Home to a university, Madison is a left-leaning city in a swing state. But if you happened to find yourself at the Kollege Klub on a recent Saturday night, where Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” instructed patrons to shake that thing, you would not know it. A man lobbed MAGA hats into a crowd of rapt frat bros. Presiding were the Nelk Boys, a group of supremely popular YouTubers who film inane pranks. They are fans of Donald Trump and have had him on their podcast three times. This was a party to gin up the vote. Yet voting felt like a concept of a plan compared with downing vodka Red Bulls and shimmying to Swedish House Mafia.

To increase his vote, Mr Trump has two options. He can moderate his message to win over traditional Republicans, the sort of voters who supported Nikki Haley in the Republican primary. He is not doing that—witness the denigration of Puerto Ricans at his rally at Madison Square Garden. Rather it is Kamala Harris who has tacked to the centre and campaigned with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, a stalwart conservative.

Instead Mr Trump is courting people who don’t reliably vote, but who will vote for him if they can be persuaded to vote at all: he is wooing the bro. He has called the Nelk Boys “the hottest guys around”. He has skipped debates with Ms Harris but made time for podcast chats with Logan Paul, a wrestler; Theo Von, a mulleted comedian; and, last week, Joe Rogan, the gorilla of the genre with 15m listeners. The centre of gravity in this macho galaxy is the United Fighting Championship, a mixed-martial-arts outfit that counts Mr Trump a fan. Its boss, Dana White, speaks (or shouts) at MAGA rallies.

Mr Trump has also appeared alongside rappers and reggaeton singers with names like Icewear Vezzo, Sleepy Hallow and Anuel AA. None has the star wattage of Beyoncé or Bad Bunny, who is Puerto Rican and endorsed Ms Harris after the Garden rally. But they have devoted followings and create a permission structure for black and Latino fans to make an against-the-grain choice. Mr Trump’s forays here can sometimes feel discordant. At a rally in Las Vegas he introduced Nicky Jam, a reggaeton star, like this: “Do you know Nicky? She’s hot!” Nicky is a “he”, who then told the crowd “Necesitamos a Trump!”

Bros like Mr Trump’s schtick. They rate him better on the economy and find him funny: less villain, more anti-hero, says John Della Volpe of the Harvard Kennedy School. An 18-year-old today would have been nine when he announced his first candidacy; there is little memory of or nostalgia for prelapsarian politics. Brandon Maly, the 24-year-old chair of the Republican Party in Dane county, which encompasses Madison, says his cohort feels alienated by social movements. “Hypocrisies like ‘queers for Palestine’? That doesn’t resonate so much with the guys.”

In 2020 Mr Trump won 41% of men aged between 18 and 29 (compared with 32% of women). This year his vote share could rise by several percentage points. Just over 12m men in that age cohort participated last time, so even a small improvement could deliver Mr Trump hundreds of thousands of votes. He is also doing better with black and Hispanic men. Yet overall, this strategy is risky. Offsetting losses among college-educated suburbanites who reliably vote requires gains among people who do so inconsistently and at lower rates. Only half of eligible young men voted in 2020.

The challenge is convincing people with less trust or interest in politics—those who are least likely to consider voting impactful—that it is worth the energy. In Mr Della Volpe’s surveys, 55% of young men who support Ms Harris say they will “definitely” vote compared with 38% of their pro-Trump counterparts. Young women, meanwhile, skew heavily Democratic and are trending more that way.

Mr Trump managed this feat in 2016 by appealing to another disengaged group: white working-class men. Then, too, his ground game was thin. This year in Wisconsin he has outsourced the job of door-knocking and phone-banking to groups run by Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk, a millennial activist. This effort appears disorganised. Ben Wikler, the Democratic state chair, claims his party is “running circles” around Republicans when it comes to get-out-the-vote operations.

Less informed voters care most about the cost of living and tend to pick candidates whom they think they know and relate to. A recent study in the American Political Science Review found that viewers of “The Apprentice” were more likely to choose Mr Trump in the primary in 2016. Entertaining, seemingly apolitical media present a “unique route into the public consciousness”, the authors concluded. That applies equally to Mr Trump’s podcasting and TikToking (where he has twice as many followers as Ms Harris).

Many Americans revile Mr Trump. Yet plenty share the view of the frat brother in Madison who told your correspondent that America, “in its simplest form, is a business” and that Mr Trump is the boss. ■