Conservatives Of Tomorrow: Grant Starrett

Grant Starrett is the founder and president of the Stanford Conservative Society. He served as Chairman of Students for Mitt in the 2008 Republican primaries, which he grew to over 4, 500 members. As part of this effort, he raised over $200,000.   He has gained quite a following through his “StarrettWire,” a newsletter he publishes and distributes five days a week to over 700 people featuring news of the day with a conservative bent. Starrett, who grew up in Los Angeles, California, will graduate from Stanford this June with a major in the History of War and Revolution. I asked Starrett some questions about his work. When did you first get involved in politics?

“My interest in politics stretches back a long way – I used to listen to familial debates as a child, where my maternal grandfather, a liberal professor and Democrat operative, would go toe to toe with my father, a conservative businessman and Republican fundraiser. I recollect trying to market Bob Dole to my elementary school peers in 1996 to not much avail. But my first actual job in politics was as a page in the United States House of Representatives when I was in high school. I went on to work for campaigns, the Republican National Committee, the White House, and FoxNews.”

What made you decide you were a conservative?

“When I was in junior high, a girl I had a crush on told me her favorite book was George Orwell’s 1984. I read that book and became so terrified at the prospect of a totalitarian government that I really began to self-identify intellectually as a conservative. I began to read further, into history and politics, the National Review and the Weekly Standard, into religion and values, the Bible and C.S. Lewis. 9/11 occurred and I embraced the need to strongly take on terrorism in the same way that men like John Foster Dulles and Ronald Reagan had challenged (and defeated) the Soviet Union. By my freshman year in high school, I had founded a campus magazine for conservative thought with an aggressive biweekly publication rate and a large and growing subscription base for what was an otherwise liberal community. Simultaneously, I worked for a local construction company and, along with tales from my two working parents, I got a sense of the destructive nature of regulation and taxation. By the end of high school, I was spending my 18^th birthday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. From these origins, I came to consider myself a hawkish fairly traditional Christian conservative - part of the ‘old majority,’ if you will.”

What are you doing specifically to reach young voters?

“Presently, I am the president and founder of the Stanford Conservative Society, and am aggressively courting peers on campus. I recently chaired the student effort for the Romney campaign and continue to connect with alumni of that organization and conservatives of all candidate preferences on facebook and elsewhere. I have spent a few summers in DC and have developed lifelong friendships with coworkers and compatriots – I know that, together, we will do something great for this cause and country.”

What should the Republican Party be doing to reach out to young voters?

“The Republican Party is not a monolithic organization – it has a number of different components and institutionally, in the form of the Republican National Committee, we can only do so much to reach out to college voters. Conservative groups, whether they be the College Republicans, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, or the Leadership Institute, certainly can and do play a role in mobilizing those in college. Generally, we need to promote visits to campuses by prominent conservative personalities; invest in the infrastructure to target ‘friendlies’ on campuses like fraternity brothers, sorority sisters, athletes, Christian fellowship members, pro-life group members, etc. We should also focus on registering Republicans at major sporting events, and consider targeting particularly opportune areas, like the South and Mountain West, and select schools, like religious and state universities. Most importantly, we need to do our best to recruit aggressive, active student leaders who can take on these vital tasks. Expanding the ‘youth vote’ to include those under thirty, Republicans can benefit by offering up a message to the upwardly mobile, essentially proclaiming ourselves the party of opportunity. As people distance themselves from college, get a job and a spouse, they are going to be much more inclined toward the Grand Old Party. If we can continue and improve upon our micro-targeting techniques, we can effectively organize this group into active Republicans that will vote the party line the remainder of their lives. Importantly, we need to ensure that the RNC Youth Coalition is prepared to take on all of these roles while we take steps toward being both tech and trend savvy. The fact is, this recent election was an anomaly, and our poor performance was predicated on our candidate’s age, the mismanagement of his campaign, and the cult-esque following of our opponent - 2008 represents more than a halving of our percentage from 2004. We can and will do significantly better in the future.”

After graduation, Starrett hopes to go to law school.