Donald Trump is looking for young dudes on the internet. Are those dudes old enough to vote?
AP Photo/Chris Carlson and Christian Petersen/Getty Images
- Do you know who Adin Ross or Theo Von are?
- Before this year, Donald Trump most likely didn't. But he recently appeared on both of their very popular internet talk shows.
- It's part of Trump's outreach to young dudes. But how many of the shows' fans are old enough to vote?
It's no secret that one of Donald Trump's election strategies is to seek out young men.
That group doesn't tend to vote that much (neither do young women) but seems quite Trump-curious. And in a tight race, that could make all the difference.
That's why Trump had Dana White, CEO of the young men-friendly Ultimate Fighting Championship, introduce him at the Republican National Convention. And it's why Trump has been making a series of appearances with internet celebrities beloved by young men, including Logan Paul, Adin Ross, the Nelk boys and, most recently, Theo Von.
There's a good chance that not all of those names are familiar to you, a grown-up reading Business Insider. (Though it's very possible you saw the clip of Von explaining cocaine's allure to Trump this week: "Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie. You know what I'm saying? You'll be out on your own porch. You'll be your own streetlamp.")
If that's the case, let me direct you to this explainer by Max Read, which gives you a brief tour of the Trump-friendly young dudes that other young dudes like. Read's catch-all term for them: "dipshits."
But I also wanted to flag Read's discussion of Trump's strategy, which makes a point I don't see in other Trump/dudes discussions:
The thing about dipshit outreach strategy is that while you can invent a kind of clever logic to support it — i.e., the audience for Logan Paul and Adin Ross consists of guys who have some kind of natural affinity for Trump, but are also low-propensity voters (due to being dipshits), and a consistent media campaign among them might increase turnout in the dipshit community — in practice a sizable majority of the dipshit audience is 15-year-old boys who are not legally able to vote.
If you have teenage boys who aren't old enough to vote in your family (raises hand), then the fact that the dipshits are enormously popular with teenage boys who aren't old enough to vote will not be news to you.
But, as we keep pointing out here, the internet consumption habits of young people remain a mystery to lots of older people. Which, again, is one of the reasons they don't understand why YouTube is so enormous.
To be fair, the exact demographic breakdown of the dipshits' audience isn't readily available, in part because it's not in YouTube and other platforms' best interests to be specific about this stuff. So we're just guessing here, just like Trump and his team are. All we can tell is that they seem to think it's working for them.