‘A real outlaw persona’: How young men in Pennsylvania helped catapult Donald Trump to victory

When conservative students at Indiana University of Pennsylvania encouraged their classmates to vote Republican back in 2020, they sometimes struggled to find potential supporters of Donald Trump.

This election season, drumming up votes for the Republican nominee wasn‘t nearly as challenging.

“A lot of people who I did not expect to be Trump supporters came up to me, asking me for stickers,” said IUP junior Blessing Mansallay, chairman of Turning Point USA’s chapter on campus. The right-leaning get-out-the-vote organization doubled its registration numbers at this school this election compared with 2020, the Philadelphia native said. “It was definitely a boost in morale when I noticed how many men were there.”

Days after a majority of voters in Pennsylvania and across the nation delivered a decisive electoral victory for Trump, attention has turned to a key demographic that helped vault him back to the presidency — young, Gen-Z men, including those who have been ready to vote for the once-and-future president since childhood.

Unlike women in the 18-to-29 demographic who have long offered reliable support to Democrats, men this age are continuing a shift to the right; this election, young men swung margins away from Democrats entirely, moving 30 points toward Trump compared with four years ago.

News of this voting trend has swept across social media, where Democratic operatives and shell-shocked supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris are conducting postmortems on how the party’s grip on young men seemingly evaporated — and how, if possible, the coalition can win them back.

Visit fraternity rows or the weightlifting area of campus gyms, Gen-Z men say, and the political groundswell is palpable.

When Susquehanna University College Republicans president Gianni Matteo went door to door registering students to vote this year, he recalled seeing a tapestry — a staple of any college dorm room — of the now-famous photo taken after Trump survived the July assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. — his fist in the air, his face bloodied.

“And I think that’s going to be in dorm rooms for years to come, right?” said Matteo, cochair of the Pennsylvania Federation of College Republicans. “Complete cultural icon.”

Trump further embedded himself in youth culture by making appearances at venues where young men could best find him. The 78-year-old candidate held a rally at Pennsylvania State University — where fraternity culture is at its peak — and featured members of the university’s wrestling team on stage, later touting their strength, their muscle, and their potential to fight undocumented immigrants at a rally over a week later in Reading.

Ryan Klein, president of the College Republicans at Penn State, lauded Trump’s decision to court young men on campus, and believes it paid off.

He recalled young voters flocking to his organization’s promo table on Election Day, snatching up all of the group’s 300 Trump signs.

“Our table was constantly full,” Klein said. “Meanwhile, the Democrats, they didn’t have people showing up.”

Trump has also aligned himself with billionaire Elon Musk, whose technological innovations were a good enough reason for Zachary Watkins, 22, a Trump voter from Bradford County, to line up outside a Delco high school on Oct. 17, at least an hour before the world’s richest man stumped for the Republican.

“He has worked his way up from where he started,” Watkins said of Musk “Which I think does resonate with a lot of people from Pa.”

And Trump went on Joe Rogan’s podcast — a top-ranked show, favored by young men — where, Matteo said, “it was literally just Donald Trump talking to a guy for three hours, just shooting the s—, and then sometimes like talking about politics.” Along with surviving the July assassination attempt, Matteo said, Trump’s appearance on Rogan’s podcast swayed undecided voters and humanized him — creating “a real outlaw persona” that resonated with men.

“They tried to indict him a million different times, and then they tried to shoot him, and they tried to shoot him again. … That’s a badass outlaw mentality that I think a lot of people are attracted to, especially men,” Matteo said.

Mansallay, with Turning Point USA, also commended Trump’s outreach to the right-wing and independent media sphere, mentioning the Republican’s campaign-trail appearances on podcasts like the Nelk Boys’ Full Send and This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von.

Long-form, unscripted podcasting has exploded in popularity with young voters and played a critical role in the 2024 presidential campaign, as both candidates courted the Gen-Z listeners who may rely on them as their only source of political news.

But few left-leaning shows have succeeded in pulling large-scale attention from Gen-Z men in the way those like Rogan, Von, and Charlie Kirk — the right-wing personality behind Turning Point USA — have in recent years.

“I think it’s been a shift since 2016, but has only shown its head now,” Mansallay said of those podcasting habits. “Young people don’t watch the news on TV at all anymore … the mainstream media’s stronghold on society has weakened, and if that continues, I think that would help Republicans in the future.”