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The Young Voter Shift and the October Ops: Jim Pfaff on The Vicki McKenna Show | Oct 8, 2026

Published: October 8, 2026
Network: WIBA/iHeart
Analysis: Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff

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Vicki McKenna opened the October 8 segment of The Vicki McKenna Show with a poll so fresh she was not sure Jim Pfaff had seen it. A YouGov survey, she said, showed a 64% increase in support for MAGA candidates and Trump among voters under the age of 25 — young voters who had allegedly been running away from MAGA, back on MAGA. The headlines, she noted, only said slight shift in polling for Trump, and he is not even on the ballot. Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff treated the young voter shift as a question about the polls themselves: what pollsters are sampling, how they model turnout, and whether a group that positive is showing up in the numbers at all. Then they sorted the October ops from what is real.

Topics Covered

• The 64% Young Voter Shift in the YouGov Poll
• Inconsistent Polls and the Turnout Model
• October Surprises That Turned Into Ops
• The Senate Holds, the House Is a Hard Read
• Obama, El-Sayed and Voters Who Know When They’re Getting Played
• The Turnout Differences Pfaff Expects
• Key Takeaways

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The 64% Young Voter Shift in the YouGov Poll

McKenna’s number was specific: the increase was 64% for Republicans among voters under the age of 25. Pfaff’s first reaction to the young voter shift was to hope it was real and to ask what it said about pollster sampling.

“It makes you wonder what is the sampling that pollsters are doing, if that’s real. And I do hope it’s real.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

McKenna stood by the source. It is a YouGov poll, she said, and YouGov tries to be accurate if it can. Pfaff said it has its inaccuracies too, then explained why the young voter shift made sense to him, going back to the advent of Trump.

“Young people do get that maybe Donald Trump wants to, or at least this is what they thought in 2024, Donald Trump maybe wants to protect the future of the country. There have been some things that Donald Trump has done that young people should be excited about, although they may not be spending much of their time thinking about.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Inconsistent Polls and the Turnout Model

Pfaff’s larger point was about polling as a whole.

“There really is something odd in the polling, in my opinion. Not so much because all of them are so wrong, but because they’re so inconsistent. I look at district after district after district, and things are flying 5, 7, 8 points between results in the polls.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Part of it, he said, is pollsters still trying to get the turnout model right; they all have to adjust for it. In private polls he has done, the raw responses can come back with 60% of Republicans answering and maybe 30% of Democrats, or the reverse — obviously not how the election will turn out. Some pollsters, he said, try to do that adjustment faithfully. His bottom line: he does not have a handle that the polls are telling him what he needs to know, pro-Democrat or pro-Republican.

McKenna noted that the YouGov survey is an attitudes poll, not a poll built on a turnout model for a candidate. Pfaff explained why he had raised the turnout model in connection with the young voter shift.

“The reason I’m bringing that up is because that group is modeled in polls. So what I’m saying is, if that group really is that positive, it’s not showing up in the polls.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Everyone is saying young people are against Republicans, he said, and he is hopeful the young voter shift is something that carries the party through November 3. McKenna was more cautious: her sense was that young people are maybe less motivated than before, though it does not feel like a blue wave.

October Surprises That Turned Into Ops

McKenna turned to what she called ops. The only October surprise she had seen was a Wall Street Journal story about Kim Guilfoyle, which she called a nothing burger — at most, if confirmed, a gotcha story for Guilfoyle, not the Trump administration. She named two more stories that felt like ops to her: the Cornell story, which she said feminists and Democrats were trying to turn into a MeToo movement, and the repeated questions to Trump about a Russian plague, framed to suggest he is in the back pocket of Putin. Pfaff agreed and added one she had not listed.

“No, and they both are ops, by the way. This whole op cycle going into an October surprise was also the AI doomerism. I mean, that came out the day of the last day of the GOP midterm convention. That was totally designed to thwart any momentum coming out of that.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

When Ken Paxton said in D.C. that polls went down after the GOP midterm convention, Pfaff said, the drop came from the psyop, not the convention. McKenna countered that Paxton should have been campaigning instead of vacationing; both said he is doing fine now, and Pfaff said he thinks Paxton will win. TCC covered the AI fight in more detail in the enthusiasm gap and the AI message fight, from Pfaff’s September 17 appearance on McKenna’s show.

The other two, Pfaff said, are the standard psyops: get women riled up over MeToo, tell them Republicans hate women. He traced the method back to a specific president.

“FDR started this whole process, FYI, is this group against that group, mess with this group, tell them how bad things are that this other group’s doing to you, but tell the other group that that other group is doing stuff to you. This is the game that Democrats have been playing for a long period of time. It is why they kept the House in Congress in general for 40 years until 1994.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

McKenna’s verdict was that the plays are not landing. The ICE protests, she said, look tone-deaf now that Markwayne Mullin has replaced Kristi Noem and Tom Homan is the calm, rational presence, so ICE operations look like law enforcement operations. What is left for Democrats, she said, is issues, attempts at voter suppression and griping about money.

The Senate Holds, the House Is a Hard Read

Pfaff asked whether the play will be successful, then ran the Senate map with two races he named as potentially at risk. Say Roger Marshall lost in Kansas and James Talarico beat Ken Paxton in Texas, he said. There is still a pretty good opportunity that Susan Collins keeps Maine, Sununu is a pickup in New Hampshire and Rogers is a pickup in Michigan.

“I think the Senate stays in Republican hands. It may be 50-50, but it easily could be 53 votes for Republicans. The House is the one that is really hard to gauge because they really do have local components.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

His example of a local component was Wisconsin’s own Tom Tiffany: no one is talking about him across the country, Pfaff said, but he is killing it in his campaign right now in Wisconsin. The same thing happens in congressional districts, he said, and the House is still within the potential grasp of Republicans, in some cases in spite of themselves, particularly as the money gets in.

“So look for some potentially positive results, at worst a blue trickle, and they take back the House barely. This is not a blue wave, at least my spidey sense.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

McKenna said the blue wave talk is gone; even Harry Enten stopped flirting with it. She explained why that matters for turnout. “When you say blue wave, just like when you say red wave, what does it make voters do? It’s voter suppression,” she said. If a race seems like a blowout, people decide they do not have to bother.

Obama, El-Sayed and Voters Who Know When They’re Getting Played

McKenna asked Pfaff for the Democrats’ next play. He said everything she had listed will ultimately work to the detriment of Democrats, because the American people are not dumb. His case in point was Michigan, where Barack Obama is going to show up for Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed, Pfaff said, knows the Black vote is either going to be totally suppressed or some of it will vote against him, so Obama is coming in spite of the years El-Sayed spent dissing him. That is not going to work either, Pfaff said.

“What’s really funny is people think the Black community are stupid people, particularly Democrats. Think Black folks are stupid, and they’re not. They’re like every other American. They are smart enough to understand when they’re getting played.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

That community, he said, is ultimately turning toward Republicans because of Donald Trump, and whoever gets the Republican nomination in 2028 had better pick up on that. Black males just may come out and diss El-Sayed, he added, because they know he is a farce.

Pfaff said he feels more confident every day that Republicans hold the Senate. The House is a hard read, and he wants another week or so to get a better sense of it. But it is still in play, he said, because Democrats have no message to give people reasons to be excited to vote for them. Voters do have some reasons to be angry at Republicans, he said, but that is coming back around because Donald Trump is on the trail.

The Turnout Differences Pfaff Expects

Pfaff’s last point went back to the turnout model. A Harvard Harris poll had the generic congressional ballot at only +2 for Democrats, which he said would be enough for Republicans to keep the House.

“That is based on a model that has 2024 voters coming out to vote who wouldn’t typically come out in midterm elections. And I know that Trump’s PAC is working on that. We are working on that, by the way.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

TCC does not have that kind of money, Pfaff said, but it is doing the work. Like the young voter shift at the top of the segment, it comes back to who the polls model as turning out, and his prediction followed from it: “I think that you just might see some very interesting turnout differences that are going to shock a lot of people.” TCC has tracked that turnout effort before in low-propensity voters and Trump’s last hurrah.

McKenna closed with Wisconsin, where she said the voter integrity operation is quite similar to the exceptional one in 2024, with more election observers, more lawyers and more election workers.

“We thought they’d cheat their way to victory in Wisconsin in 2024. They didn’t do it. Why? Because we actually had flooded the zone with election integrity people. The same thing’s true this election.”
— Vicki McKenna, Host, The Vicki McKenna Show

To anyone who thinks the election will be stolen anyway, her answer was that they won’t be able to in the governor’s race this year. For Pfaff, the young voter shift and the Harvard Harris +2 both come back to the turnout model.

Key Takeaways

1. The young voter shift – McKenna cited a YouGov poll showing a 64% increase in support for MAGA candidates and Trump among voters under 25; Pfaff said he hopes it is real and asked what pollsters are sampling.
2. Polls are inconsistent, not just wrong – Pfaff said district results swing 5, 7 and 8 points, and if the young voter shift is that positive, it is not showing up in the polls.
3. The October ops are failing – Pfaff called the AI doomerism push a psyop timed to the last day of the GOP midterm convention, and said the group-against-group play goes back to FDR.
4. The Senate stays Republican – Pfaff put the range at 50-50 to 53 seats; the House is a hard read with local components, and at worst a blue trickle.
5. Voters know when they’re getting played – Pfaff said Obama’s trip for Abdul El-Sayed will not work because Black voters are smart enough to see the play.
6. Watch the turnout differences – Pfaff said the Harvard Harris +2 model counts on 2024 voters returning for a midterm, and that Trump’s PAC and TCC are working on it.

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About The Conservative Caucus:
The Conservative Caucus is a grassroots public policy action organization, formed in 1974. Headed by President Jim Pfaff, the Caucus is committed to advancing free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values.

Originally broadcast Oct 8, 2026 on The Vicki McKenna Show with Vicki McKenna, WIBA/iHeart.