The Zoomer Zynergy that brought Trump back

Donald Trump has won the presidency for a second time — but the real surprise is the coalition of voters that put him there.

Women showed up less for Kamala Harris than they did for Joe Biden, Trump’s white working-class base didn’t falter, and Arab Americans made their mark in Dearborn, Michigan. But the most notable gains for the GOP, however, were with Hispanic men and young men.

With Hispanic men, according to CNN exit polls, the shift is remarkable: from +31 for Hillary Clinton, to +23 for Joe Biden, to +10 to Trump. Lots of credit is due to the burgeoning Spanish-speaking conservative media.

With young men, the trend is even more eye-opening. In Pennsylvania, men under thirty favored Trump by eighteen points, a demographic that Biden won by nine points in 2020, CBS reports. Similarly, in Michigan and North Carolina, the Republican led by double-digits, per ABC’s exit poll.

Fox News polling suggests that 46 percent of all under-thirties supported Trump. In terms of the gender gap, women voters between the ages of eighteen and forty-four supported Harris 9 percent more than men in the same group — a gap that while significant, many overestimated.

Anecdotally, of my five best friends in Washington, DC, none voted for Trump in 2020; two of them were self-proclaimed liberals at the time. This year, they all did. I got a call from my very apolitical brother on Election Day. “I went to vote with Andrés,” he told me, explaining that all of his friends voted for Trump. These are eighteen-year-olds. I never saw this level of enthusiasm when I was a high-schooler in 2016.

For years now, maximizing the youth turnout has been seen as a Democratic priority, with Republicans prudently sticking to more reliable demographics. Low youth turnout, for instance, was often cited as one of the main reasons Clinton lost — and higher turnout with the youngsters was credited for Biden’s electoral success. Recent Republican logic, then, was mostly focused on trying to depress turnout — not alter preferences. “They’ll become conservative as they grow older,” went the conventional wisdom. The close to 70 million Generation Z members, born between 1997 and 2012, who now make up about 20 percent of the population, terrified traditional Republican strategists. In 2016, most Zoomers couldn’t vote, but by 2030, all of us will be able to.

Back in the primary season, TikTok-using Vivek Ramaswamy fixated on penetrating the Zoomer voter market. Few seemed to want to take lessons from his failed campaign. Yet there was an obvious one: Republicans can appeal to the youth. 

A deep dive into the Iowa Caucus’s exit polls showed that despite quitting right the results came in, Ramaswamy did excellently with under-thirties. In fact, he performed more than five times better with younger Iowans than with those older than sixty-five.

What made Vivek a superstar in Gen Z politics was that he simply showed up. No other candidate back then appeared on my screen more than he did.

Fast forward to the general, with Vivek now serving as a Trump surrogate, and Trump and Vance took that strategy and refined it into an art. From sitting down with Logan Paul and Joe Rogan, Trump moved away from just doing the town halls and Fox News hits. He appeared on several podcasts, including with comedian Theo Von and livestreamer Adin Ross.

Ask your uncle who those last two are and you’ll likely get a blank stare. Ask a random frat bro and you’ll get their biographies. That’s the point. The idea that, in appealing to the kids, Trump would have to change his messaging was nonsensical from the start.

In the end, the old assumptions proved useless, because there are not many sixty-five-year-olds joining Adin’s stream — and thus the dangers of targeting the group were overstated. But also, even if your granny joined the stream, they wouldn’t get a different Trump. There was never anything to lose. 

An increased presence in spaces where Zoomers reside was all that Republicans needed. A few boomers, convinced that schools were turning the kids into Marxists, might have seen the investment as counterproductive.

In refusing to accept that Zoomers were a lost cause, Trump’s campaign has done more for the conservative movement than previously imaginable. In befriending influences like the Nelk Boys (again, ask a frat bro), Gen Z Trumpism emerged as its very unique cultural phenomenon. Suddenly, being a young Trump supporter meant more than having a MAGA hat. Customs were established — nicotine pouches and White Claws became their elixirs. 

Mean jokes and disgruntled old women meant nothing when all Trump needed were the boys. At the very least now, to honor those who carried him to victory, the 47th president must stand against the war on Zyn and in defense of all things bros hold close to their hearts.