‘Not in a weird way, but he’s charming’: Meet the young men who love JD Vance

Eric Garcia speaks to men in North Carolina who believe women only like Harris because she’s female and who are impressed by Vance’s supposed coherence and bravery

Republican vice president nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, speaks during a campaign event in Greensboro, N.C., Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024 (AP)

At the Koury Convention Center in Greensboro, Senator JD Vance was speaking to a packed house. Plenty of older men and women and middle-aged people filed through, wearing shirts with slogans like “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my President,” and “Ultra MAGA.”

But most noticeable in the crowd were the impressive numbers of young men.

“I don't think there's really anybody else better that Trump could have picked,” Chase Johnson, a young man from Graham, North Carolina, said. “He's very coherent. He really knows what he's doing — good with the economy and just great ideas.”

Kyle Nielson, who is from Nashville, North Carolina, told The Independent he had not planned on coming to the event at first, but he was in the area, so he and his mother decided to come along.

“I think he's really well-spoken,” Nielson said, adding that this was the first political event he’d ever attended.

Brody Martin, who is 15 and who wore a blazer and dress shirt without a tie, said he came to the Vance town hall because his uncle is a county chairman. Martin told The Independent he thinks he knows why women are not as supportive of Trump.

“Well, the voters for Kamala Harris just want a female president,” he said. “They don’t like her policies. They don’t know her policies... They just go further because she’s a woman.”

Since Trump picked Vance as his running mate, stories have abounded about how he puts off female voters. Indeed, when Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris, she specifically referenced Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies.” And Vance’s position on abortion — having said in the past that he opposes abortion even in the case of rape, because “two wrongs don’t make a right” — is even more hardline than Trump’s.

But there is evidence that young men are gravitating toward the Trump-Vance ticket. The fall 2024 survey for the Harvard Institute of Politics showed that while 70 percent of female Generation Z voters support Harris, only 53 percent of men do the same — and 36 percent of young male voters support Trump. By comparison, only 23 percent of young likely female voters support Trump. That’s a wide gender gap.

It’s important to note that Trump and Vance’s growing support among men is not exclusive to white men. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed that Latino men between 18 and 34 years old support Trump over Harris. And during a stop at a campaign office last week, former president Barack Obama spoke of his concern about numbers showing that many Black men are considering voting for Trump, too.

Scott Schoenfield, who is 21 and from Asheboro, North Carolina, said that Vance’s youth appeals to him. Schoenfeld wore a suit and tie along with a white Trump baseball cap.

“Not in a weird way, but he's charming,” he told The Independent. “If you look back at the debate, Ronald Reagan was a charming politician, and JD Vance is doing the same thing.”

The Trump campaign has made deliberate efforts to court these young men, appearing on a number of bro-adjacent podcasts and shows recently. The former president appeared on the podcasts of Theo Von and Logan Paul, and on the show of Adin Ross, at the apparent suggestion of his youngest son Barron.

Vance kept things civil during his debate with Tim Walz, and polling showed that his public image improved afterward.

“He even said after the fact that he was very nervous, but he came across as very hardened,” Lucas Cory, who came with his brother to the town hall event, told The Independent. “He was brave. Like, you couldn’t even tell there was fear in his eyes.”

But Vance seemed much more willing to throw punches in Greensboro. Toward the end of his conversation with retired NASCAR driver Danica Patrick, he did a bizarre impersonation of Harris, before adding, “I forgot the awkward cackle afterwards.”

Throughout Trump’s campaign, Vance has regularly attacked women — not just his female presidential opponents like Harris and Hillary Clinton, but female reporters as well. During one rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, one man was seen selling shirts with the slogan “Say no to the hoe,” with Harris’s face on it.

Harris, for her part, has attempted to appeal to men throughout her campaign. The campaign has deployed Walz to lead that outreach, and spoken extensively about her own gun ownership. Last Friday, Walz launched Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz, and the campaign also recently started Hombres con Harris in an attempt to help her lagging polling among Latino men.

It’s difficult to predict how successful these efforts might be. And at the same time, the Trump campaign knows that it has to fix its women problem. Fox News hosted Trump for a town hall with women voters in Georgia earlier this week. The much-lauded forum was well-attended — but it later transpired that great efforts had been taken to pack out the room.

Although Harris and Trump remain neck-and-neck, the growing gender divide is something that pollsters continue to mention. Considering women tend to turn up to vote more reliably than men, that could spell bad news for the Trump-Vance ticket. Then again, the older men who follow Trump and the younger men who have been tempted into the fold by Vance could combine to make for some very impressive numbers.