Two days before Election Day, The Des Moines Register released a stunning poll showing 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris up by three percentage points in Iowa.

The poll, conducted by well-regarded pollster Ann Selzer, quickly made its rounds across corporate media. Reliably red Iowa was not considered one of this cycle’s battleground states, so Harris reportedly leading there was a welcome headline for many Democratic pollsters.

Selzer also had a reputation for being consistently accurate in her polling of previous election cycles. In 2016, FiveThirtyEight had called her “the best pollster in politics.”

Selzer’s “November surprise” 2024 survey suggested “that women — particularly those who are older or who are politically independent — are driving the late shift toward Harris,” the Register reported November 2.

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The Iowa poll suggested that women above the age of 65 – which it showed Harris winning by a 35-point margin – would prove to be the X factor in this year’s election being a Democratic sweep.

Only the exact opposite happened.

On election night, now-president-elect Donald Trump convincingly won Iowa by 13 points – exceeding expectations and improving on his margins in the state from both 2016 (when he won the state by 9.4 points) and 2020 (when he won it by 8.2).

In 2024, Trump came closer to beating Harris in deep-blue New York than she did to beating him in Iowa.

It meant that Selzer’s “bombshell” poll was 16 points off.

The once-flawless pollster, 68, unceremoniously announced her retirement from election polling just a week and a half after Trump’s rout of Harris – in which he carried every swing state, won every red state by double digits, and put places like New Jersey in the “battleground” conversation.

Many experts like Selzer had gotten the storyline of the 2024 presidential election completely wrong. It was not older female voters who proved decisive in Harris’ favor, but instead it was young male voters who buoyed Trump to a second-term mandate.

It is worth noting that despite all the pre-election buzz, Trump still won all married women by three points and white women by eight, per a CNN exit poll. He only lost senior women by nine points – not the 35 points projected by Selzer’s poll.

As media outlets concocted a narrative that many married white women, mobilized by abortion, would “secretly” vote for Harris, Democrats ignored a massive groundswell of voters of the opposite sex shifting toward Trump.

Indeed, it was a coalition of Joe-Rogan-listening, MMA-watching, cryptocurrency-trading, gym enthusiast “bros” who delivered the White House to Trump and issued a stunning rebuke to the incumbent Biden-Harris administration.

A monumental shift

As discussed in Part I of this analysis, Trump was able to win in such a dominant fashion due to making substantial inroads among many groups that were instrumental in delivering former President Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012.

The 45th and soon-to-be-47th president drastically improved his performances with Latino, black, Asian, Arab, Muslim, and American-Indian voters – as well as younger male voters across all racial and ethnic groups.

CNN’s exit poll showed that Trump won the vote of men under 30 by two points, with 49% to Harris’ 47%.

The result meant there was a monumental 13-point swing from the 2020 election, when Trump lost men under 30 to the Biden-Harris ticket by double digits – winning 41% compared to 52% for the Democrats.

While Harris’ campaign and its surrogates poured an enormous sum of money into pro-abortion ads, many young male voters backed Trump regardless of their stances on the issue.

Per CNN, Trump and Harris tied among voters who said abortion should be “legal in most cases” – a group Biden-Harris won by 38 points four years ago. In fact, exit polling seemed to suggest that Harris’ abortion messaging blitz only seemed to resonate with extremists on the issue.

A 21-year-old Trump voter who considers himself to be pro-choice expressed that he cast his ballot for the president-elect based on what he described as the Democratic Party’s “exclusion” of young white men like himself, as well as economic issues.

“I’m a straight white man, and I feel like we take the blame for a lot of things,” Nic Sumners, 21, told Glamour, a women’s magazine known for generally being left-leaning on political issues.

Trump’s “campaign was not coming after us,” Sumners continued. “He was highlighting the American people, which we are. It doesn’t matter what color you are, what you may identify as.”

“Since I wasn’t excluded, I resonated with it,” the young Trump voter stressed.

Sumners said that Harris voters he has spoken to “are constantly saying that we’re racist, that we’re misogynistic, that, you know, we’re transphobic.”

“And it’s like they don’t understand that most people aren’t like that,” he added. “Of course, there’s those fringe people who are, but most people just want to live and not be bothered by name-calling.”

Finally, the voter also pointed to Trump’s “emphasis on the economy and building America up again.”

Coby, 19, another young male Trump voter interviewed by Glamour, said:

When you tell a young white guy, like, “Hey, you’re an oppressor, and because you’re white, you have privileges that your Black and Hispanic peers didn’t have, and you’re inherently at fault, or you’re guilty for that,” which is what a lot of the left wings or Democrats are saying, they’re gonna reject that.

“We’re not racist; we’re not misogynistic,” emphasized Coby, who lives in the swing state of Michigan. “We’re just normal people, and we [are] friends with everyone. We’re tired of hearing a lot of this BS from a lot of the far left.”

‘A serious flex for bros’

Last week, Sen. John Fetterman, D-PA, weighed in on how Trump’s victory was propelled by a historic shift among young men.

“I think this election was a serious flex for bros,” Fetterman, a noted populist in a party dominated by its elite, told POLITICO.

The Democratic senator also said it was “strange” that his party, which spent a considerable amount of time attacking Trump running mate JD Vance over a 2021 tongue-in-cheek quip about “childless cat ladies,” also ignores men.

Fetterman noted that the media use the term “bro” as a pejorative when referring to young male Trump supporters: “Like, well, they’re unsophisticated, they’re shallow, or they’re crass. And we dismiss them.”

Fetterman, who endorsed Harris during the election campaign, said he “loved” people that were “absolutely going to vote for Trump.”

“They’re not fascists,” he emphasized:

I think if you go to the tickle switch, use those kinds of terms, then it’s kind of hard to walk back on those things. That’s kind of a word that really isn’t part of the vernacular for voters. Scolding harder or clutching the pearls harder, that’s never going to work for Democrats.

The lawmaker’s remarks strongly contrasted with rhetoric used by both Harris and President Joe Biden toward Trump and his supporters in the weeks leading up to Election Day.

The podcast no-show that sunk Harris’ candidacy

In speaking with POLITICO, Fetterman also scrutinized one particular Harris misstep that likely contributed to her dismal performance among young male voters: declining an invitation to appear on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

“I don’t understand why you wouldn’t go on Rogan,” the senator stated. “I’ve always been a long-term fan of his.”

Fetterman acknowledged that he does not agree with the podcaster, who is enormously popular among young men, “on everything,” but added “don’t we all have the responsibility to challenge our views and to be a part of those conversations with people?”

Fetterman himself appeared on Rogan’s show the Saturday before Election Day. Rogan has previously expressed left-of-center views.

Unlike his failed Democratic opponent, Trump accepted Rogan’s invitation and flew to Austin, Texas, to sit down for a nearly three-hour interview with the podcaster. In three days, the conversation reached just shy of 40 million views on YouTube alone.

As CatholicVote noted at the time, Rogan’s show is the “number one podcast on Spotify and currently boasts 14.5 million followers on the app and 17.5 million subscribers on YouTube.”

After remaining neutral throughout the entire 2024 cycle, Rogan issued a last-minute endorsement of Trump on the eve of Election Day.

He made the announcement upon releasing his latest interview with pro-Trump billionaire Elon Musk – another figure who is both immensely popular among young men and was at a time widely regarded as liberal-leaning.

After Trump’s win, Rogan said that many “artists, musicians, and comedians” thanked him for his surprise endorsement.

Fetterman was not the only well-known voice on the left with a critique of the Harris camp – after it became clear that her spurning Rogan may be partly to blame for her loss.

On the Sunday following the election, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, said during a CNN appearance: “What’s the problem with going on those shows? It’s hard for me to understand that.”

Sanders appeared on Rogan’s show in August 2019 as a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Several months after the cordial interview, Rogan announced that he was endorsing Sanders in the Democratic primary – an endorsement the left-wing senator publicly touted.

“I like him a lot,” Rogan said of Sanders in January 2020.

However, the podcaster’s then-endorsement of the openly socialist lawmaker received considerable pushback from many on the left. Some LGBTQ activists called Rogan “transphobic” for believing in biological sex, and other leftists took issue with him for having “conspiracy theorists” on as guests.

Rogan at the time had less than half the number of subscribers on YouTube he has now.

In early 2022, many figures on the left unsuccessfully called on Spotify to deplatform Rogan after he interviewed Dr. Robert Malone, a physician and vaccine pioneer who holds views on COVID restrictions and treatments that dissent from the public health establishment.

Singer Neil Young made headlines after he removed his music from Spotify in protest against the audio streaming provider not canceling their best-performing podcast. Young quietly returned to Spotify just two years later, prompting Rogan to sardonically welcome him back.

On Thursday, Joshua Franklin and Anna Nicolaou of the Financial Times (FT) reported that “Kamala Harris’s fears of a progressive backlash killed a plan for her to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast.”

The FT’s report quoted Jennifer Palmieri, the former White House Communications Director under the Obama administration who served on Harris’ campaign as a senior adviser to the candidate’s husband, Doug Emhoff.

“The Harris campaign and Rogan, whose audience is bigger than that of many television networks, had discussed an interview for his podcast,” Franklin and Nicolaou wrote,

a move some Democrats hoped would help Harris reach young men who were gravitating towards Trump.

The talks faltered because of concerns at how the interview would be perceived within the Democratic party, said Jennifer Palmieri.

Following the publication of FT’s report, many critics from across the political spectrum took to X (formerly Twitter) to blast the Harris campaign staffers’ costly misgivings about Rogan.

“The Kamala campaign punted on Joe Rogan over backlash from campaign staff?” wrote independent journalist Lee Fang. “We live in an age where left-liberal leadership destroys itself out of fear of offending lower level ultra privileged woke staffers.”

Cenk Uygur, the founder of popular left-wing alternative media outlet The Young Turks (TYT), wrote: “Apparently some PC staffers had a role in blocking Kamala from going on Rogan.”

“Presumably in their minds, they didn’t want to platform him. You’re not getting it!” Uygur continued. “You’re not in control of the message anymore. Kamala wasn’t platforming Rogan, Rogan would have been platforming her!”

On an episode of The Hill’s “Rising” last week, journalist Niall Stanage pointed to what he called the “arbitrariness of Rogan seemingly being deemed unacceptable by some Democratic staffers.”

He compared political insiders’ rejection of Rogan to former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-WY, a deeply controversial anti-Trump Republican who endorsed Harris, “being deemed acceptable” by the Democratic campaign.

Stanage said that the vast number of views the Trump-Rogan interview received in a matter of days shows that the podcaster has “a crazy-large audience to just ignore or disdain in any way.”

In addition to “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Trump also appeared on “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von,” “Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant with Akaash Singh,” the Nelk Boys’ “Full Send Podcast,” and “Impaulsive with Logan Paul” – all popular podcasts with predominately young male followings.

Trump also sat down for interviews with the sports-focused “Six Feet Under” – hosted by retired professional wrestler Mark “The Undertaker” Calaway –  and Barstool Sports’ “Bussin with the Boys.”

Trump went on the “Shawn Ryan Show” as well, a podcast hosted by a retired Navy SEAL that is especially popular among military service members and veterans.

In August, Trump defied conventional political wisdom by appearing on a stream with Adin Ross, a popular figure in the gaming community.

Harris meanwhile took part in significantly fewer podcast interviews. Her two most well-known appearances were on “Call Her Daddy,” a comedy podcast geared toward younger women, and “The Howard Stern Show,” a long-running radio show with primarily an older male audience.

LifeNews Note: Anthony Iafrate writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.

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