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Superstar
Copying from NYT but it's behind a paywall. Not the whole article just a piece that discusses how Trump won over men.
www.nytimes.com
The Gender Gap
The Trump team’s data clearly showed that the highest return on investment would be a group that didn’t often vote: younger men, including Hispanic and Black men who were struggling with inflation, alienated by left-wing ideology and pessimistic about the country.
Mr. Trump had long been nervous about the issue of abortion.
He blamed the fallout from the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade for the G.O.P.’s poor performance in the midterms in 2022. He considered the issue so politically fraught that it had the potential to single-handedly sink his campaign.
And so, on the first Tuesday in April, he settled into his seat on the jet his aides call Trump Force One, a thick stack of papers before him on his desk. On top was a document his senior political advisers had prepared, spelling out a simple and compelling argument against his coming out in favor of a national abortion ban.
The title, in all caps: “How a National Abortion Policy Will Cost Trump the Election.”
A 15- or 16-week ban — which Mr. Trump was seriously contemplating — would be more restrictive than existing law in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the three “blue wall” states that were crucial to victory in November. The news media, his advisers told him, would relentlessly portray his position as rolling back the rights of women, who were already in revolt against the G.O.P. over abortion.
On the flight to Grand Rapids, Mr. Trump began dictating the script of a video he would release the following week: He would leave the abortion issue to the states and would not say how many weeks he considered appropriate — disappointing some social conservatives but making it harder for Democrats to use the issue against him.
Mr. Trump’s approach to gender could not have been more different from Ms. Harris’s.
His team’s data clearly showed that the highest return on investment would be a group that didn’t often vote: younger men, including Hispanic and Black men who were struggling with inflation, alienated by left-wing ideology and pessimistic about the country.
The Trump campaign committed its limited resources, including the candidate’s time, to communicating with these young men, embracing a hypermasculine image. His first campaign stop after his criminal conviction was an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. He entered the Republican National Convention one night to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” He spent relatively little time doing mainstream media interviews and instead recorded a series of podcast interviews with male comedians and other bro-type personalities who tapped into the kind of audiences Mr. Fabrizio’s data said were most receptive to Mr. Trump’s message.
They included a three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan that racked up more than 45 million views on YouTube, and won Mr. Rogan’s election-eve endorsement. Aides and allies like Mr. Musk made explicit appeals to men to vote for Mr. Trump in the contest’s final hours.
Ms. Harris’s team was trying equally hard to mobilize women in the first national election since the fall of Roe v. Wade, showcasing the stories of women who suffered catastrophic medical emergencies in states where Republicans had enacted strict abortion bans. Michelle Obama made an impassioned case to vote for women’s interests. And there were efforts to encourage wives to ignore their husbands, with sticky notes left in women’s restrooms reminding them that their vote was a secret. The actress Julia Roberts recorded an ad calling the ballot box one of the last places where women still had the freedom to choose.
Mr. Trump was aghast. “Can you imagine a wife not telling a husband who she’s voting for? Did you ever hear anything like that?” he said on Fox News.
But Mr. Trump declined to call upon Nikki Haley, the runner-up in the Republican primaries, as an emissary to female voters. He didn’t think he needed her, and people close to him said he continued to thoroughly dislike her. “You have the issue of abortion,” he said on “Fox and Friends.” “Without abortion, the women love me.”
Trump’s Gamble on Anti-Trans Ads
About a week after the September debate, Mr. Trump started spending heavily on a television ad that hammered Ms. Harris for her position on a seemingly obscure topic: the use of taxpayer funds to fund surgeries for transgender inmates. “Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,” Ms. Harris said in a 2019 clip used in the ad.
It was a big bet: Mr. Trump was leading on the two most salient issues in the race — the economy and immigration — yet here he was, intentionally changing the subject.
But the ad, with its vivid tagline — “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” — broke through in Mr. Trump’s testing to an extent that stunned some of his aides.
So they poured still more money into the ads, running them during football games, which prompted Charlamagne Tha God, the host of the Breakfast Club, a popular show among Black listeners, to express exasperation — and his on-air complaints gave the Trump team fodder for yet another commercial. The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC. It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.
The anti-trans ads cut to the core of the Trump argument: that Ms. Harris was “dangerously liberal” — the exact vulnerability her team was most worried about. The ads were effective with Black and Latino men, according to the Trump team, but also with moderate suburban white women who might be concerned about transgender athletes in girls’ sports.
Those were the same suburban women Ms. Harris was trying to mobilize with ads about abortion.
Democrats struggled to respond. At one point, former President Bill Clinton told an associate, “We have to answer it and say we won’t do it.” He even raised the issue in a conversation with the campaign and was told the Trump ads were not necessarily having an impact, according to two people familiar with his conversations. He never broached the topic publicly.
The Harris team debated internally how to respond. Ads the Harris team produced with a direct response to the “they/them” ads wound up faring poorly in internal tests. The ads never ran.
For the Trump team, the transgender attacks — along with other ads showing Ms. Harris laughing or dancing in a colorful blouse and pink pants — fit into a broader Trump goal: to make her look like a lightweight.
Mr. Trump was already running as a felon. In the eyes of his team, the transgender ads made her look unserious, foolish and outside the political mainstream.
How Trump Won, and How Harris Lost
He made one essential bet: that his grievances would become the grievances of the MAGA movement, and then the G.O.P., and then more than half the country. It paid off.
The Gender Gap
The Trump team’s data clearly showed that the highest return on investment would be a group that didn’t often vote: younger men, including Hispanic and Black men who were struggling with inflation, alienated by left-wing ideology and pessimistic about the country.
Mr. Trump had long been nervous about the issue of abortion.
He blamed the fallout from the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade for the G.O.P.’s poor performance in the midterms in 2022. He considered the issue so politically fraught that it had the potential to single-handedly sink his campaign.
And so, on the first Tuesday in April, he settled into his seat on the jet his aides call Trump Force One, a thick stack of papers before him on his desk. On top was a document his senior political advisers had prepared, spelling out a simple and compelling argument against his coming out in favor of a national abortion ban.
The title, in all caps: “How a National Abortion Policy Will Cost Trump the Election.”
A 15- or 16-week ban — which Mr. Trump was seriously contemplating — would be more restrictive than existing law in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the three “blue wall” states that were crucial to victory in November. The news media, his advisers told him, would relentlessly portray his position as rolling back the rights of women, who were already in revolt against the G.O.P. over abortion.
On the flight to Grand Rapids, Mr. Trump began dictating the script of a video he would release the following week: He would leave the abortion issue to the states and would not say how many weeks he considered appropriate — disappointing some social conservatives but making it harder for Democrats to use the issue against him.
Mr. Trump’s approach to gender could not have been more different from Ms. Harris’s.
His team’s data clearly showed that the highest return on investment would be a group that didn’t often vote: younger men, including Hispanic and Black men who were struggling with inflation, alienated by left-wing ideology and pessimistic about the country.
The Trump campaign committed its limited resources, including the candidate’s time, to communicating with these young men, embracing a hypermasculine image. His first campaign stop after his criminal conviction was an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. He entered the Republican National Convention one night to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” He spent relatively little time doing mainstream media interviews and instead recorded a series of podcast interviews with male comedians and other bro-type personalities who tapped into the kind of audiences Mr. Fabrizio’s data said were most receptive to Mr. Trump’s message.
They included a three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan that racked up more than 45 million views on YouTube, and won Mr. Rogan’s election-eve endorsement. Aides and allies like Mr. Musk made explicit appeals to men to vote for Mr. Trump in the contest’s final hours.
Ms. Harris’s team was trying equally hard to mobilize women in the first national election since the fall of Roe v. Wade, showcasing the stories of women who suffered catastrophic medical emergencies in states where Republicans had enacted strict abortion bans. Michelle Obama made an impassioned case to vote for women’s interests. And there were efforts to encourage wives to ignore their husbands, with sticky notes left in women’s restrooms reminding them that their vote was a secret. The actress Julia Roberts recorded an ad calling the ballot box one of the last places where women still had the freedom to choose.
Mr. Trump was aghast. “Can you imagine a wife not telling a husband who she’s voting for? Did you ever hear anything like that?” he said on Fox News.
But Mr. Trump declined to call upon Nikki Haley, the runner-up in the Republican primaries, as an emissary to female voters. He didn’t think he needed her, and people close to him said he continued to thoroughly dislike her. “You have the issue of abortion,” he said on “Fox and Friends.” “Without abortion, the women love me.”
Trump’s Gamble on Anti-Trans Ads
About a week after the September debate, Mr. Trump started spending heavily on a television ad that hammered Ms. Harris for her position on a seemingly obscure topic: the use of taxpayer funds to fund surgeries for transgender inmates. “Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,” Ms. Harris said in a 2019 clip used in the ad.
It was a big bet: Mr. Trump was leading on the two most salient issues in the race — the economy and immigration — yet here he was, intentionally changing the subject.
But the ad, with its vivid tagline — “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” — broke through in Mr. Trump’s testing to an extent that stunned some of his aides.
So they poured still more money into the ads, running them during football games, which prompted Charlamagne Tha God, the host of the Breakfast Club, a popular show among Black listeners, to express exasperation — and his on-air complaints gave the Trump team fodder for yet another commercial. The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC. It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.
The anti-trans ads cut to the core of the Trump argument: that Ms. Harris was “dangerously liberal” — the exact vulnerability her team was most worried about. The ads were effective with Black and Latino men, according to the Trump team, but also with moderate suburban white women who might be concerned about transgender athletes in girls’ sports.
Those were the same suburban women Ms. Harris was trying to mobilize with ads about abortion.
Democrats struggled to respond. At one point, former President Bill Clinton told an associate, “We have to answer it and say we won’t do it.” He even raised the issue in a conversation with the campaign and was told the Trump ads were not necessarily having an impact, according to two people familiar with his conversations. He never broached the topic publicly.
The Harris team debated internally how to respond. Ads the Harris team produced with a direct response to the “they/them” ads wound up faring poorly in internal tests. The ads never ran.
For the Trump team, the transgender attacks — along with other ads showing Ms. Harris laughing or dancing in a colorful blouse and pink pants — fit into a broader Trump goal: to make her look like a lightweight.
Mr. Trump was already running as a felon. In the eyes of his team, the transgender ads made her look unserious, foolish and outside the political mainstream.
