Chairman of North Carolina Republican Party says GOP needs to engage more with young voters

Chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party Michael Whatley expressed the importance of the GOP engaging with young voters in upcoming elections.

"The word is authentic," Michael Whatley said on the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show. "You have to have real conversations with them (young people). I am a big proponent of engagement rather than outreach. We don't want to just show up six months before an election and ask Hispanics or blacks or young voters to vote for us. We want to be engaged with them all the way through it."

While some pollsters such as Trafalgar have found that Gen Z is a more conservative or libertarian generation, Whatley said that it is important to lay out the platform of the GOP to young people so they can see the appeal of it. 

"In North Carolina, our agenda for the entire party and the entire cycle was Family First," Whatley explained. "It was all about economic security and educational opportunity. And we feel like the more conversations we have with young voters about education opportunities about economic security, the better we're going to do."

North Carolina's GOP had some good results in this week's midterm elections, with Ted Budd winning a seat in the U.S. Senate and the party flipping control of the state Supreme Court by picking up two seats previously held by Democrats while winning every statewide judicial race. 

"We have great Republican candidates," said Whatley. "We have a great Republican agenda. Frankly those candidates were talking to the voters of North Carolina and listening to the voters of North Carolina. We were able to put solutions on the table for the issues that they brought. So we're pretty excited about the results that we got."