Harris Battles for the Bro Vote

Consider the split screen. On the right, billionaire Elon Musk is stumping for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania and offering $1 million checks to supporters who sign a petition from his PAC. On the left, billionaire Mark Cuban is opening for Kamala Harris at a campaign event in Wisconsin. On the right, professional wrestler Logan Paul and Barstool bro Dave Portnoy are embracing Trump. On the left, musicians Eminem and Bruce Springsteen are boosting Harris.

All these efforts are part of a late scramble to win over a demographic group that could tip a tight election: men, particularly young ones. Although Trump won a majority of men in both 2016 and 2020, Democrats have historically led with men under 30. This year that may change. In the last three New York Times/Siena polls, Trump has led Harris among young men by more than 20 points. John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Politics, says his surveys of voters under 30 show that young men are shifting towards Republicans by a 14-point swing compared to 2020. An Oct. 22 poll from the progressive group Data for Progress found that while young women favor Harris by a 37-point margin, young men under 30 are evenly split between the candidates.

In an election that could feature one of the most dramatic gender gaps in recent memory, Republicans are scrambling to capitalize. According to the Young Men Research Initiative, Republican-aligned groups have outspent Democrat-aligned groups by more than 10-to-1 this October in targeting men under 44 in the pivotal swing state of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Musk, who has become something of a cult hero among tech-obsessed young bros, has poured $75 million into his pro-Trump America PAC over the last three months, becoming one of the former President’s most valuable surrogates in the process.

The Harris campaign appears to be waking up to the challenge. To reach young men, a campaign official says, it has bought advertising during professional baseball and basketball games, as well as college football contests and the sports betting site DraftKings. Harris has leaned into the sports guy bona fides of her running mate, Tim Walz, a former high-school football coach, while tapping basketball stars Steph Curry, Magic Johnson and Chris Paul as co-chairs of an Athletes for Harris affinity group. It has launched a channel on Twitch, where 7 in 10 users are male, and placed digital ads on video-game websites like IGN and Fandom.

Read More: What Kind of President Would Kamala Harris Be?

The Harris campaign has recalibrated its media strategy, with the Vice President logging appearances with Howard Stern, CharlamagneTha God, and basketball podcast All The Smoke. She made a recent stop at Telemundo, announcing a policy agenda specifically tailored to the economic concerns of Latino men, a week after unveiling a similar economic agenda tailored to Black men. A campaign official says internal polling shows the Democrats still hold the edge with young men, a bloc that the campaign believes will generally make their decisions late. Harris has more work to do with young men, the official says, but views them as one of several “huge persuasion targets that are requiring a lot of time and effort and money to win over.”   

Why exactly young men have drifted away from the Democrats is a question party strategists, pollsters, and nonpartisan observers have been examining for some time. “I don’t think it’s a stampede to the right. I think it’s more a detachment away from the left,” says Richard Reeves, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonpartisan research institute devoted to studying issues related to boys and men. Many of the young men peeling away from the Democrats came of age during in the social paroxysms of recent years: #MeToo, DEI, online cancellations—cultural changes that some men interpreted as hostile to them. Democrats, Reeves says, are “very strongly leaning into their identity as: we’re here for women and women’s rights. If you’re a young man, you don’t see yourself.” 

In 2020, President Joe Biden won roughly 60% of young voters. But in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, many young men grew increasingly alienated from the Democratic party. Isolated during lockdowns, some were pulled deeper and deeper into online bro cultures. A New York Times poll in May, before Harris entered the race, found that one of the best predictors of defection from Biden was having a favorable view of the podcaster Joe Rogan. “These are the young men who spent thousands of hours during Covid listening to bro-casters talking about the Democratic Party,” says Della Volpe. “They see Trump more as an antihero than a villain.”

Some of the young men skeptical of Trump’s policies appear drawn to his persona. They think he’s funny. And more importantly, he represents a thumb in the eye of the liberal social-justice warriors whom many young men feel have been scolding them for nearly a decade. 

According to a September Blueprint poll, more than half of men agree that cancel culture is a real phenomenon that can lead to men losing their jobs or having their lives wrecked because of a bad joke or a different opinion, and 60% agree that a lot of men have been hurt by unfair or untrue allegations. Nearly 6 in 10 men polled said they thought the Democratic Party was “overly concerned with wokeness.” But it’s not clear they’ll vote on these feelings: The same poll found that cancel culture and political correctness were less important to men than standard political issues like the economy and inflation.

Read More: How Far Trump Would Go.

“I think a lot of it is a reaction to social progressivism done the wrong way,’” says David Hogg, the progressive activist who co-founded Leaders We Deserve, which helps elect young progressive candidates. Young men, he says, feel like progressives look down on them for saying the wrong thing, even when it’s a mistake. That discomfort, he says, is enough to drive them away from the Democratic Party, even if they don’t necessarily agree with Republicans. “They would rather be around someone they don’t agree with who doesn't judge them,” Hogg says, “than somebody they do agree with who judges them constantly.” 

Social and economic dislocation could also be a factor. Young men are finishing college at lower rates than young women. Young men without a college degree are less likely to be in the labor force than they were in earlier generations. More than 6 in 10 men under 30 are single, according to a 2022 Pew survey. “When you’re unsure of where you’re headed, a strongman persona could be attractive,” says Della Volpe. 

Legislation passed during the Biden-Harris Administration has helped produce an economy recovery that has benefited many young men. But Harris doesn’t talk about those accomplishments as delivering jobs for men; in fact, Democrats seem to go out of their way not to describe them that way.  “Even when you pass a major piece of legislation that would help more men than women, God forbid you would ever say that,” says Reeves, who says he estimates that roughly two-thirds of the manufacturing jobs created during the Biden-Harris Administration would go to working-class men. “There’s no attempt to take credit for that.”

Even if Democrats did frame their achievements as benefiting men, it’s not clear that young men would see it. Many of these voters are getting their news from social media, where right-wing influencers have been building massive youth audiences for years. Trump and his surrogates have been regulars on the podcast “manosphere.” In the last year, the Republican nominee has appeared with streamer Adin Ross, went on Theo Von’s podcast, and has been interviewed by Paul, a YouTube influencer. He recently appeared on a Barstool podcast, and is backed by arch-bro Portnoy, who runs the popular Barstool media empire. 

Some Democrats are nervous the party was too late to realize the problem. These Democrats worry that the party has focused too much on courting women voters, LGBTQ voters, and culturally progressive voters, alienating too many men in the process. “There’s a recognition that we’re losing men, and the things that we’re doing around men haven’t been working,” says Ross Morales Rocketto, a Democratic organizer who founded White Dudes for Harris. 

At the same time, the Trump campaign’s laser-focus on young men is an investment in a voting bloc that doesn't have a great track record of showing up. Young women have voted at higher rates than young men in every Presidential election since 1996; in 2020, the turnout difference was 11 points. Many of the young men gravitated toward Trump are attracted to him precisely because of their disillusionment with politics— not exactly a winning recipe for civic engagement. Meanwhile, abortion is likely to solidify young women as an even more reliably Democratic voting bloc than they’ve been in the past. 

“The Trump campaign clearly feels like the only path to victory is through men,” says Morales Rocketto. “‘Can Trump actually get those people out to vote? I don’t think anyone knows the answer to that question.”