US election: Why young men supported Donald Trump
2024 in Gastonia, North Carolina. With three days until the election, Trump is campaigning for re-election in the battleground state of North Carolina, where recent polls have the former president and his opponent, Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris in a dead heat. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP (Photo by CHIP SOMODEVILLA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP)
Focusing her campaign on abortion rights, Kamala Harris believed she had found a winning strategy to attract women voters.
But it was Donald Trump who claimed victory, increasing his support among American men — particularly young men.
While young people generally tend to lean more liberal, Trump’s presidential campaign effectively capitalised on youth masculinity, tapping into interests such as combat sports and cryptocurrency, and appearing on male-dominated podcasts.
“If you are a man in this country and you don’t vote for Donald Trump, you’re not a man,” said Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist focused on the youth vote.
Trump won the presidency with 54 per cent of men voting Republican, a slight increase from the 51 percent who supported him in 2020, according to exit polling by NBC.
However, what was particularly notable was the support from younger voters aged 18–29, with 49 percent of young men voting for Trump — challenging previous assumptions that young people generally lean left.
As Elon Musk — tech entrepreneur, billionaire, and major Trump supporter — put it on Election Day: “the cavalry has arrived.”
Trump’s gains reflect a growing gender divide among young voters: women under 29 overwhelmingly favoured Harris, with a 61-37 split over Trump.
“There is a lot of latent sexism in the US electorate, both among men and women,” Tammy Vigil, an associate professor of media science at Boston University, told AFP. “Trump’s campaign allowed people to indulge their worst impulses and embrace divisiveness of many kinds.”
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Spencer Thomas, a Harris supporter, noted that many of his peers who voted for Trump were focused on the economy.
“They were more concerned with economic policies and similar issues than abortion rights,” said the Howard University student, attending a historically Black college in Washington.
The macho tone of Trump’s campaign — rejecting political correctness, “wokeness,” and other forms of liberal caution — attracted many Black men, despite the campaign’s overt racism at times.
Among Black men under 45, roughly three in ten voted for Trump — double the rate from 2020, further eroding the Democrats’ traditional base.
As Democrats analyse what went wrong, there will be no simple explanation.
But “Black and Latino men might overlook the racism of the Trump campaign because Trump appealed to their sense of machismo,” Vigil suggested.
Trump’s appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, with an audience that skews young and male, “was aimed at motivating young men to turn out,” said Kathleen Dolan, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
“His overall display of masculinity was designed to appeal to his base — men and women who like him because they see him as ‘tough’ and a ‘leader,’ and who clearly aren’t offended by his comments,” she told AFP.
Whatever Trump’s unique appeal was, it resonated with voters.
According to exit polling from Edison Research, some 54 per cent of Latino men voted for Trump on Tuesday — an extraordinary 18-point gain for Republicans compared to 2020.
