Erika Kirk’s moving tribute to her slain husband reverberated around America on Sunday, as Charlie Kirk’s stadium-sized memorial service drew vast crowds and interest. Amid the horror of her loss, Erika Kirk’s remarkable poise is fuelling rumours that she could pull young women to the Right — just as Charlie did with young men.

That parallel was underscored by the way the memorial itself doubled as a celebration of Charlie’s political impact. Speaking at the service, Trump recalled: “Charlie didn’t just bring young people into the movement. All of a sudden it started to grow by leaps and bounds. By 2024, we won more young people than any Republican candidate in the history of our country — including, for the first time, a majority of males under 30. Can you believe that?”

Perhaps the most powerful moment came when Erika, fighting back tears, told the crowd: “My husband Charlie, he wanted to save young men just like the one who took his life.”

Charlie Kirk played a huge role in bringing young men to Trump’s GOP last year. The question, however, is whether Erika, as the new head of Turning Point USA, can do the same for women. This is arguably a harder challenge. As Daniel Cox of the Survey Center for American Life wrote last year, “Over the past decade, poll after poll has found that young people are growing more and more divided by gender on a host of political issues.” “Since 2014,” added Cox, “women between the ages of 18 and 29 have steadily become more liberal each year, while young men have not.”

Indeed, on nearly every metric, young women are drifting further Left. The #MeToo movement, the pandemic, and “Great Awokening” helped Charlie Kirk’s message find more open minds among Gen Z men. These cultural landmarks, though, seem only to have pushed young women’s beliefs further from young men’s. The challenge for Erika, then, is not merely to reach them — but to pull them away from embracing a very different worldview, especially when it comes to marriage, motherhood, and work.

In Erika Kirk, the Right believes its message of cultural conservatism has found a powerful new ambassador. Like Phyllis Schlafly before her, Erika Kirk is a working mom who appears eager to take on her new role. As the head of Turning Point, Erika inherits a juggernaut with $85 million in revenue last year alone, plus skyrocketing interest since her husband’s death. Her efforts to sway young women will therefore come with one of the largest support structures in recent political memory.

In a Sunday interview with the Washington Examiner, Turning Point executive Tyler Bowyer said that Erika already seems to be having an effect. “This week my inbox has been flooded, 80% to 90% from women, saying their hearts have been changed, that now they want to get involved,” he said. “That’s never happened before. Usually, it’s almost all men.”

It’s obviously an understatement to say Charlie Kirk leaves behind big shoes to fill as a political organiser. It takes a rare personality type to oversee growth like that which Turning Point USA experienced in Charlie’s hands over the last decade. The extreme difficulty of navigating Trump-era divisions on the Right made that work doubly challenging, as will the organisation’s newly mythical status in the wake of a generational tragedy. It took Charlie Kirk years to get right.

Yet it is in precisely that space that Erika Kirk is beginning to emerge. Her evangelism will not be narrowly partisan but explicitly Christian — echoing the turn her husband’s outreach took in his final years. For the Right, the calculation is clear: after filling a stadium with worshippers and watching Trump twice prevail by leaning into the culture war, embedding political messages within cultural ones no longer looks like a liability in a secular society, but a powerful advantage.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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