Trumps Closing Message: Kamala's Agenda is They/Them, Not You

The Trump Campaign is Going All In on Men. Will It Work?

Elections are usually games of addition. That is what makes the Trump campaign’s 2024 strategy of purging voter rolls in swing states they control like Virginia and Georgia so unique: their goal is subtraction.

Nearly every state conducts routine maintenance on its voter registration rolls to keep them up to date and prevent fraud. Federal law requires these routine “purges” be completed 90 days prior to the election, a deadline Alabama Republicans simply ignored now that the Republican Party has abandoned the rule of law.

In Georgia, supposed friend of democracy Brian Kemp let Georgia Republicans go even further, allowing random citizens to challenge the eligibility of any other voter, resulting in 80,000 challenges filed by just a handful of people, resulting in about 15% of those voters being removed from the voter rolls (though for administrative issues, not fraud).

The Trump campaign is so committed to “winning through subtraction” after their takeover of the RNC, they gutted the organization’s vaulted field operations and shifted considerable resources to purging voters from the rolls, both before and after the election.

So, its impossible to talk about the Trump campaign’s 2024 strategy without noting it relies heavily on reducing the size of the electorate, particularly in Democratic Party strongholds like in Harris County, TX.

That said, today I want to focus on the Trump campaign’s other strategy which has received far less scrutiny.

As the ad above highlights, the theory of the case for Trump’s reelection has been to win in 2024 by motivating large numbers of men who don’t usually vote to show up and cast ballots for Trump.

In pursuit of this goal, Republican donors have dropped millions of dollars since 2023 on voter registration drives and digital ads predominately via You Tube and other streaming services aimed at turning out low-propensity men.

The hope is that turnout gains among Trump’s most reliable voting block, men, will offset the known, sizable female gender gap favoring Harris, one that has grown across the Trump Era and is especially heightened this cycle because of the repeal of Roe v. Wade.

The Trump campaigns is so committed to this manly strategy they have diverted resources normally spent in battleground suburbs to the effort because “Republicans don’t need suburban women,” which is why Steve Bannon remains my favorite Trump adviser.

For a political scientist well versed in American voter turnout, it’s a dangerous strategy that attempts to do the hardest thing to do in American politics: get the 50% of Americans who don’t even bother to vote in presidential elections to care enough to register to vote, and then actually follow through and cast a ballot.

To find out if there is any evidence this is working I asked Tom Bonier, one of the country’s best voter targeting analysts to take a deep dive in the registration data from Pennsylvania, the swing state the Trump campaign has disproportionately focused on, to see if there is any evidence of a registration surge among the Trump team’s target demographic: dudes.

I should note, that men underperform women in terms of turnout both in presidential cycles as well as non-presidential cycles like midterm elections which is why the female gender gap hurts more than the male gender gap. The Trump campaign has strategically committed itself to changing that.

To vote in this country, in most states, one must plan ahead as registration deadlines close a month or even more before Election Day. If the Trump campaign’s decision to focus almost entirely on men and especially on men who don’t vote is bearing fruit, it should show up first in the registration data.

Comparing registration data up to about a week ago, less men have registered to vote in Pennsylvania this cycle than in 2020. By this point in 2020, 89,626 Republican men registered to vote compared to just 78,206 in 2024. Despite disproportionate investment into Pennsylvania, the number of men registering as Republicans has actually declined.

Now, registration deadlines are just passing and once all the registration is closed I’ll ask Tom to take a broader look at all of the swing states for evidence of historic turnout for men, but as of today it is women, not men, winning the registration race.

Hell hath no fury like a woman who has had control of her own body stolen by the Republican Party.

I want make one other point about Trump’s strategy, especially in terms of the anti-trans ads like the one in this post that the Trump campaign is putting big bucks into airing on NFL and college football games.

I have heard TV analysts poo poo this strategy as a “mobilization” or “base-only” strategy and I want to make something very clear: that is wrong.

Ads like “Unbelievable” are the GOP’s version of persuasion messaging. Yes, it will drive Republicans and right-leaning independents out to vote as CRT did in the Virginia 2021 cycle, but also like the CRT strategy, at the same time it is performing a very distinct form of “persuasion” messaging: persuasion by disqualification of the other option.

The Republican system relies on one messaging strategy that drives strong turnout among their voter coalition while at the same time, pushes swing voters away from voting for Democrats. That is why their model is superior: not only does it meet our ill-informed, apathetic electorate where it is, is saves resources and makes sure the full voter file is exploited by saving a bifurcation of resources.

Though its tempting to dismiss these ads as wasted resources spent on an already rapid base, that would be a mistake. The GOP’s persuasion strategy is to make sure swing voters think Democrats are extremists and it is a strategy that will work if it is not offset by a comparable persuasion strategy from Democrats.

The Harris campaign gets this, and continues to paint Trump as a dangerous extremist coming for freedom and running counter offense on border security and crime, but these data from Ad Impact makes it clear that in terms of centralizing messaging strategy to be able to compete with the GOP’s sound machine, much work remains.

John Lennon imagined a world of peace. I imagine a world where Democrats centralize their messaging strategy from the top of the ticket all the way down to the state legislature and the schoolboard.

You can call me a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

Source: Ad Impact