GOP strategists tried to answer the question that is puzzling conservatives, Hillary Clinton and advertisers alike: what do young voters want?

A group of Republicans has written a playbook that purports to answer the question puzzling Hillary Clinton, conservatives and advertisers everywhere: what do millennials want?

Alexandra Smith, chairwoman of the College Republican National Committee, told reporters on Wednesday that the plan, titled Millennial.GOP, was meant to help “Republican candidates up and down the ballot” persuade young people to support the party. The plan was based on a survey of 800 adults aged 18 to 29 and focus groups in the Denver area.

Smith said millennials were “one of the most freedom-loving generations” in history, and argued that they were thus open to the charms of the Republican party. But she stressed that candidates would have to work for the affections of young people, saying Republicans have “a long way to go on our personal brand”.

Step one, per the report: show you care.

“Republicans have a caring gap,” said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a co-founder of research company Echelon Insights and a columnist at the conservative Washington Examiner. She added that there were “a lot of issues where young voters aren’t quite sure that Republicans care”.

According to Soltis Anderson, young people want “someone who’s kind to people from all walks of life” and “has empathy for people from all sorts of backgrounds”. In particular, she said, “they want politicians to understand that not everybody has opportunity”.

In their advice to Republicans, the report’s authors dabbled with the language of Democrats. They wrote that Republicans should talk about “how to break down barriers, many of which are rooted in a centralized, top-down government that has fallen down on the job” – a mirror of Hillary Clinton’s “breaking every barrier” slogan that singles out big government rather than the racism, sexism and industry deregulation railed against by the Democratic frontrunner.

Clinton has struggled to win over young people: her opponent, 74-year-old Bernie Sanders, has won the youth vote by extraordinary margins, though not nearly enough to prevent his rival from an almost certain nomination.

At least two of Clinton’s key issues feature prominently in the Republican playbook, and constituted another step in the report: talk about privilege.

“The happy talk that we all have this great opportunity in America just doesn’t resonate” with young people, Soltis Anderson said. Republicans should talk about “issues of privilege, issues of race and gender”, she added, because inequality of all kinds – particularly of wealth and income – is on millennial minds.

The report also tested focus groups with dueling Republican v Democratic proposals to key issues, such as student debt and regulation, and again tried to flip typical Republican rhetoric on its head. After being shown a video of the House speaker, Paul Ryan, talking about “bottom-up” economics, a 24-year-old college student, quoted as Dereck, noted the dissonance.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bernie Sanders, has won the youth vote by extraordinary margins. Photograph: Andy Alfaro/AP

“Funny how he said bottom-up instead of top-down, but the party that he is affiliated with literally had trickle-down economics,” Dereck said. “It just seems a little crazy.”

The report also found that clean energy, equal pay for women, addressing poverty, student loan reform and better public school funding were four of the six “very important” issues to young people – all issues either opposed or bitterly disputed by Republicans in Congress.

But the authors of the report found ways to spin some issues to young audiences, largely with language such as “open”, “natural”, “local”, “warm” and “authentic”.

“Simply saying the words ‘open’ and ‘bottom-up’ alone are not enough to woo a skeptical generation,” they wrote, but certain tacks could still work. They suggested talking about contraception access in terms of “over the counter access”, for instance, versus “the status quo” of Barack Obama’s healthcare reform.

Similarly, although most young people support the rights of same-sex couples to marry and protections of LGBT rights, the authors wrote that “millennials are not necessarily comfortable with forcing a business owner to violate his or her religious beliefs, either”.

The authors stressed that their report was for all Republicans, and said young people should be educated about “freedom” because “they have no clue about ‘freedom’ in their own lives, no hint of why they need it, when they use it, or how to value it”.

The key, according to the authors, is to speak about freedom “in practice”, particularly through millennials’ “ability to connect with others and share information”: their phones.

“Our phones are not something ‘other’ than us. They are us,” they wrote. “We are one with everyone, everywhere. That connection expands what we can do, which necessarily expands who we are and what we can become.”

Simply saying the words ‘open’ and ‘bottom-up’ alone are not enough to woo a skeptical generation The report

In stark contrast to this language of openness stands the party’s nominee for president, Donald Trump, who has proposed closing the country to Muslims and refugees and promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico. His name was entirely absent from the written report.

But Soltis Anderson said Trump “could capitalize on some of these themes”, particularly “this fundamental distrust of what’s going on here in Washington, that Washington is broken, it’s inept”.

In an April poll by Harvard University, only 25% of people aged from 18 to 29 said they would vote for Trump, versus 61% who said they would vote for Clinton. Trump’s net favorability among the people surveyed was -57, and even among young Republicans only 37% saw him favorably versus 57% who disliked the former TV show host.

Years of polling suggest that young people have become more liberal than not, including in their acceptance of same-sex relationships and favorable views of socialism. Demographic changes have also diminished Republicans’ base of older white voters: millennials are the most racially diverse generation in US history.