STATE COLLEGE, PA — Twenty-four hours before former President Donald Trump took the spotlight at Madison Square Garden to deliver his closing argument, he was on a stage in Pennsylvania State University’s Bryce Jordan Center with a targeted message for a specific group of voters.
“For all the young people here at Penn State and across America who may be voting for the first time, I want you to know that I am in this fight,” Trump told the thousands of students in the crowd.
It wasn’t just about Trump’s message; it was about the image.
In the crowd assembled behind him displayed on the arena’s jumbotron — the largest arena between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — only four women were visible behind Trump. The rest of the crowd was a sea of young white men in red hats.
No presidential candidate has gone to Penn State since 2008, but Trump is set to stop there twice in the last two weeks of his campaign, going back this weekend for the game against Ohio State.
The youngest generation of voters came of age during Trump’s presidency. They were in middle school when he was first elected, in high school when their lives were upended by the pandemic and school shutdowns and now in college as he seeks to return to the White House.
Finally, the young men who have followed Trump for most of their lives are voting for the first time. Republicans know women — particularly young women — are overwhelmingly supporting Kamala Harris. Up for grabs, however, are the young men. The Trump campaign is hoping those young men will turn out in droves for the former president in battleground states.
“We don’t care about the normal political talking Republicans have been saying for, like, years. It’s like a new era of conservatism,” Penn State junior Chris Lacey told NOTUS while heading into the rally.
“We kind of run it now. We’re going to be the next people in mind to future leaders,” he said.
Trump is nowhere close to winning over Gen Z. A Harvard Youth Poll earlier this month found that Harris leads Trump by 20 points among young registered voters nationwide. But that gap narrows to 9 points in the seven key battleground states.
Young white men made up a third of all voters under 35 in the 2020 election, and that group voted for Trump over Biden by 6 points. Their support for the former president appears only to be growing.
“There definitely has been a growing gender gap among young adults, particularly in swing states, where we have seen more and more young men finding some resonance with the Trump candidacy,” Elizabeth C. Matto, director of the Center for Youth Political Participation at Rutgers University, told NOTUS.
“You have absolutely seen the Trump candidacy responding to it and really targeting young men in ways they wouldn’t have if not for these findings,” she said.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Ryan Klein, president of the Penn State College Republicans, said he’s seen a noticeable increase in the number of students volunteering this year.
“Seeing Trump here shows an investment in the youth vote, which is something that for a long time the Democrats have had a monopoly on,” Klein said.
Like the thousands of other (largely male) students who showed up for Trump, Klein was in middle school when the former president was elected. Klein got interested in politics in 2020 after “being unable to have my senior year in a classroom.”
He’s noticed a shift among students this year, with more engagement in the club and in weekend canvassing for Trump. The student body overall though, Klein said, is “largely apathetic” when it comes to politics.
What’s different now is that Trump is engaging directly with Gen Z, both in podcast appearances and in the in-person stops to colleges that candidates haven’t made in the past.
“He’s been going to UFC, he’s been on the Nelk Boys, he was just on Joe Rogan. The young people are responding to that because he’s really speaking their language,” Klein said.
“He’s really presenting himself as one of the boys,” he said.
Tristan Kilgore, a sophomore and vice president of the Penn State College Republicans, said the relationship between candidates and social media has become more of a two-way street compared to 2016 or 2020.
“No one’s gonna watch your 60-second ad before the YouTube video,” Kilgore said. “But if you are the content that people are watching, when they’re going on there for a podcast and you’re on that podcast, then people are gonna be interested in it.”
“He knows just from years of being a celebrity beforehand, how to be exciting, how to make good content,” Kilgore said of Trump.
On the issues, Kilgore said the two he hears repeatedly about from Gen Z men are the economy and “World War III.”
“We’re the generation that would go out and fight. People see Taiwan and Ukraine, and they’re like, ‘Well, do I really want to go out there and, like, get put on the front lines or anything like that, get drafted?’”
Penn State freshman Ryan Reicher said foreign policy is the main reason he supports Trump.
“I just turned 19. Being at that young age, with all the conflicts overseas with other countries, I’m worried about a potential draft and forcing people to go into the Army. It’s kind of concerning,” Reicher said.
“There’s a lot of intensity around his support, too,” he added. “It’s kind of worried people on the other side, when they realize he’s a lot more relevant and that he has a lot more support with guys my age.”
That intensity among the young Trump supporters was apparent on Saturday night. What’s less clear is how much of that intensity actually translates into votes.
White young men voted at a higher rate in 2022 than Asian, Black or Latino men, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. But across every race, young women vote at higher rates than young men — and young women are expected to vote for Harris at disproportionately higher rates than for Trump.
“As a guy, that’s not, like, one of my top concerns, but I can see how that is important to the other side,” said Miles Webster, a senior in pre-med.
The young white men of Penn State aren’t a monolith, one Harris supporter was quick to point out while hanging out by the rally’s entrance. Evan Eissfeldt, a senior studying data science, said he wasn’t attending the rally but wanted to check out the vibe. To him, the Trump visit made sense.
“There’s a lot of young white dudes here who like to party, and I think are probably a bit more prone to supporting Trump, so I think it makes sense from an election strategy to come here,” Eissfeldt said.
At the same time, Eissfeldt said he’s “absolutely concerned” at the level of support he saw.
“Trump’s a really charismatic guy. I mean, I dislike him a lot, but he can be funny, and I can see why he can appeal to especially white dudes who maybe don’t take the time to actually look into issues,” he said.
“The campaign does a good job kind of promoting Trump as a kind of alpha male figure, and younger men who, in my opinion at least, don’t have a good idea of what it means to actually be a man, kind of see that as society’s glamorization of masculinity,” he said.
Millennials and Gen Zers make up the country’s largest voting bloc based on population, representing the futures of both parties. Most of the Trump fans in attendance who spoke to NOTUS saw the party’s shift towards Trump as a positive change.
Jack Kelly didn’t necessarily see it that way.
Wearing a classic Trump outfit — a light blue suit with a red MAGA hat — Kelly spoke to NOTUS about an hour before the former president came onstage. He said he’s fully onboard with Trump’s policies. But unlike the young men who praised Trump’s brashness and his anti-politician behavior, Kelly said he had some reservations.
“Trump, really, he doesn’t have a mind and mouth filter, for better or worse. I mean, there’s a couple things he’s said that I really don’t agree with,” Kelly said, citing Trump’s ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts” comment during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
He said he’s concerned about how Trump’s style is shaping the future generation of the party.
“For the last couple generations, a lot of the Democrats and Republicans that have been in office have been a little bit more moderate, one way or another,” he said. “Now, I just feel like they’re both so far right and left that I feel like there’s not gonna be a lot of middle ground between Gen Z. It’s extremely, extremely divided, more so than the previous generations.”
An hour later, Trump called out the Penn State wrestling team by name and brought them onstage with him. He asked the crowd to “dream big, just like your wrestling team dreams big” and said he’d “maybe wrestle one or two of them.”
Fourteen Penn State wrestlers came onstage, shaking hands with Trump and standing behind him during his remarks. Directly behind Trump was a young man in a light blue suit and a red MAGA hat, Jack Kelly.
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.