Guns, Sports, and Videogames: How Trump and Harris Are Luring Male Voters

Guns, Nascar, video games, football and Zyn pouches: These are apparently the keys to reaching male voters, one of the trickiest and most contested demographics this election cycle.

Both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are revving up their outreach to American men this week, a strategic and predictable move in an election where gender has already played an outsize role. Harris, if elected, would be the country’s first female president, and she has campaigned aggressively on many issues that resonate particularly with women, including abortion rights and childcare. Her support among men, however, has consistently lagged Trump’s: It now stands at roughly 43% to the former president’s 51%, according to new polling from the Pew Research Center.

Last Friday, former President Barack Obama tackled this gap head-on in a blistering speech to Black male voters. “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” he said.

In an effort to close the gap, Harris and her surrogates have been hammering on a trifecta of men’s interests: guns, sports and video games. There is Harris’s running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who spent time in his home state over the weekend hunting pheasant, delivering a pep talk to his old high school football team, and hanging out with a hunting influencer and rodeo athlete. There is Harris herself, opening up about her possession of a Glock handgun and joking about beer and football on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Democrats also flew Harris ads over football games in several swing states last weekend, while the Harris camp recruited a Twitch streamer to play World of Warcraft alongside live footage of a recent Arizona campaign event.

Whether any of this will erode male support for Trump—a candidate who has infamously traded on misogyny and toxic male tropes—remains to be seen. But his camp is also visibly increasing outreach to male voters: To wit, the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and his running mate, JD Vance, stopped by a Nascar race Sunday.

Trump has also recently attended college football games and Ultimate Fighting Championship events, and appeared on the podcasts of several young male influencers, including Logan Paul, Theo Von and the Nelk Boys. (Members of the Nelk Boys, a troupe of YouTube pranksters turned conservative activists, also feature in a short YouTube ad the Trump campaign targeted to young men in late September, railing against a tax Walz put on Zyn tobacco pouches.)

The gender gap between Trump and Harris is not unusual: Women are more likely to identify as Democrats, and men disproportionately sided with Trump in each of the last two elections. But one recent analysis from 538 found that Harris has actually slightly narrowed the gender gap since August.