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Donald Trump has been on a tour of the Gen Z influencer ecosystem, from Theo Von to Adin Ross. In this episode of “The Opinions,” Daniel Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, argues that Trump is trying to win the support of young men, a once loyal Democratic constituency. Mr. Pfeiffer says Democrats ignore these voters at their peril, for the 2024 election and beyond: “There is no post-Trump era if Gen Z men become firmly adherents of MAGA philosophy,” he explains.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of the audio piece. To listen to this piece, click the play button below.
Daniel Pfeiffer: I’m Dan Pfeiffer, co-host of “Pod Save America,” author of the Message Box newsletter, and I was Barack Obama’s communications director.
This week, Kamala Harris announced a huge media blitz. She’s doing the traditional stuff like “60 Minutes” and “The View,” but she’s also doing podcasts like “Call Her Daddy,” which is a huge podcast with a massive audience of young women.
Audio clip of “Call Her Daddy”:
Alex Cooper: I have seen girls on the street walk up to men, do you know where a tampon goes? Do you know how many we use? Do you know what a X or Y or Z is? And they don’t know the answer.
Kamala Harris: I was the first vice president or president to ever in office go to a reproductive health care clinic. Ever.
Cooper: Really?
Harris: Yes. Yes.
Pfeiffer: Appearing on these sort of nontraditional outlets is exactly what President Obama did to reach out to young voters when I worked with him back in 2008.
A huge part of our strategy in 2008 was to mobilize young voters, people who do not normally vote, who were excited by President Obama’s candidacy, to get them to actually vote. And President Obama did things that most candidates had not done much of before.
Clip of David Letterman: Our first guest tonight is the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your senator from the great state of Illinois, Barack Obama.
Pfeiffer: He was on late-night comedy shows. He appeared on “Monday Night Football.”
Clip of Barack Obama: I would like to announce to my hometown of Chicago and all of America that I am ready for the Bears to go all the way, baby. Dun dun dun dun!
Pfeiffer: All in ways to reach young voters who are interested in President Obama, interested in politics, but do not consume traditional news through traditional sources.
I’m glad Kamala Harris is appearing on podcasts like “Call Her Daddy” and another podcast called “All the Smoke,” which is hosted by two former N.B.A. players and has a largely male audience. This is exactly what we need to be doing as a party. But even with this blitz, we have to recognize that we have to do more to reach out to young men. The Trump team is making a huge bet that they can peel off just enough young men to prevent Kamala Harris from getting the votes she needs to go to the White House in November.
Younger voters in general, but younger men in particular don’t turn to the traditional sources of news that a lot of us think of. They don’t watch cable news. They don’t read newspapers, either in dead tree version or online. They mostly get their news from social media. A recent Pew poll shows that four in 10 voters under 30 get much of their news from TikTok in particular. The connection between younger voters, and younger men in particular, and traditional media has been largely severed in a lot of ways.
And so Donald Trump is appearing on podcasts, YouTube shows, he’s appearing with TikTok and social media influencers.
All in a very targeted, pretty strategic attempt to reach young men, particularly ones who have spent a lot of time online and are particularly cynical about politics.
One prominent interview that Trump did was with the YouTuber Theo Von.
Clip of Theo Von: Today’s guest is Donald Trump. …
Pfeiffer: He has three million subscribers to his YouTube show. Seven million followers on TikTok. He is probably MAGA adjacent, really pushes the boundaries on, uh, political correctness and language, and is very popular with young men in particular.
Clip of Theo Von:
Donald Trump: My son’s a big fan of yours, Barron.
Von: Really? Barron is?
Trump: Yeah. He knows you very well. He said, “Dad, he’s big.”
Pfeiffer: They talked about everything from the assassination attempt to a very long conversation about Theo Von’s sobriety and what it’s like to do cocaine ——
Clip of Theo Von:
Trump: Is it too much? Too much to handle?
Von: Some of the stuff started to get a real rattle in it, too.
Trump: So the thing you go back to, then, is alcohol, for the most part.
Von: Right, yeah, but what I want probably is cocaine, but I know that if I have a drink, then it’ll give me — it’ll like, be like, OK, well, I had a drink, then I can do this.
Trump: Is cocaine a stronger, uh, up?
Von: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pfeiffer: Which is the most interested Donald Trump has seemed in another human being in my life.
And that interview went hugely viral: 13 million views on YouTube. The TikTok clips of it were everywhere. This interview with Theo Von has about twice the viewership of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s much ballyhooed interview with Dana Bash of CNN. And so we just have to simply understand: The media ecosystem has changed fundamentally, and there’s no going back to the old world. And we have to adjust how we cover and think about politics for that world.
Trump is very good in this medium for a number of reasons. He is a reality TV star by profession. And so he has a natural knack for understanding attention and how to get people’s attention. But also if you are a man under 30, Donald Trump has been running for president most of your adult life. For a lot of these men who are particularly distrustful of institutions, cynical about politics, feel victimized by various social trends that have happened, Donald Trump is their antihero, and he speaks to them in a lot of ways. He has put in the time to court these voters.
Clip of Trump: They are coming after me because I am fighting for you and we are fighting for those who have no voice and we will win because we know how to win.
Pfeiffer: And there really has been no countervailing messaging from anyone else. It is all MAGA messaging all the time. And these voters are largely isolated from politics because they’re not consuming traditional political news. The only political messaging they are getting is from Donald Trump and from other MAGA voices that populate these platforms.
And then there’s JD Vance.
Clip of JD Vance: A lot of the things the press said about Donald Trump and says about Donald Trump are just straight up fabrications. Donald Trump never called white supremacists very fine people after Charlottesville. A total fabrication of the American media. It’s like, OK, what other things am I hearing about Donald Trump that are actually not true?
Pfeiffer: JD Vance was able to go from prominent, Never Trump Republican to Donald Trump’s handpicked vice-presidential candidate with a bottoms-up approach of appealing to these important social media influencers and then getting them to vouch for his MAGA credentials, which gave him re-entry into a MAGA Republican Party.
There is this hope among a lot of people in the pro-democracy movement that if we were able to defeat Trump, there’d be a possibility of returning the Republican Party closer, at least, to its pre-Trump form. And that becomes impossible if half of Gen Z, the one that’s gonna be aging into the electorate over the next five decades, becomes radicalized by Trump.
Then the incentive structure for Republican politicians is to be more like Trump. There is no post-Trump era if Gen Z men become firmly adherents of MAGA philosophy. We have to go out there and make a case to these men on the platforms that they consume with a message that appeals to them. We have to be willing to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast. We have to be willing to do what Senator Bernie Sanders did recently, which is go on Theo Von’s podcast.
Clip of Theo Von:
Von: What’s the first concert you ever went to?
Bernie Sanders: Name you probably wouldn’t know. You ever hear of Pete Seeger?
Pfeiffer: I believe Kamala Harris can win this election even if Donald Trump does as well as it appears he’s going to do with Gen-Z men. There are enough women to have her get to the majority, but that may be a case of winning the battle and losing the war. Over the long term, Democrats have to make persuading these Gen Z men a priority for our party.
The post The One Thing Missing From Kamala Harris’s Media Blitz appeared first on New York Times.
