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(AP) — For years, Pat Verhaeghe didn’t think highly of Donald Trump as a leader.
Then Verhaeghe began seeing more of Trump’s campaign speeches online and his appearances at sporting events.
There was even the former president’s pairing with Bryson DeChambeau as part of the pro golfer’s YouTube channel series to shoot an under-50 round of golf while engaging in chitchat with his partner.
“I regret saying this, but a while ago I thought he was an idiot and that he wouldn’t be a good president,” said the 18-year-old first-time voter. “I think he’s a great guy now.”
Verhaeghe isn’t alone among his friends in suburban Detroit or young men across America. Although much of the electorate shifted right to varying degrees in 2024, young men were one of the groups that swung sharply toward Trump.
More than half of men under 30 supported Trump, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters, while Democrat Joe Biden had won a similar share of this group four years earlier. White men under 30 were solidly in Trump’s camp this year — about 6 in 10 voted for Trump — while young Latino men were split between the two candidates. Most Black men under 30 supported Democrat Kamala Harris, but about one-third were behind Trump.
Young Latino men’s views of the Democratic Party were much more negative than in 2020, while young Black men’s views of the party didn’t really move. About 6 in 10 Latino men under 30 had a somewhat or very favorable view of the Democrats in 2020, which fell to about 4 in 10 this year. On the other hand, about two-thirds of young Black men had a favorable view of the Democrats this year, which was almost identical to how they saw the party four years ago.
“Young Hispanic men, and really young men in general, they want to feel valued,” said Rafael Struve, deputy communications director for Bienvenido, a conservative group that focused on reaching young Hispanic voters for Republicans this year. “They’re looking for someone who fights for them, who sees their potential and not just their struggles.”
Struve cited the attempted assassination of Trump during a July rally in Pennsylvania as one of the catalyzing moments for Trump’s image among many young men. Trump, Struve said, was also able to reach young men more effectively by focusing on nontraditional platforms like podcasts and digital media outlets.
“Getting to hear from Trump directly, I think, really made all the difference,” Struve said of the former president’s appearances on digital media platforms and media catering to Latino communities, like town halls and business roundtables Trump attended in Las Vegas and Miami.
Not only did Trump spend three hours on Joe Rogan’s chart-topping podcast, but he also took up DeChambeau’s “Break 50” challenge for the golfer’s more than 1.6 million YouTube subscribers.
Trump already had an edge among young white men four years ago, although he widened the gap this year. About half of white men under 30 supported Trump in 2020, and slightly less than half supported Biden. Trump’s gains among young Latino and Black men were bigger. His support among both groups increased by about 20 percentage points, according to AP VoteCast — and their feelings toward Trump got warmer, too.
It wasn’t just Trump. The share of young men who identified as Republicans in 2024 rose as well, mostly aligning with support for Trump across all three groups.
“What is most alarming to me is that the election is clear that America has shifted right by a lot,” said William He, founder of Dream For America, a liberal group that works to turn out young voters and supported Harris’ presidential bid.
With his bombastic demeanor and a policy agenda centered on a more macho understanding of culture, Trump framed much of his campaign as a pitch to men who felt scorned by the country’s economy, culture, and political system. Young women also slightly swung toward the former president, though not to the degree of their male counterparts.
It’s unclear how many men simply did not vote this year. But there’s no doubt the last four years brought changes in youth culture and how political campaigns set out to reach younger voters.
Democrat Kamala Harris’ campaign rolled out policy agendas tailored to Black and Latino men, and the campaign enlisted a range of leaders in Black and Hispanic communities to make the case for the vice president. Her campaign began with a flurry of enthusiasm from many young voters, epitomized in memes and the campaign’s embrace of pop culture trends like the pop star Charli XCX’s “brat” aesthetic. Democrats hoped to channel that energy into their youth voter mobilization efforts.
“I think most young voters just didn’t hear the message,” said Santiago Mayer, executive director of Voters of Tomorrow, a liberal group that engages younger voters. Mayer said the Harris campaign’s pitch to the country was “largely convoluted” and centered on economic messaging that he said wasn’t easily conveyed to younger voters who were not already coming to political media.
“And I think that the policies themselves were also very narrow and targeted when what we really needed was a simple, bold economic vision,” said Mayer.
Trump also embraced pop culture by appearing at UFC fights, and football games and appearing alongside comedians, music stars, and social media influencers. His strategists believed that the former president’s ability to grab attention and make his remarks go viral did more for the campaign than paid advertisements or traditional media appearances.
Trump’s campaign also heavily cultivated networks of online conservative platforms and personalities supportive of him while also engaging a broader universe of podcasts, streaming sites, digital media channels, and meme pages open to hearing him.
“The right has been wildly successful in infiltrating youth political culture online and on campus in the last couple of years, thus radicalizing young people towards extremism,” said He, who cited conservative activist groups like Turning Point USA as having an outsize impact in online discourse. “And Democrats have been running campaigns in a very old-fashioned way. The battleground these days is cultural and increasingly on the internet.”
Republicans may lose their broad support if they don’t deliver on improving Americans’ lives, Struve cautioned. Young men, especially, may drift from the party in a post-Trump era if the party loses the president-elect’s authenticity and bravado.
Bienvenido, for one group, will double down in the coming years to solidify and accelerate the voting pattern shifts seen this year, Struve said.
“We don’t want this to be a one-and-done thing,” he said.
In the days after the presidential election, Sadie Perez began carrying pepper spray with her around campus. Her mom also ordered her and her sister a self-defense kit that included keychain spikes, a hidden knife key, and a personal alarm.
It’s a response to an emboldened fringe of right-wing “manosphere” influencers who have seized on Republican Donald Trump’s presidential win to justify and amplify misogynistic derision and threats online. Many have appropriated a 1960s abortion rights rallying cry, declaring “Your body, my choice” at women online and on college campuses.
For many women, the words represent a worrying harbinger of what might lie ahead as some men perceive the election results as a rebuke of reproductive rights and women’s rights.
“The fact that I feel like I have to carry around pepper spray like this is sad,” said Perez, a 19-year-old political science student in Wisconsin. “Women want and deserve to feel safe.”
Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focusing on polarization and extremism, said she had seen a “very large uptick in several types of misogynistic rhetoric immediately after the election,” including some “extremely violent misogyny.”
“I think many progressive women have been shocked by how quickly and aggressively this rhetoric has gained traction,” she said.
The phrase “Your body, my choice” has been largely attributed to a post on the social platform X from Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and far-right internet personality who dined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida two years ago. In statements responding to criticism of that event, Trump said he had “never met and knew nothing about” Fuentes before he arrived.
Mary Ruth Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said the phrase transforms the iconic abortion rights slogan into an attack on women’s right to autonomy and a personal threat.
“The implication is that men should have control over or access to sex with women,” said Ziegler, a reproductive rights expert.
Fuentes’ post had 35 million views on X within 24 hours, according to a report by Frances-Wright’s think tank, and the phrase spread rapidly to other social media platforms.
Women on TikTok have reported seeing it inundate their comment sections. The slogan also has made its way offline with boys chanting it in middle schools or men directing it at women on college campuses, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue report and social media reports. One mother said her daughter heard the phrase on her college campus three times, the report said.
School districts in Wisconsin and Minnesota have sent notices about the language to parents. T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase were pulled off Amazon.
Perez said she has seen men respond to shared Snapchat stories for their college class with “Your body, my choice.”
“It makes me feel disgusted and infringed upon,” she said. “... It feels like going backward.”
Misogynistic attacks have been part of the social media landscape for years. But Frances-Wright and others who track online extremism and disinformation said language glorifying violence against women or celebrating the possibility of their rights being stripped away has spiked since the election.
Online declarations for women to “Get back in the kitchen” or to “Repeal the 19th,” a reference to the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote, have spread rapidly. In the days surrounding the election, the extremism think tank found that the top 10 posts on X calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment received more than 4 million views collectively.
A man holding a sign with the words “Women Are Property” sparked an outcry at Texas State University. The man was not a student, faculty or staff, and was escorted off campus, according to the university’s president. The university is “exploring potential legal responses,” he said.
Anonymous rape threats have been left on the TikTok videos of women denouncing the election results. And on the far-flung reaches of the web, 4chan forums have called for “rape squads” and the adoption of policies in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a dystopian book and TV series depicting the dehumanization and brutalization of women.
“What was scary here was how quickly this also manifested in offline threats,” Frances-Wright said, emphasizing that online discourse can have real-world impacts.
Previous violent rhetoric on 4chan has been connected to racially motivated and antisemitic attacks, including a 2022 shooting by a white supremacist in Buffalo that killed 10 people. Anti-Asian hate incidents also rose as politicians, including Trump, used words such as “Chinese virus” to describe the COVID-19 pandemic. And Trump’s language targeting Muslims and immigrants in his first campaign correlated with spikes in hate speech and attacks on these groups, Frances-Wright said.
The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reported similar rhetoric, with “numerous violent misogynistic trends” gaining traction on right-wing platforms such as 4chan and spreading to more mainstream ones such as X since the election.
Throughout the presidential race, Trump’s campaign leaned on conservative podcasts and tailored messaging toward disaffected young men. As Trump took the stage at the Republican National Convention over the summer, the song “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” by James Brown blared from the speakers.
One of several factors to his success in this election was modestly boosting his support among men, a shift concentrated among younger voters, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. But Trump also won support from 44% of women aged 18 to 44, according to AP VoteCast.
To some men, Trump’s return to the White House is seen as a vindication, gender and politics experts said. For many young women, the election felt like a referendum on women’s rights and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris ’ loss felt like a rejection of their own rights and autonomy.
“For some of these men, Trump’s victory represents a chance to reclaim a place in society that they think they are losing around these traditional gender roles,” Frances-Wright said.
None of the current online rhetoric is being amplified by Trump or anyone in his immediate orbit. But Trump has a long history of insulting women, and the spike in such language comes after he ran a campaign that was centered on masculinity and repeatedly attacked Harris over her race and gender. His allies and surrogates also used misogynistic language about Harris throughout the campaign.
“With Trump’s victory, many of these men felt like they were heard, they were victorious. They feel that they have potentially a supporter in the White House,” said Dana Brown, executive director of the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics.
Brown said some young men feel they’re victims of discrimination and have expressed mounting resentment for the successes of the women’s rights movement, including #MeToo. The tension also has been influenced by socioeconomic struggles.
As women become the majority on college campuses and many professional industries see increasing gender diversity, it has “led to young men scapegoating women and girls, falsely claiming it’s their fault they’re not getting into college anymore as opposed to looking inward,” Brown said.
Perez, the political science student, said she and her sister have been leaning on each other, their mother, and other women in their lives to feel safer amid the online vitriol. They text each other to make sure they get home safely. They have girls’ nights to celebrate wins, including a female majority in student government at their campus in the University of Wisconsin system.
“I want to encourage my friends and the women in my life to use their voices to call out this rhetoric and to not let fear take over,” she said.