One of the biggest fights playing out in this election is the battle for young, persuadable men of all races who appear to be less firmly in the Democratic column than they were just four years ago.
For former President Donald Trump, that has meant appearing on podcasts and alternative media platforms popular with young men while tailoring his get-out-the-vote effort to some of these “low-propensity” voters. For Vice President Kamala Harris, it has meant a shift in tone and message from recent Democratic campaigns, a targeted ad blitz and a running mate whose bid is very much wrapped up in the subtext of what it means to be masculine in the 2020s.
Underlying this focus on men is a new conversation about the future of masculinity and issues facing young men in America who have largely spent their adult lives in the Trump-dominated, post-#MeToo political era.
Ross Morales Rocketto, a co-founder of White Dudes for Harris, said the country is “having a conversation about masculinity right now as it relates to politics.”
“Masculinity is in crisis,” he said. “And I think that conversation has been long overdue.”
Polling has played a huge role in spurring that conversation. An NBC News Stay Tuned/SurveyMonkey poll of Gen Z adults taken in late August found that while young women favored Harris over Trump by 30 points, young men favored Harris by just 4 points.
Richard Reeves, founder and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonpartisan research organization, said shifting political views among young men were the result of feeling less at home on the left than prior generations because of an unwillingness on the left to talk about problems men specifically face while at times painting them as problematic.
“That’s partly because of the kind of gender dynamics we see kind of playing out on the left,” he said. “More a sense of [political] homelessness and more a bit of detachment, a bit of retreat. It’s not a stampede over to the right.”
‘We feel voiceless in this country’
The dynamic has Trump, who is trying to get his numbers with men back to 2016 levels, gearing his campaign toward a kind of hypermasculinity that was on full display at his party’s convention this fall — one that featured a former pro wrestler ripping his shirt off onstage and Trump being introduced for his speech by Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
His effort goes beyond such explicit imagery. Trump-aligned strategists launched a $20 million campaign called “Send the Vote” in August to boost turnout among young men. The former president has made podcast appearances with hosts like comedian Theo Von, influencer Logan Paul and streamer Adin Ross; in the one with Ross, Trump made sure to say “Barron says hello” and is “a big fan of yours,” referring to his youngest son.
Trump’s decision to tap Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, as his running mate was made with some of these voters in mind too, as Vance is the youngest man to serve on a major-party ticket in generations.
In the last week, Trump’s campaign started running a digital ad aimed at men under 35 in battleground states that criticizes Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, for applying the state’s tobacco tax to Zyn, a nicotine pouch popular with young men. The ad ends with a pro-Trump influencer telling a Trump rally: “Trump 2024, that’s it. Let’s f—ing go.”
Trump and his campaign frequently take aim at Walz, calling him “Tampon Tim” — a nickname stemming from a mischaracterization of a Minnesota law that requires schools to provide menstrual products in student restrooms. Trump boosters have also mocked Walz’s masculinity online, seeking to block inroads with persuadable men.
One Trump-world operative said Trump’s strategy with young men — including young Black and Hispanic men, whom surveys have shown Trump fares better with than in past cycles — was made possible by what this person saw as a fading “social stigma” around supporting him compared to his 2016 and 2020 runs.
“Trump is very much the cool candidate,” this person said. “Look, the fact that people like Theo Von, Logan Paul and the Nelk Boys, who are right in the middle of the zeitgeist of our culture, are willing to publicly associate with Trump would’ve been unfathomable five years ago.”
Trump has also waded into these spaces by appealing to cryptocurrency investors, launching his own line of NFT tokens and even introducing a sneaker brand.
Brian Hughes, a senior Trump adviser, said that even in these spaces, Trump’s message is much the same as it is to other segments of the population: combating rising prices, undocumented immigration and crime.
“Do we communicate with subsections and demographics? Of course,” Hughes said. “Do we do some of those communications more tailored to each of the demographics? Of course.”
One Trump campaign staffer predicted that the shifts among young men and the widening gender gap is the result of a “brand problem” that will “haunt” Democrats “for generations,” saying that some Gen Z men see a vote for Trump “as an act of protest.”
“Young men in this country — Black and white — know that the Democratic Party doesn’t prioritize them, their success or their stories,” this person said. “Trump is gaining traction with young men because we feel voiceless in this country.”
Harris’ two-front strategy: Sports and gaming
On the flip side of this outreach is the Trump campaign deprioritizing outreach to women, particularly in the suburbs, where Democrats have made consistent gains since 2016. In part because of this, as well as the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the Harris campaign now sees opportunity to expand its reach into non-college-educated women, a core Trump demographic.
“Well, I’m not going to comment on his strategy, but I’m just saying as a candidate, I’m targeting both [men and women],” Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., told NBC News at a campaign event for suburban women in the Philadelphia suburbs last month. “We’re not targeting one gender versus the other.”
“I think there’s a lot of commonality here about what people care about,” he added. “A lot of men out there care about women’s rights and want their daughters and their granddaughters to have the same rights that their mothers and grandmothers have. There are a lot of men out there who care about child care costs because it affects the family budget and affects their lives as well.”
For Harris, efforts to reach these men look somewhat different. And advisers caution that while they are focused on messaging specifically to reach young men, they see a larger universe of target voters.
“I think she has to focus on the general population and those most likely to vote rather than on gender IMO,” Mark Cuban, the billionaire businessman and a Harris surrogate, said in an email. “Whoever is more likely to vote in the greatest numbers is where she should focus. And I think that is what she is doing. There are only [36] days left. She has to reach the greatest number of likely to vote. The goal is to win the election, not a specific demographic.”
Still, the Harris campaign is ramping up its efforts to reach young men on platforms like Twitch and IGN, leading video game platforms with large male audiences. It’s also spending an outsize portion of its ad budget on major sporting events — NFL, college football and Major League Baseball games, for example — to reach these voters. Her message to these voters has been heavily focused on the economy.
On Saturday, the Harris campaign launched “Athletes for Harris,” highlighting endorsements from 15 NFL Hall of Famers. A key line from their press release: “Athletes are among the most trusted voices for key voting blocs, especially young men, making them uniquely qualified campaigners for Vice President Harris and Governor Walz.”
And while Harris allies questioned Trump’s podcast-focused strategy — with one adviser saying his appearances amounted to “one-offs” rather than a more coherent targeting effort — she recorded an appearance on “All the Smoke,” a popular NBA podcast hosted by two former players. An adviser said she could be expected to make appearances on similar shows in the coming weeks. (Some Democrats have suggested she or Walz should make an appearance on Joe Rogan’s widely consumed podcast.)
“The Trump effort is basically, have him go to a UFC match, have him do a couple podcasts. They’re photo-ops,” a Harris adviser said. “Our bet, and I think it is a good bet, when you look at the profile of these voters, is that because they’re not interested in politics, we should not rely on a couple one-offs to make our case here. Not just because she’s less known but because it’s going to take attrition to really bring them into the fold.”
‘We need to create space for people’
Reeves, the American Institute for Boys and Men president, said he has noticed a shift this campaign season in Democratic messaging around men and masculinity, saying that Harris leading the ticket has actually given space for a “different performance around masculinity on the left.”
“So far, there has been almost nothing around the sort of problematization of toxic masculinity or kind of patriarchy,” he said, adding that while abortion rights are front and center in the campaign, “there isn’t a kind of very strong sense of this being kind of driven by gender.”
While Walz has some of the trappings of traditional masculinity — the campaign has leaned into his biography as a high school football coach, a National Guardsman, a hunter and a lover of yardwork — he has also spoken about his support for his school’s gay-straight alliance and his and his wife’s struggles with infertility.
The next step Reeves would like to see Democrats take is to actively begin talking more openly about challenges facing men, particularly young men: worsening educational outcomes, a much higher rate of suicide, and economic challenges for working-class men.
“The neglect of the issues of men, especially young men, has really been going on for quite a while now, and it’s going to take some serious work to persuade young men that we really do have their backs,” he said. “And whoever’s in power is going to have to take on that task.”
At the forefront of that effort on the left in recent weeks is White Dudes for Harris, which held a widely publicized Zoom soon after Harris launched her bid and has continued engaging with men in the following weeks. Its organizers want to shift how Democrats talk about men and men’s issues.
“Over the last 20 to 30 years, while we have tailored messages for everyone else, we do not have tailored messages for men,” said Rocketto, the White Dudes for Harris co-founder. “We need to try other stuff. We need to create space for people.”
Mike Nellis, a fellow organizer at White Dudes for Harris, said he has personally dealt with mental health struggles and felt there had to be a space on the left for some of these problems to be openly discussed.
“If you look at the problems young men are facing: Lack of economic opportunity is one of them, lack of growth and wages is one of them. But you also have isolation and loneliness and suicidal ideation and these deaths of despair that are happening and plaguing particularly the white men community. And I can’t imagine another group of people in this country having [problems] like that where it wouldn’t be talked about all the time.”
