Team Trump desperately tries to slow Harris’ young voter momentum

Donald Trump’s campaign is starting to sound frantic over the reported surge of young voter interest in Kamala Harris’ presidential run.

With President Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket, it was easier for Trump and his allies to portray the Republican nominee as relatively youthful, perhaps even a countercultural figure some young people might want to glom onto. 

Harris’ candidacy threw a wrench in those plans. Suddenly, Trump will be two decades older than the likely Democratic nominee on Election Day, and he looks every bit the part when they’re both seen in split-screen. And young voters appear to have been energized by Harris’ candidacy, which you may have noticed if you’ve been online lately. But there’s more to the story than social media excitement. As of Friday morning, the website Vote.org reported that more than 100,000 people had registered to vote using its platform since Biden dropped out of the race, and voters under 35 made up nearly 85% of that number.

So, naturally, Republicans are trying to throw cold water on that momentum. 

In an interview with Breitbart, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt dismissed the youth interest in Harris and tried to frame Trump as the obvious choice for young folks concerned about the economy. Leavitt claimed that young, female voters like her know Harris is “inauthentic,” and used Harris’ campaign video of her receiving the endorsement of Barack and Michelle Obama — which Leavitt called “staged” — as purported evidence. This is a rich claim, considering Trump’s first presidential campaign was launched with a staged event where some attendees were paid actors, and his followers have literally staged other events to play up his popularity. 

Leavitt also said high mortgage rates and inflation are reasons for young people to back Trump. Mortgage rates were relatively low in the beginning of the pandemic, because of the poor economy and fewer people seeking loans. As the economy improved in the ensuing years, mortgage rates increased, although they’ve started decreasing recently and market analysts predict they’ll fall even further by the end of the year. The problem for Trump’s campaign is that, unlike the Biden-Harris administration, their candidate hasn’t proposed anything to fix the issue of high mortgages. And economists have overwhelmingly said that the economic policies Trump has pushed — like weakening the independence of the Federal Reserve, deporting immigrants en masse and giving tax cuts to the rich — are likely to spike inflation. That’s not exactly a winning pitch to young voters, who have been shown in polling to prioritize economic issues and health care heading into November.

But the Trump campaign and its followers seem to think they have an ace in the hole when it comes to winning over young voters: rappers. 

While evidence suggests most voters don’t take cues from celebs on whom to vote for, the MAGA universe, aided by people like the infamous Fyre Fest organizer Billy McFarland, has routinely tapped rappers as Trump surrogates in an attempt to win over young voters — particularly young, nonwhite voters. Personally, I’ve always thought this was a silly strategy, as it presumes young voters are influenced by rappers rather than merely entertained by them. But the MAGA faithful, seemingly worried about Harris’ youth support, have spent the past week promoting rapper French Montana’s embrace of RNC co-chair Lara Trump, as well as rappers Lil Pump and Swae Lee’s social media attacks on Harris, which regurgitated false claims about Harris’ prosecutorial record and other misinformation — which I’ve reported on previously — that claim she’s not really being Black. 

It seems we’ve zeroed in on the Trump campaign’s chosen means of stopping Harris’ young voter momentum: with spin and ignorant emcees.