Steve Bannon Says Sarah Huckabee Sanders Ad 'Dumped On' Young Men Voters

Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House chief strategist, said on Friday that Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders insulted young men with her new welfare ad. He called those voters "the swing factor in the 2024 election" and said they have drifted away from the GOP with a month left before the midterms.

On his War Room podcast, Bannon told Caroline Wren, a Republican strategist and fundraiser, that the ad was more than an online squabble. "Huckabee is not an internal fight. Huckabee is in your grill, demonizing a group, a demographic that we've got to motivate," he said.

Wren had asked conservatives to put their infighting on hold until after Election Day. Sanders is a Republican governor and Donald Trump's former White House press secretary.

What the Sarah Huckabee Sanders 'Brad' Ad Says

Bannon never described the ad on the show. Sanders's reelection campaign released it on September 28 to promote her welfare-to-work requirement. The ad features a character named "Brad."

"Meet Brad. Brad has turned relaxing into a full-time profession," Sanders says in the ad, Fox News reported. "But you – you actually work hard. You pay taxes to cover welfare for guys like Brad who just choose not to work."

The policy starts in January 2027 and applies to about 210,000 adults ages 19 to 64 in the state's Medicaid expansion program. They will have to work, go to school or volunteer for 80 hours a month, according to Newsweek.

The backlash on the right came quickly. "Do not portray your core voting bloc as losers, period," wrote Will Chamberlain of the Article III Project. Jenna Ellis, a conservative radio host, asked: "Who advised Sarah this was a good idea?!"

Steve Bannon vs. Caroline Wren on GOP Infighting

Wren pushed back. "General elections are the time to stand up and fight for anyone with an R next to their name," she said. When Bannon pressed her, she added, "I don't think I was in touch with that ad. I also don't see the point of even talking about this or having this battle right now. If we want to have this fight, have it on November 10th."

Bannon didn't budge. "These young men have punched out," he said. "We've got to get some of these young men back to it, and when you sit there and dump on young white men as the problem, you're not going to do it."

"Why would you put a spot up 30 days before a vote that dumped on one of our most important, I would say, the swing factor in the 2024 election, young men," he said. "If you don't call it out, you're not going to get them to show up. It's got to be called out, and you got to back her down."

Bannon also said Sanders had called the criticism "all manufactured" but didn't explain the remark. He appeared to mean what she said in a Fox News interview on Thursday, when she called the backlash "overblown and incredibly manufactured," HuffPost reported. Earlier she had brushed off her critics on X: "Next thing you know they'll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls. If you are able-bodied you should not collect welfare simply because you choose not to work. Period."

Were Young Men the 2024 Swing Factor?

The numbers back up Bannon's basic point. About 56 percent of men ages 18 to 29 voted for Joe Biden in 2020, Tufts Now reported. In 2024, 56 percent of them voted for Trump and 42 percent for Kamala Harris, according to Tufts University's CIRCLE, which analyzed AP VoteCast data.

Pew Research Center's study of verified voters shows a similar shift across a wider age group. Biden won men under 50 by 53 percent to 43 percent in 2020. Four years later, Trump narrowly carried them, 49 percent to 48 percent, Pew found.

There is less hard evidence for his claim that young men have now "punched out." Wren's own pitch for persuasion this weekend focused on Trump voters who are frustrated with the Iran war and gas prices. That echoes concerns Bannon himself acknowledged earlier this week. Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by 8.1 points in PolitiKool's polling average.

What Happens Next

Bannon predicted of Sanders, "she's not going to back down." He ended the segment with a joke about him and Wren "fighting like an old married couple" and told her, "Not in front of the kids." It is still unclear whether the Brad dispute will hurt GOP turnout among young men in November or fade once the campaign moves on.