It’s an accepted fact at this point that young men are flocking to Donald Trump. What’s less accepted is why.
I went to the center of the universe for young male Trump supporters — an Alabama vs. Georgia football game — to investigate why Gen Z has the biggest political gender gap. The answers from young men were somewhere between Dave Ramsey and Larry the Cable Guy.
As one Alabama fan told me, “Shit, my pockets liked Trump.”
What is clear is that the split between young male and female voters is growing. About two-thirds of women under the age of 30 plan to vote for Kamala Harris, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. More than half of men in that age group — 53% — plan to vote for Trump.
If you ask these guys why they’re so taken with the former president, most will give you an economic reason — an answer so safe that it almost seemed disingenuous. At these historic numbers, backing Paul Ryan for economic reasons, with his actuarial charts and sleeves rolled up, would make more sense than supporting Trump.
But there had to be something about the former president that made him different from these guys, drawing them to Trump’s larger-than-life image and norm-shattering ways. Why are young men so in love with a man who lied or misled, on average, 21 times a day when he was in office?
Sure enough, there was a something. It’s just that there was a clear sample bias; as it turns out, if you ask SEC football fans, at an SEC football game, why they like Trump, SEC football will come up.
“You can’t convince me Kamala Harris knows a darn thing about sports,” Aaron Doucet, a Louisiana transplant to Alabama, told me.
“It’s simple: Trump is based,” he said. “Can you picture Tim Walz and Kamala Harris coming over here?”
If you don’t understand how Southern folks love SEC football, it may be hard to understand why, in the eyes of these fans, it brings a billionaire former president down to the trampled grass of an Alabama quad.
But whether drinking the holy water of a tailgate (Bud Light) or seated inside the cathedral of SEC football (Bryant-Denny Stadium), there’s a religious experience created over the shared joy of football. And that shared joy, Doucet told me, doesn’t end with sports.
“Trump is more relatable, and people scoff at that,” Doucet said. Yeah, he said, Trump’s a billionaire. Yeah, he lived in New York. But to Doucet, that doesn’t change a thing. “He eats McDonald’s, hangs out with us,” he said.
At a tailgate where fraternity bros who love Trump are as ubiquitous as crushed beer cans, I sought out the guys who looked like they could articulate why they were voting Republican. I ended up on a bench with Evan Cochran, a blue-collar worker from Bessemer, Alabama.
Cochran isn’t the stereotypical Trump supporter from Alabama. He prefers religion to politics — “It matters who’s president, but at the same time, if you ain’t got Jesus, you ain’t got nobody” — and doesn’t believe a person should be praised for their power or position. Nevertheless, he is a Trump supporter.
He disagreed with Harris’ positions on social issues, but he said that’s not why he favors Trump. “The most important is just, for me, as a blue-collar worker, he’s trying to help us out,” Cochran, an electrician, said. “He’s just a normal guy at the end of the day.”
But if relatability was actually a consideration, surely Gov. Tim Walz could contest the drift of young men to Trump. A former teacher and assistant football coach, he may be the closest thing to a normal person — at least to these fans — on either party’s ticket.
As I spoke with two fans from California, Walz was attending a football game 12 hours north: Michigan vs. Minnesota. But the pair wasn’t having it.
“It’s stupid; they’re using this thing as a stunt,” one of the men, Ryder, now a senior at Georgia, told me. He didn’t believe that the former president was using the Alabama game in the same way. “Trump has done this in the past,” Ryder said.
Some Michigan fans apparently agreed — or they just didn’t appreciate a Democrat of any ilk visiting their stadium. Unlike Trump’s visit later that night, fans gave Walz a reception colder than the rain in Ann Arbor.
Since 2004, young voters have reliably favored Democratic presidential candidates. Polls show that to be true again this year. But Trump’s popularity with young men is eating into the advantage. (The big thing saving it is that women are skewing toward Democrats more overwhelmingly.)
Young women cite abortion as a motivating factor to support Harris. Polls have consistently shown that women trust Harris more than Trump on the issue by a significant margin. Men also believe Harris will be better on abortion. But it’s less of a draw for young guys.
For the young guys, economic reasons are a much bigger consideration.
The numbers actually back up what I was hearing anecdotally: Young men are more concerned about the economy. And, as The New York Times recently pointed out in its own investigation of the widening gender gap, it’s young men who don’t have college degrees who are particularly taken with Trump.
“After we’ve seen such economic stagnation, I think there’s a lot of frustration with people on that,” GOP political consultant Eamon Keegan told me.
Keegan added that there’s “probably some nostalgia from Trump’s presidency,” when views on the economy were stronger, even though most economic indicators now show a better economy than even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Of course, one Alabama football game does not represent the complex political motivations of young men writ large. It is far from a perfect representation of America. But I wanted to look at the support among young men here because it is imperfect.
I thought these guys would point to reasons beyond the economy. I thought we could get real in that way that young guys at football games tend to get real. But my conversations kept coming back to Bill Clinton’s unofficial slogan from 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
“It’s a no-brainer for me,” said Doucet, who owns a pool-cleaning business in Prattville, Alabama. When he started his business in 2017, the prices were “a certain way.”
“I was paying $65 for 25 pounds of chlorine chalk. Now, it’s almost $200,” he said. He hasn’t been able to increase the prices of his services in a corresponding way.
For Cochran, it also came down to the money — namely, who he thought would keep more of it in his bank account.
“Everything’s gone up since Biden was in office, and I’m hoping that, if we get Trump back in here, we can get it back, at least, down a little bit,” he said.
Economists overwhelmingly agree that Trump’s plans would actually increase inflation more. Trump wants to cut taxes, cut interest rates and impose new tariffs while deporting millions of low-wage immigrant workers. In June, 16 Nobel Prize economists famously wrote that they were “deeply concerned” about what a second Trump administration would do to the economy.
Ryder dismissed those arguments in six words. “Ain’t nobody got time for that,” he said.
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Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.