Brothers stand up and deliver for their guy where it matters

The Republican nominee’s strategy to target voting-shy young men has paid off decisively at the polls.

Donald Trump sought out podcasters such as Joe Rogan, whose audience of millions skews heavily to young men. Picture: YouTube

In the end the bros broke big for Donald Trump, the votes of America’s disillusioned and formerly disengaged young men proving decisive for a vindicated Republican nominee.

If there was one constant in this seesawing contest it was how men and women lined up on opposite sides, accentuating the polarisation of the US electorate.

But the Trump card — so to speak — for the Republicans and their unconventional candidate was the chronically overlooked and underestimated bros drawn from Gen Z and the Millennials.

Women voters galvanised by the issue of abortion were supposed to propel Kamala Harris into the Oval Office. The Vice-President never stopped hammering that a Trump-appointed majority on the Supreme Court had struck down Roe v Wade and claimed he would further limit reproductive rights if returned to power.

The sisters did come through for the Democrats, but not in the numbers required in the handful of swing states where the election was decided. There, young men of all races and varied walks of life stood up for Mr Trump, justifying what seemed to be a risky strategy to woo them.

It will go down as his political masterstroke.

Don’t underestimate the perils of this approach. In 2020, Mr Trump won 41 per cent of men aged between 18 and 29, against 32 per cent of women. He ran the risk of preaching to the converted.

Offsetting the Democrats’ strength among university-educated suburbanites who reliably vote, with a cohort that doesn’t, could easily have backfired. Given only half of eligible young men turned out at the last election, Mr Trump’s first task was to get more of them to the ballot box. He sought out podcasters such as Joe Rogan, whose audience of millions skews heavily to young men, and peppered his language with coarse terms that spoke to them.

Exit polls conducted by US television networks and the Associated Press in the swing states of Georgia and North Carolina, both won by Mr Trump, showed he had won about 20 per cent of black men and a double-digit share of African-American voters overall. That was a big improvement from four years ago, when a defeated Mr Trump took 11 per cent of black voters in Georgia and just 7 per cent in North Carolina.

In lineball Pennsylvania, women sided with Ms Harris by 12 points, according to the exit polls. But this was shaded by the 14-point lead Mr Trump opened with male voters, well up on his 2020 share before that key state was called for him.

Mr Trump booked useful gains among Hispanics. NBC’s exit polling showed that Latino men broke for the former president by a 10-point margin nationally — 54 per cent to 44 per cent. This was another reversal from the last election, when they backed Joe Biden over Mr Trump by a margin of 59 per cent to 36 per cent.

Ms Harris also underperformed with Latino women, early analysis of the voting showed. While she commanded a 25-point advantage with this group, it was down from Mr Biden’s 39-point lead at the last election. This belied the purported damage inflicted on the Republican campaign by comedian Tony Hinchliffe’s gaffe at Mr Trump’s October 27 Madison Square Garden rally in New York City where he referred to Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage”.

The split between the genders was so pronounced that the Trump campaign used its final pitch to voters to explicitly call on men to vote. “All the men of America need to fulfil their duty, get to the voting booth, and end the invasion once and for all,” adviser Stephen Miller posted, driving home the former president’s focus on undocumented immigration.

Mr Trump’s targeting of young male voters reprised the success he had in 2016, in his boilover defeat of a heavily-favoured Hillary Clinton, with securing the support of working-class voters.

Clear majorities of both men and women without university degrees backed him again, including two-thirds of white men who didn’t have a tertiary qualification.