The Next Generation of Republican Politics Looks Like Catalina Lauf

On this afternoon, though, it’s oddly quiet. The lighting is dim and warm, the walls crowded with old paintings and taxidermy. The long wooden tables feel more like someone’s slightly eccentric dining room than a New York restaurant. Catalina Lauf arrives in a navy pantsuit, looking like a much more beautiful version of who you would imagine has spent the last few years on campaign trails and television panels. Lauf is used to having to explain herself to reporters, voters, critics, and strangers on the internet. It’s a skill she’s had to develop quickly. Before she ran for Congress, Lauf worked in the Trump administration at the Department of Commerce. It was 2018, and Washington was already in a kind of political fever dream. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had just arrived in Congress, the “Squad” was dominating headlines, and progressive women had become a cultural force almost overnight. “I remember looking around and thinking, who is the counter voice?” Lauf tells me. At the time, she was in her mid-twenties. She had always loved politics but felt alienated by what she calls the “buttoned-up establishment Republican” mold. Trump’s arrival had cracked that world open. He wasn’t a typical candidate, but a New York City Democrat who lived in a golden palace with a supermodel wife. “You can literally feel the freedom when you land.” “When I came into the administration, I thought, okay. These are people disrupting the whole game,” she says. When Lauf later launched a congressional campaign, the media quickly found a convenient label for her: the anti-AOC. “I mean, it was useful for the time,” she says. “But really it represented something bigger. Young people in the movement who were willing to speak out.” The conversation drifts between politics and personal history as our food arrives. Lauf grew up in Illinois. Her mother immigrated from Guatemala. Her father ran a small business. They lived in a farming area where, she says, work was just part of life. She is, in many ways, living the “American Dream.” “We grew up with humble beginnings,” she says. “You just worked hard.” After COVID, her family left Illinois and moved to Florida. “We became blue-state refugees,” she says. Florida, she says, felt immediately different. “You can literally feel the freedom when you land,” she says. “In Illinois there was always this tension. Even in Republican areas.” In Florida, she says, people speak more openly about politics. It’s not unusual to see Trump flags on boats or people wearing campaign hats in everyday life. As someone who lived in Miami for a few years, I know exactly what she’s talking about. “You don’t realize how much pressure you’re under until it’s gone,” she says. For Lauf, the move was also personal. She had recently gotten married and was thinking about where she wanted to build a life and eventually raise children. “I just thought, there’s no way I’m raising my kids somewhere that’s going in that direction,” she says. But the conversation quickly moves beyond politics. At one point, Lauf begins talking about a company she started with her sister. The original idea was baby formula when the sisters had grown concerned about what was actually in many products marketed to infants. “We’d walk through grocery stores and look at the ingredients and think, 'why is this okay?'” she says. They started researching the industry and quickly ran into the reality of federal regulation. “The FDA approval process basically protects the big incumbents,” she says. “For a startup like ours, it was almost impossible.” So they pivoted. Instead of formula, they developed a children’s prebiotic supplement through Begin Health . It's designed to help rebuild gut health naturally, especially for kids dealing with digestive issues, antibiotics, or restrictive diets. Lauf lights up when she talks about it. “We started it literally at the kitchen table,” she says. “And now we’ve helped thousands of kids.” But the conversation eventually drifts somewhere heavier. Lauf brings up something she says rarely gets attention in political coverage: child trafficking at the southern border. It's a subject she thinks people avoid precisely because it's so disturbing. “Child trafficking is a problem that everyone, on some level, knows about, but it's so horrifying that many don't want to think about it,” she says. “There are things that can be done to fight it, but it's near-impossible to wholly eradicate.” This issue shouldn’t be partisan. So people take one of two tacks, she says: either they choose to believe it doesn't really happen here and ignore it, or they find it so overwhelming that they retreat to easier-seeming, more palatable issues. She tells me about speaking with a border agent who described witnessing a three-year-old girl being sold multiple times during a border crossing. “It’s horrifying,” she says quietly. She traces it back to how the previous administration ran the border. “Sixty-five thousand calls to the federal hotline went unanswered under the Biden administration,” she says, “because the policies made the whole situation completely unmanageable.” She argues there was next to no oversight of the adults taking in children who crossed the border—“less paperwork than it takes to adopt a pet.” With the sheer number of people crossing every day, and so many children placed with strangers, she says, abuses were inevitable. “It was an atrociously mismanaged system from the outset.” This issue shouldn’t be partisan. “If you care about protecting children, this should be something every woman can get behind,” she says. She sounds less angry than frustrated. “Where are the feminists talking about this?” she asks. To Lauf, the silence isn't an accident. “Feminists have largely stayed quiet because they've prioritized the platform of the Democratic Party over the needs of the women and girls they claim to represent,” she says. “Girls are facing brutal, actual harms, but because unrestricted illegal immigration is at the heart of the project, they refuse to jump into the fight.” The moment shifts the tone of the conversation. Much of the media attention around Lauf has focused on ideological labels, but her motivations seem rooted in something more visceral: family, children, and what she sees as cultural blind spots. When I ask what she'd actually do about it, her answer is less about slogans than logistics. “The easiest way to slow child trafficking is exactly what the Trump administration is doing,” she says. “Close the border, enforce immigration law, and prioritize people who are vetted and hardworking and taking the legal steps to come here.” The unrestricted crossings of the past few years, she argues, played directly into the cartels' hands, letting traffickers get rich and gain easy access to victims. Commonsense reforms to legal immigration, paired with real border enforcement, would slow that flow—“and with it,” she says, “children being victimized under the promise of a life of freedom in America.” Eventually the conversation turns to women in politics more broadly. Lauf says one of the strangest parts of running for office wasn’t criticism from the left, but from within her own party. Because she wasn’t married at the time and didn’t have children, some opponents argued she wasn’t qualified to represent families. “I had people sending mailers saying that,” she says. “It was ridiculous.” The logic still confuses her. “If you don’t have kids yet, you actually have more time to build something,” she says. She’s particularly frustrated by the way women on the right are often forced into narrow cultural categories—either hyper-traditional “tradwives” or career-obsessed “girlbosses.” “Why do we have to choose?” she asks. Her answer is simple: women can want families, careers, public influence, and meaningful work at the same time. “I want to do both,” she says. It’s a perspective that’s increasingly common among younger conservative women, even if it rarely shows up in media coverage. Lauf mentions several women she admires in politics, including Anna Paulina Luna, who she sees as part of a new generation. “They’re not in it for fame,” she says. “They’re doing it because they believe in it.” By the time lunch winds down, the restaurant is still quiet. Our waiter appears again, this time with glasses of champagne on the house. The conversation turns to Catalina's new book. It's called Time to Choose , a title that sits oddly beside everything she's just said about refusing to choose. The choice she means is a different one entirely though. The argument inside it is about history. "I wrote Time to Choose because I believe history has something important to teach us about the moment America is in today," she says. "Our country has faced periods of division, uncertainty, corruption, and profound change before, and at every defining moment, Americans have had to decide what principles were worth defending and what kind of country they wanted to leave behind." The book pulls those lessons forward into the present. " Time to Choose looks to those lessons from our past and brings them into the modern American landscape, where too many people feel increasingly disconnected from their government and powerless to change its direction," she says. "Too many people in Congress have become more interested in preserving their own power than protecting the freedoms, institutions, and opportunities that made this country exceptional." It's a blunt assessment of a body she campaigned to join. "But history also reminds us that America has never belonged solely to the people in Washington," she says. "Its future has always been shaped by ordinary citizens willing to stand up, speak out, and take responsibility for what comes next." "We do not have to wait for Washington to save us." She puts the point of the book plainly. "That is ultimately what this book is about: reminding Americans that we are not powerless. We do not have to wait for Washington to save us. Every generation inherits the American experiment, and every generation is eventually asked to defend it, renew it, and choose what it will become." Then the line the title comes from: "Now it is our turn to choose." Politics, Lauf admits, has been harder than she expected. There are online attacks, threats, constant scrutiny. There’s also the strange experience of being flattened into a headline or stereotype. At one point early in her career, she says, she was standing outside in Washington feeling overwhelmed and wondering if she should continue. She carried a pocket Constitution at the time and opened it randomly. It landed on the final line of the Declaration of Independence: We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. “That moment stuck with me,” she says. Compared with what the founders risked, she says, modern political backlash feels smaller. “You’re going to get bruised a little,” she says. “But that’s part of the journey.” Outside, the Lower East Side is starting to fill with late afternoon traffic. Inside Freeman’s, the lights are still dim and the champagne glasses are nearly empty. Before we leave, I ask her how she hopes people will ultimately see her. The anti-AOC label never quite fit. What she wants instead is simpler. “Common sense,” she says. Then she pauses. “And hopefully proof that there are a lot of women out there like me.”