When a professor asked his class of 40 students to vote by a show of hands for which candidate they thought would win the presidential election in the fall, Jipson Zhang said he was one of three who raised their hand for Donald Trump.
Polls at the time were predicting a dead heat, but the election broke the way the first-year political science and international affairs student had predicted. A Republican trifecta emerged in the District after Trump swept the swing states and GOP majorities prevailed in both chambers of Congress — a victory that Zhang said should stir students to confront the country’s increasingly conservative political reality.
“If supposedly some of the brightest political science majors, some of the brightest international affairs majors in the country were this wrong about an election, is there anything that I or anyone could do to kind of fill this intellectual complacency?” Zhang recalled asking himself.
By December, he had reregistered Young Americans for Freedom at GWU, the University’s chapter of the national conservative youth organization Young America’s Foundation.
The YAF chairman is one of several first-years that revived inactive conservative student groups this fall, along with the Foggy Bottom branch of Turning Point USA, a group that promotes limited government, free market economics and free speech.
Both national organizations sit on the advisory board for Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint for the next Republican administration that parallels some of Trump’s first executive actions, despite the president disavowing the plans during his campaign.
Zhang said the previous iteration of YAF voluntarily disbanded in 2022 due to internal disagreements within the group’s executive board over “social issues.”
The Student Government Association Senate urged the University to suspend the chapter in April 2022 after it tweeted transphobic remarks earlier that month. Zhang said the incident was part of a larger “culture war” between “traditional values” and policies concerning LGBTQ+ rights and diversity, equity and inclusion.
“They did not communicate it correctly,” Zhang said. “They probably did it in a way too, I’d say, insidious manner.”
Zhang said YAF doesn’t endorse political candidates or parties but instead aims to introduce conservative perspectives to a dominantly left-wing campus.
In 2019, GW’s former chapter of YAF opposed the campaign to retire GW’s Colonials moniker — which ultimately succeeded in 2022 — calling it a “unifying” symbol of the University’s identity. The group also frequently faced backlash for inviting right-wing speakers to campus, including Ben Shapiro, Rick Santorum, Michael Knowles and Phyllis Schlafly.
He said he sees potential in GW’s culture shifting to be more accepting of conservatism due to the political acumen of the student body, and he envisions the revived chapter at GW as an umbrella organization where students across the conservative spectrum can come together, from “Trumpist populists” to “Never Trumpers” to the “New Right.”
“We want to encapsulate everyone’s philosophy,” he said. “I know many people disagree with me. Many people in my organization disagree with me.”
Zhang said he and YAF Vice Chairman Stan Biskupski recently found the posters they plastered around Foggy Bottom advertising their group ripped down or vandalized in at least three campus buildings, actions he described as “resorting to the heckler’s veto.”
gw.propaganda, a satirical Instagram account that posts memes about student life, notified its followers YAF was postering via Instagram on Wednesday. After YAF shot back, “Indeed,” the account responded, “F*ck off losers, stop interfering with my freedoms.”
Later that night, YAF wrote, “Come on, we were just having a little fun.”
About 30 to 40 students signed a YAF interest form before the group’s first informal meeting last week, Zhang said. It plans to hold biweekly meetings in late February or early March, along with a “pro-life timeline project” — a tabling event where members will invite students to indicate when they believe human life begins using sticky notes.
He said YAF also plans to host a conversation with Emily Jashinsky, a GW alum and the D.C. correspondent at UnHerd, a news and opinion site, who sits on YAF’s national board of directors.
The group will express its views on issues that are “loud enough” on campus through statements posted on Instagram, Zhang said, but YAF’s entire executive board must first approve the comments.
“That doesn’t mean what we’re going to say is never going to be controversial, but I don’t see much benefit in purposely pursuing controversy,” said Biskupski, who is majoring in international affairs and economics.
He added, “I think that was a big mistake by the last organization, but that’s not to say that they didn’t do a lot of good things as well.”
Biskupski said Trump’s win of the popular vote proves that there is a nationwide attraction toward conservatism, referencing public opinion polls that show a substantive share of the U.S. population holds “at least a few” conservative opinions. The president won the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points in 2024, the thinnest margin since 2000.
He said as a result, liberal students should no longer perceive conservatism as “crazy” or “evil” but instead “misguided.” The GOP’s electoral victories have also pushed right-leaning students to more closely examine what they believe in and why, Biskupski added.
“The fact that it’s often stigmatized in academia is to everyone’s misfortune,” Biskupski said.

In October, four other first-year students attempted to revive the GW chapter of Turning Point USA, which went inactive around 2022, based on the group’s most recent social media activity.
The former GW chapter and other local branches protested the appearance of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at a town hall event on campus in 2017 and opposed the retirement of the Colonials moniker with a postering campaign in 2022.
Co-founders Carter Zgonina and Sarah Haies, who are both studying political science with a focus on public policy, said officials rejected their organization’s reregistration application in November due to concerns that the group was too similar to College Republicans and would fail to gauge sufficient interest.
Haies said the group’s “targeted approach” in advocating for limited government, free market economics and free speech differentiates it from other right-wing student groups that focus more on campaigns, candidates and parties.
She said the organization also advances “civic engagement,” pointing to often-combative debates between Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, and students on college campuses.
“Instead of a divide between Democrat and Republican, it’s like, okay, these are the core values we all have, and we can debate and talk about issues based on these values,” Haies said.
She said Turning Point’s leaders didn’t appeal the University’s rejection of its registration application. They instead opted to “build excitement” around the organization of about 29 members and plan to reapply in the future, Haies said. The group has since dropped “GW” from its name, instead affiliating itself with Foggy Bottom.
Zgonina said the organization plans to continue tabling around campus and the neighborhood and host debates and events inspired by regional leadership through Turning Point’s national headquarters.
The national organization has criticized the University in blog posts and runs a “Professor Watchlist” that seeks to “expose and document” faculty members who discriminate against conservative students and advance “leftist propaganda,” per its website. It includes four current GW faculty members and one who has since left.
Turning Point most recently mentioned GW in a May 2024 blog about the “vandalized and defaced” George Washington statue in University Yard that protesters wrapped in a Palestinian flag and keffiyeh during the pro-Palestinian encampment last spring.
“National headquarters is different from what we’re doing here,” Zgonina said. “But I will say that conservative students feel scared to come out because of their liberal counterparts.”
Zgonina said liberals at GW have gotten “really good” at making conservatives feel “horrible” for their beliefs. Haies added that she has been “screamed at” by several GW students, cut out of friendships and “alienated” by certain groups for her political views.
“If we disagree with some of the policies that the liberals support, we deserve to be able to demonstrate that and voice who we support and not be crucified for it,” Zgonina said.