Among the most striking images from the night of Donald Trump’s shock victory in 2016 are those depicting baby-faced young men in suits and MAGA hats, writhing in ecstatic glee. While much of that cohort is now old enough to have since purchased MAGA onesies for their own babies, a new pro-Trump group aims to tap directly into the same young male energy again.
Send the Vote is a new voter turnout initiative featuring megapopular pro-Trump influencers the Nelk Boys, along with various UFC fighters, in a pitch to the under-30 set. With a reported $20 million in funding, the new PAC seems poised to reach young male, Trump-amenable voters right where they live, and maybe even mobilize some of them come election day. What it seems far less likely to do, however, is reach any potential voters even somewhat on the fence—the same problem plaguing Trump’s campaign overall at this pivotal point in the election.
The state of play has gone through seismic shifts in the past couple weeks. When Trump picked 39-year old freshman Senator JD Vance as his running mate, the former president had just survived an assassination attempt, amid cratering support for his opponent, President Biden. Choosing the rabidly pro-Trump Vance was the electoral equivalent of a preemptive touchdown dance, playing to the base while further highlighting Biden’s advanced age. As soon as Biden took himself out of the race, though, and Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him at the top of the ticket, millions of potential voters were suddenly up for grabs—many of them young.
Harris’s campaign may be less than two weeks old, but it’s already proven adept at reaching beyond the kind of voters who were already committed to coming out for Biden in November. On the celebrity front, she’s been able to bring out big guns including Migos rapper Quavo and Megan Thee Stallion at a recent event in Atlanta, where the latter coined the voting bloc, Hotties for Harris. Perhaps more importantly, the pro-Harris group Won’t PAC Down has used some of its reported $25 million, and its stable of professional comedy writing talent, to come up with ads like the recent, “These guys are just weird,” whose virality suggests broad appeal.
Meanwhile, the pro-Trump influencers behind Send the Vote—the Nelk Boys’s John Shahidi is a cofounder—seem to understand they can’t compete with Harris for mainstream star power. It’s likely quite clear to them that the spectacle of a shirt-ripping Hulk Hogan at the Republican National Convention last month probably electrified nobody born after 1982. Although a smattering of rappers such as Lil Wayne and Sexxy Red have come out for Trump this cycle, the closest the campaign could muster in the way of a youth-courting star at the RNC was Amber Rose, who left many viewers scratching their heads.
Get out the bro
But while the Nelk Boys may not be mainstream, they’re certainly superstars in the eyes of many young voters. The comedic crew’s flagship YouTube channel has 8.8 million subscribers, and their podcast, Full Send, gets millions of downloads each month. Lest there be any doubt about who makes up those vast audiences, a quick scan of the Nelk Boys Instagram offers a bevy of bikini’d breasts and butts in between videos of recent interviewees Tucker Carlson and Trump himself. (Trump has repeatedly appeared on their podcast, including in an episode pulled by YouTube because of its disinformation about the 2020 election.) The Nelk Boys reside comfortably within the hypermasculine nexus of Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate, captivating the kind of disenfranchised young men who would have grown up listening to Eminem—at least before Eminem came out as staunchly anti-Trump.
These influencers have been targeting young men by staging Get Out the Vote drives at UFC events—a savvy move, given that 40% of the UFC’s male-skewing fanbase is between the ages of 18 and 34, and that Trump’s relationship with the organization goes back decades. But on the other hand, this effort seems to completely ignore many other potentially gettable voters. It’s like the PAC equivalent of Trump choosing Vance all over again, defiantly refusing any attempt at courting a broader coalition.
The strategy of kicking off Send the Vote with Vance’s August 2 appearance on the Full Send podcast only underscores the navel-gazing nature of this initiative. One of the main variables in the election that has shifted in the past couple weeks is the wisdom of Trump’s choice for VP. Beyond the fact that Vance in no way helps with the electoral map—he’s the junior senator of Ohio, a state Trump handily won by eight points in 2020—he has already proven singularly unpopular on the campaign trail. Broad swaths of the electorate now seem as appalled by Vance’s views toward women as they are thrilled by the widespread mockery he’s inspired.
Choosing Vance to help kick off an effort at energizing young voters seems about as deft at this point as choosing him to be on the ticket in the first place.
Meanwhile, the full extent of how VP Harris’s team will leverage her appeal to young voters remains to be seen. She has a war chest that grows by the day and a miraculous Rolodex of marquee names to call upon, and Won’t PAC Down has just begun rolling out comedic ads designed for a TikTok audience. While Trump’s top evangelists are preaching to the choir, Beyoncé may soon be taking a gargantuan chunk of undecided voters to church.
But the scariest thing for Trump and his allies isn’t even all the star power in Harris’s orbit. It’s the fact that 100,000 new voters registered during the first week of her campaign, many of them under 35. That kind of enthusiasm suggests she may not even need so many mainstream stars on her side—because a lot of young voters already see her as a star in her own right.