Claudia Conway Declares Her Independence

Claudia Conway’s phone was buzzing. She was about to walk into a bagel shop in Lower Manhattan when her younger sister called. It was a Tuesday in mid-September and Claudia, 19, had come from her college, where she is a sophomore majoring in political science. She said she had been registering fellow students to vote as part of this year’s National Voter Registration Day.

Ms. Conway said that being “a normal college student” can be challenging at times — especially when classmates or strangers recognize her as a daughter of two of the more outspoken and combative voices in modern Republican politics.

“People are like ‘Oh, how are your parents,’ and it’s weird,” she said.

These days, she and her mother, Kellyanne Conway, talk on the phone multiple times a day. Both said that their relationship has come a long way since Claudia, at 15, drew the internet’s glare in 2020 for posts on social media that disagreed with the political views of her mother, who served as a top aide to former President Donald J. Trump during his 2016 campaign and for most of his four years in the White House.

Ms. Conway and her mother at the Beautycon convention in New York in 2019. A year later, in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Ms. Conway drew the internet’s glare for social media posts that disagreed with the political views of her mother.Credit…Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times

In one post, Claudia wrote that she was seeking emancipation from her parents. (Her father, George Conway, is a longtime conservative lawyer and a founder of the Lincoln Project, an organization catering to anti-Trump Republicans.) In another post, Claudia wrote that she was “running away.”

The public spat involving the high-profile family was emblematic of the polarization that has divided loved ones, friends and colleagues in the Trump era of politics.