How the ‘bro vote’ helped put Trump back in the White House

On the eve of Donald Trump’s reelection, one of the people on stage after declaring Trump’s victory was the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Dana White. He gave a few shoutouts:

Dana White: I want to thank some people real quick. I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, “Bussin’ with the Boys” — and, last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.

You might recognize a few of those names, but for those who don’t, they are key players in what drove a striking gender gap in who young people decided to vote for in this election. Now, a new term has entered the political lexicon: the “bro vote.” 

What’s fueling this trend? To what extent is it shaped by online influencers, podcasters and other cultural figures who amplify hypermasculine and often misogynistic rhetoric? 

Joan Donovan, founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to break down this new wave of extremely online young men. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Arun Rath: First, let’s define in a bit more detail what exactly the bro vote is and how it came to be. Who are these people, and how did they come as a response to the feminist movement of the last decade and beyond?

Joan Donovan: Yeah. So, one of the things that’s striking about the internet is that you can actually anticipate how different groups of people are — not necessarily [how they’re] going to vote, but how they’re going to respond to different wedge issues. And, in particular, the absence of discussions about the role of men in the Democratic Party, the future of men, is something that was percolating online. People were wondering, “What’s the plan for men?”

And then, in that dialogue, you actually had a lot of internet influencers — people who make their money off of telling men how to go on dates, how to approach women. There are all of these communities of men who then started talking politics and about how the Democrats are leaving men out, and that Trump is the candidate of choice for young men who want to have a voice in politics.

It’s a really interesting reversal of what we typically think about when we think about identity politics.

Rath: Let’s talk about that identity male podcasters and influencers are tying into. Because the influencers, especially, we’ve seen over the last five years: there’s a message there that resonates with these young men. What is that message, and is it inherently political?

Donovan: It is political because it has to do with how they think about themselves in relationship to the rest of society. For the last, let’s say, 15 years or so, I’ve been studying the rise of misogyny online and the rise of white nationalism. One of the things that these movements do really well is give men a voice and give men a purpose. Unfortunately, it’s at the expense of women, LGBTQ people, Black, Indigenous people.

When we talk about identity politics in public, usually we’re describing all of those other minoritized groups and not talking about, “Well, what does it mean for men to become very invested in their own identity and then want to exercise it politically?”

Unfortunately, there is a lot of misogyny that goes along with this. You might have heard of terms like “toxic masculinity,” but it’s also deeper than that. It’s not just, you know, the kind of adage of “boys being boys.” It’s men believing that women control sex and love and marriage. It’s men believing that they don’t stand a chance in the job market because of DEI policies.

One of the things that I’ve studied over the last 15 years is the rise of that rhetoric, and then the rise of the audiences that are engaging with it and finding that it does speak to them; it speaks about their interests and also their livelihoods.

Rath: Let’s talk about the role of online disinformation. You mentioned it there, somewhat, in talking about misogyny, but it goes far beyond that. I mean, we’ve seen influencers like Andrew Tate or Elon Musk furthering disinformation into this field, like the race riots in England.

Donovan: Yeah, I do think that there’s a lot to unpack here, especially around how they were able to turn immigrants in the U.S. into this “other.” And that’s one of the ways in which you see masculinity practiced in these spaces: as a gatekeeper. But not just a regular gatekeeper, but a violent one — one where they see themselves as vigilantes, needing to take the reins.

Someone like Musk, in particular, has been very clear about his desire to reshape America by getting rid of migrants. He was the number-one spreader of migrant conspiracy theories on X, and, as a matter of fact, he turned X into a promotion machine for Trump. One of the ways that he did that was by bringing back a bunch of these misogynist influencers that had been deplatformed for things like hate speech, harassment and disinformation.

But I think when we talk about disinformation, we also have to add in another vector, which is to discuss: how people get served that information. The platforms here did a very awful job of fact-checking and giving people the right information that they needed to vote with — and, in its place, promoted violent fantasies against migrants in Springfield.

That, to me, is something that we’re going to have to reckon with, starting January 20th.

Rath: I know we’re still digesting a lot of this data that’s coming in, but do we have a sense of how big the bro vote is as a voting demographic? I mean, we know pretty much all groups, other than women, shifted right in this election. Was the bro vote decisive on its own, or is it part of this trend overall?

Donovan: I think it’s part of a trend. I do think in some states, of course, the bro vote was decisive. But I do think it’s really interesting to think about it in the sense of ... people are experiencing it sort of like it came out of nowhere and that they didn’t understand that this was possible, almost as if the bro vote was a silent majority.

But I caution people to think that way, because the way this group mobilized is that they just used social media platforms as they are designed — particularly YouTube — in order to get these ideas into the hearts and minds of young men all over the United States.

Unfortunately, on election night, I was watching the stream between Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes, and they were celebrating the kinds of policies that Trump is going to bring around, particularly, women’s right to reproductive technologies. Of course, Fuentes became internet famous for tweeting out: “Your body, my choice.”

I do think that even though these groups of people are visible online, we haven’t paid enough attention to the way in which technology brings them together — the way in which disinformation, hate and incitement drives their feeling of purpose.

I wonder, at this stage, it’s probably not going to be any national regulation that we get because the platforms themselves already work so well for far-right parties. So, I do think that the states are going to have to step in and start to make sense of what’s happening because [social media sites] tend to be the place [where] national or international narratives about women dispossessing them and trans people driving the Democrat political agenda.

From the outside looking in, it’s completely bonkers. But, at the same time, now that we’re hearing from voters, it really did matter.