Trump Shows Up for the Bros. Will They Show Up for Him?
As the 2024 campaign comes to a close, honing in on the grievances of young men everywhere is the Trump campaign strategy. The theory here is that young men are ready to stop being nice and start being real about their desire to brush back feminism and egalitarian politics in favor of dudes being dudes in the Trump White House.
Polling has shown a historic gender split this cycle, and so it is now widely said that if Trump can get the bros to vote, the bros will carry the day. Suddenly an election cycle that began with questions about Donald Trump’s Dobbs problem is ending with questions about Kamala Harris’ young men problem.
Trump is scheduled to appear in State College, Pennsylvania, twice in the final days of the campaign to court the young, male and angry. NOTUS’ Katherine Swartz went to the first event, a rally at the campus arena on Saturday. Trump “called out the Penn State wrestling team by name and brought them onstage with him,” she reports. He “said he’d ‘maybe wrestle one or two of them.’”
“He’s been going to UFC, he’s been on the Nelk Boys, he was just on Joe Rogan,” the president of the Penn State College Republicans told Katherine. “He’s really presenting himself as one of the boys.”
If the election really does hinge on young men, it would be a very rare outcome. White young men voted at a higher rate in 2022 than other demographics of men, according to researchers at Tufts. But still, young women vote at a much higher rate across the board than young men. Another Tufts study finds young white men to be much less likely to be civically engaged versus their peers. All of this could be proving Trump’s point, of course: Give young men something to rally around, and there’s a lot of votes to be found.
But it could also be proving the point that young men just are not very reliable voters, and basing a campaign around them is, at best, very hard and, at worst, very silly. Michael McDonald, who tracks early voting on his Substack, says his early results show a gender split among young voters that basically matches the gender splits on the voter rolls, meaning more women, by several percentage points.
“It’s a double-bias, advantage, whatever you want to call it,” he told NOTUS. “There’s more of them, and they tend to have higher turnout rates.”
A senior Democratic operative in a swing state texted us incredulously on Monday morning that the “Trump campaign and Republicans have been freaking masterful at convincing the media that this election is about the rage of young white men.” Abortion rights are still a pretty big deal, the operative ranted, and Trump’s record on that is still really unpopular. This operative said the young men focus from Trump is basically a smoke screen to cover that fact. “I wouldn’t fall for the okey doke that fast,” they added.
McDonald says this week will be the one where we start to see if young people are turning out in greater or surprising numbers, because young people wait to vote. But so far, the young men this campaign is supposedly about are not showing up to weigh in on it.
—Evan McMorris-Santoro | Read Katherine’s story here.
