female-influenced) members. Looking at you, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. And you, Bill (Laura) Cassidy and Elaine Chao… I mean, Mitch McConnell. (RELATED: The GOP’s Self-Inflicted Midterm Crisis)

They want an America which isn’t so much white as it is American…

I mention that part because the things the Senate has spit the bit on, and most prominently the SAVE Act, are items of particular importance to the demographic in question. Talk to Gen Z white guys, and there is one thing you will hear from them again and again — which is that they want the America their parents and grandparents grew up in. They want an America which isn’t so much white as it is American; where when you call customer service you can talk to a human being who speaks understandable English, where you aren’t competing with the rest of the world for admissions to your state’s flagship university, where you don’t get fired and forced to train your H-1B replacement, and where you aren’t discriminated against for being a member of the majority race.

And what they absolutely, positively cannot stand — and they aren’t alone in this — is the idea that their heritage and future are being given away on the altar of DEI by — and they aren’t wrong in this at all — a horde of professional-sounding white women of a certain age and worldview.

You can scoff at those concerns if you must, but any significant effort at surveying single, white, male voters under 30 will turn up that attitude in a huge number of them. And again, these are non-core GOP voters who can be mobilized to turn out for the party and, managed correctly, can be turned into core GOP voters.

This should have been the cycle that happened. Performance by the Republicans in charge of the country has prevented it from being the case. There are certainly some wins the Gen Z White Dude crowd should appreciate, but not enough to close the sale.

And then there are the botches. Here is one of those…

You pay taxes to cover welfare for people who just choose not to work. That’s why I launched a welfare-to-work requirement.

If you’re young, healthy, and get government assistance, you should work, go to school, or volunteer. pic.twitter.com/M83nxNMdry

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) September 28, 2026

The ratio Sarah Sanders is getting online for this ad is well-deserved, and it’s a shame, because her welfare-to-work policy is one worth running on. Red states, given some regulatory freedom by the Trump administration, have been doing real work in clearing the welfare rolls of people who don’t need to be on them. For years now we’ve had massive problems with filling the skilled trades with Americans, and the people who ought to be filling those jobs are too often drawing sustenance from the government instead. The welfare system has gone utterly septic as a destroyer of the work ethic among people who should be working-class, and it has prevented them from becoming truly middle class. (RELATED: The ‘BBB’ Brings Accountability to the Food Stamp Program — Not Catastrophe)

But “White Guy Slacker Brad,” who has purportedly turned recreation into an art form, is not the problem Sarah Sanders is trying to solve.

Arkansas’ population is just 15 percent black. Its welfare rolls are 34 percent black. It’s true that 54 percent of the Arkansans who draw a government check are white, but that number is less than the 70 percent of the population of the state which is white. The 10 percent or so of the population in Arkansas which is Hispanic is also, per capita, more likely to draw welfare than are white people.

And proportionally speaking, it definitely isn’t white men who earn starring roles in the welfare drama. White women are distinctively more likely to fit that typecast.

Everybody knows what’s happening with this ad, of course. It’s the same marketing shtick that has it so the burglar in the home-security ads is a white guy who looks ready to sing tenor in a Barbershop quartet. Make the white guy the bad guy and nobody accuses you of racism.

And up until a few years ago, there wouldn’t be a lot of backlash against a move like that. The people who make messages for the Republican Party, many of whom are old and tired and were never very good in the first place, still live in that world. But it’s gone — and while Sanders is going to get re-elected as Arkansas’ governor, an ad like this is a foul-up which could well cost Republicans in that state somewhere along the line.

The X post of the ad inspired endless comments like this…

That white man you are trying to vilify with Cheetos has been discriminated against in the job market his entire life. Now you want him to empty trash cans so that work will set him free. Republicans are useless as a political party.

— Todd Davis (@DavisTodder) September 28, 2026

And sure, we can have the argument over the statistics if we want. Are there arguments both ways? Yeah. Of course there are.

But that’s not the point. Sarah Sanders’ consultants are not going to change the perceptions of the people who make up the universe of potential GOP voters in Arkansas between now and Election Day around the idea that “No, really, Slacker Brad is who’s actually on the welfare rolls,” and it isn’t worth her while to try. If she’s going to push the success and necessity of welfare to work, she’s going to need to do it around the fact that the people who are on the welfare rolls are not likely Sarah Sanders voters.

And it would help not to alienate the demographic her party needs to lock down.

Young white men are developing the same sort of mentality that blacks, Hispanics, gays, and others have developed. While it might not be tribal per se, it is defensive. And young white men are very aware of their status in society — namely, being the only people it’s OK to abuse, discriminate against, bully, cancel, and so on. Their level of tolerance and their sense of humor around those things is at a low ebb.

The Sanders ad infuriates them. You can see it in the X thread.

And what shows up in this is something Sanders’ people should have been very mindful of, which is that she is not a white man. She’s a white woman of a certain age.

Now, Sarah Sanders shares none of the politics of, say, Holly Rowe, or the Lindsay Clancy jurors. The problem is that the demographic group we’re talking about isn’t overly politically involved. They don’t spend a lot of time studying her record.

What they see is “here’s another scoldy middle-aged white woman.” Just like 90 percent of the teachers and administrators of the school they went to, who treated them as though they were badly behaved girls, and the bulk of the faculty at the college they attended. Or the HR director at the company they worked for last year. These guys have dealt with women in positions of authority more, in many cases, than they have dealt with men in those positions, and Sarah Sanders looks and sounds just like those women in this ad, even though she comes from a different political place than the faculty at the high school the Gen Z guys endured four years in. (RELATED: The 5QT Presents: The Five Black Pills, Part 1 — Feminism)

So when she derides Lazy Brad, who went from Cheeto-eating gamer to freshly-shaven office-boy thanks to her policies, it’s not going to be received well.

So far it hasn’t been. Because this is 2026, not 1996, and pissing off young white men as disposable black sheep for generalized campaign ads is now going to carry costs it didn’t before.

The easiest and best way to fix this is to quickly issue a couple of alternate versions of the ad showing a white girl, a black girl, a Hispanic guy, et cetera, having their lives improved by moving off the government dole and into a promising new job. You could argue that would do more harm than good; I’d counter by saying Team Sanders isn’t getting any votes from the people the follow-on ads might alienate anyway, and it might just assuage the people currently throwing grenades at her on X.

I’d advise that she not stand pat on Slacker Brad. If she does, her team of supposed political professionals is going to be very disappointed when the people who look like Slacker Brad remain on the couch playing Call of Duty on Election Day.

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