The bro vote: Trump and Harris duel over what it means to be a man in America

WASHINGTON ? It might have seemed like a curious pairing. There was former President Donald Trump inside his Mar-a-Lago home. Next to him was a 23-year-old internet celebrity known for livestreaming video games.

"We're going to get some good ratings today," the 78-year-old Trump said to the host, Adin Ross, at the top of a 77-minute friendly livestreamed interview last month viewed 2.6 million times on YouTube.

Yet this was hardly a detour from the 2024 campaign trail for the Republican nominee. The young, largely male audience Ross attracts – particularly people not usually tuned in to politics – made his livestream an ideal forum for Trump.

As he works to overcome Democratic nominee Kamala Harris' advantage with female voters, Trump has aggressively courted young male voters by leaning into a version of his own brand of masculinity. Trump, who has long presented himself as a leader who exudes strength, has doubled down on that image this election to attract a long-overlooked voting bloc.

Some call it "the bro vote."

To win in November, the Trump campaign has identified undecided male voters under 50 that make up about 11% of the electorate across the top battleground states, according to a campaign analysis first reported by The Washington Post. Although the group is mostly white, Trump also is trying to reach young Black, Latino and Asian American voters.

More: Gun-owner Kamala Harris says 'they're getting shot' if intruder breaks into her house

On the other side, the Harris campaign has embraced a different version of masculinity to make its own appeal to young male voters who have increasingly voted Republican.

Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, talks about his time as a high school football coach and his service in the National Guard and casts himself as the everyday loving dad. Meanwhile, Harris' husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, has sought to show a different idea of manliness: supporting your wife even if it means halting your own professional career.

"Gender is everywhere in this election, but masculinity is front and center in a way that's perhaps unprecedented," said Jackson Katz, a scholar on gender and masculinity who this month released a new film, "The Man Card: 50 Years of Gender, Power and the American Presidency."

"Gender is always a central factor in American presidential politics, but it's hiding in plain sight until a woman runs. When a woman runs, her gender makes visible what's been there all along."

More: 'So goes Pennsylvania': Inside the Harris-Trump fight for top 2024 battleground

The great gender divide of 2024

Competing notions of masculinity have collided in an election with an especially wide gender gap.

A USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll last week of likely voters in Pennsylvania – one of the top battleground states that could decide the election – found Harris leading with female voters 56%-39% and Trump on top with male voters 53%-41%. Harris' 17-point advantage among women, compared with Trump's 12-point lead with men, helps explain Harris' 49%-46% lead in the state in the poll.

Among young voters, the gap is even wider. A nationwide USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll this month found Harris leading female voters ages 18 to 34 years old 63%-27% and Trump leading male voters in the same age bracket 45%-37%.

More: Harris leads Trump in Pennsylvania — and two bellwether PA counties — exclusive poll finds

If elected, Harris would become the first female president in U.S. history. She has campaigned aggressively on abortion rights after the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and a constitutional right to an abortion – an issue that over the past two years has resonated among many female voters, including independents and some Republicans.

"It is clear that they just don't trust women. Well, we trust women," Harris said Friday in a speech on abortion rights in Atlanta.

A Trump campaign official rejected any suggestion that it is "surrendering female voters," pointing to Americans' concerns with the economy and the southern border as winning issues for Trump with women.

Yet Trump's efforts to expand support with young male voters has taken the former president to Ross' livestream show, podcasts by comedian Theo Von and controversial influencer Logan Paul, a UFC fight and a Formula One race. Trump has embraced bitcoin – which is most popular among young white men – and he's set to attend the Alabama-Georgia football game later this month.

"We're going to make this country so strong and so great," Trump said during his livestream last month with Ross. Trump told the young audience watching, "You'll love your life and you'll be successful."

Trump's version of masculinity couldn't be missed at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July, before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

More: Trump offered Cybertruck, Rolex as gifts during appearance on Adin Ross's livestream

Trump entered the third night of the convention to James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" booming in the arena. He delivered his convention address in front of a backdrop that displayed his last name, "Trump," in oversized letters. He wore a bandage over his left year, days after surviving an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Supporters held signs that read "Make America Strong Again" and "Trump = success, Biden = failure."

Wrestling icon Hulk Hogan fired up the crowd by ripping off his shirt. Kid Rock performed a rock-rap anthem inspired by Trump's assassination scare. "Fight! Fight!" the singer yelled, his right fist clinched to mimic Trump's reaction before he was ushered away by Secret Service agents seconds after the shooting.

"It was just a complete four-day spectacle of a sort of hyper-masculine bravado," Katz said. "It was so over the top. It wasn't hidden anywhere."

'Nobody likes weakness'

Gender and masculinity are themes also echoed by Trump's running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.

In past statements that have surfaced on the campaign trail, Vance has disparaged women and teachers who don't have children. And Vance has tried to cultivate an image, through his book "Hillbilly Elegy," of a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to overcome poverty and family troubles in Appalachia.

Timothy Denhollander, 22, attended a Trump campaign rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, last month, wearing a Trump cowboy hat and a shirt with the image of a bloodied Trump, fist in the air, after being shot.

Part of Trump’s appeal is that he supports what Denhollander, a devout Christian who lives with his parents and 13 siblings in Pittstown, New Jersey, considers traditional gender roles.

“Being a Christian, the man is supposed to be the top of the household,” said Denhollander, who works mowing grass at solar power installations.

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Billie Carbone, 63, a retired teacher's aide and Trump supporter from Lake Ariel, Pennsylvania, said she believes Trump is winning over male voters “because he talks like a real man."

“He says what he thinks," Carbone said as she waited for the Wilkes-Barre rally to start. “You have to, in order to survive, talk tough.” She added that "when you portray yourself weak" it is like "blood in the water."

"Nobody likes weakness, really," she said.

Emhoff: 'Women in this country are sick and tired of weak men'

The Harris campaign has embraced a different idea of masculinity through two top male messengers: Walz – the plainspoken Midwest governor from working-class roots – and Emhoff, a former high-powered entertainment attorney who, as second gentleman, is Harris' most public defender.

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Walz's former students and players from his high school football helped introduce the vice presidential nominee to a national audience. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar described Walz as "the dad in plaid." There was also the image of Walz's son, Gus, crying in the crowd out of sheer joy, shouting, "That's my dad!"

Walz has been deployed by the Harris campaign heavily in the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan that could determine the election. It's partially a play to white blue-collar voters who have increasingly become disaffected with the Democratic Party.

More: Campaigning for wife Kamala Harris, Doug Emhoff embodies (and redefines) masculinity

In his rollout at the Democratic convention, Emhoff presented himself as the dorky dad – the guy who left an awkward first voicemail on Harris' cellphone at the beginning of their romance. Emhoff also vouched for his wife's toughness, which Harris has played up by emphasizing her roles as a former prosecutor and California attorney general who stood up to powerful interests and put criminals behind bars.

“We all know cowards are weak, and Kamala Harris can smell weakness," Emhoff said in his speech. In the weeks since the convention, Emhoff has maintained that tone, calling Harris a "badass warrior" while arguing the manly thing is to defend women and their reproductive rights

Emhoff told supporters at a fundraiser this month in Brooklyn: "Women in this country are sick and tired of weak men trying to take away their fundamental rights and then gaslight you about it. We're sick and tired of it. And the women in this country will never humble themselves before Donald Trump."

A risky strategy for Trump campaign?

Michael Kimmel, a retired sociology professor at Stony Brook University and author of the book "Angry White Men," said that "all kinds of different models of masculinity are on display" this election year. With Walz and Emhoff, he said, "you have models of men who publicly are loving fathers, who publicly are supportive of women."

"There's clearly a battle for young men, particularly Gen Z men, right now going on," Kimmel said, adding that Republicans have "perceived correctly" a growing gender gap in which young women are shifting further to the left politically than young men.

A Gallup poll this month found 40% of women ages 18 to 29 consider themselves "liberal" or "very liberal" – up from 28% from 2001 to 2007. Conversely, 25% of men ages 18 to 29 consider themselves "liberal" or "very liberal," and the percentage has stayed relatively flat for several years.

"The Republicans see that as a real opportunity for them. So they're playing up sort of the frat boy video gamer kind of 'dudeness' as a way to attract those young guys," Kimmel said.

The obvious risk in banking on the male vote, however, is that historically more women vote in elections than men. In the 2020 presidential election, 82.2 million women voted, according to the Center for American Women and Politics, versus 72.5 million men.

And polls suggest Trump isn't winning young male voters by the same margin Harris is leading female voters.

Donye White, 35, a barber at Cuts & Shaves Barbershop in Allentown, Pennsylvania, said he voted for Trump in 2016, skipped the 2020 election but plans to vote for Harris in 2024. He pointed to the historic opportunity of electing the first female president.

"I'm simply voting for her because we've never seen this before," White said. "Not only the fact that it's a Black person, but a woman. Like I've told everyone, we've let almost 50 white guys try. What's the problem in maybe letting someone else try?

"The fact that we're in 2024 and we're still saying 'first anything' in America is crazy."

Trump, of course, has defeated a female presidential nominee before. This time, he might need to lean on men to help him do it again.

Contributing: Zac Anderson

Reach Joey Garrison on X, formerly Twitter, @joeygarrison.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Bro voters: How masculinity is shaping Harris-Trump 2024 election