Putting abortion rights front and center in her campaign, Kamala Harris thought she found a winning formula in courting women voters.

But it was Donald Trump who found victory, running up the margins on American men -- particularly young men.

That young people as a whole tend to be more liberal was no deterrent to a US presidential campaign that capitalized on youth masculinity -- tapping into interests such as fighting sports and cryptocurrency, as well as making appearances on male-dominated podcasts.

"If you are a man in this country and you don't vote for Donald Trump, you're not a man," said Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist long focused on the youth vote.

Donald Trump won the presidency with 54 percent of men voting for the Republican, up slightly from the 51 percent that supported him in 2020, according to exit polling by NBC.

But what raised eyebrows was among younger voters aged 18-29, where 49 percent of men voted Trump -- shattering previous images of young people generally leaning left.

As Elon Musk -- tech bro, wealthy businessman and major Trump backer -- put it on Election Day: "the cavalry has arrived."

Trump's gains come as a gender divide makes itself felt among young people at-large: women under 29 had a massive 61-37 Harris-Trump split.

"There is a lot of latent sexism in the US electorate, male and female members alike," Tammy Vigil, an associate professor of media science at the University of Boston, told AFP.

"Trump's campaign gave people permission to indulge their worst impulses and embrace divisiveness of many sorts."

- 'Tough' Trump seen as a 'leader' -

Spencer Thomas, who voted for Harris, said the economy was on the mind of many of his peers who voted for Trump.

"They focused more on the economic policies and different things of that nature, rather than abortion rights," said the student at Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington.

The macho energy of the Trump presidential run -- eschewing political correctness, "wokeness" or other forms of liberal handwringing -- won over plenty of Black men, despite the campaign's outright racism at times.

Among Black men under 45, about three out of 10 voted for Trump -- double the rate of the 2020 vote and blowing yet another hole in the Democrats' traditional base.

As Democrats embark on their postmortem, trying to figure out what went wrong, there won't be one simple explanation.

But "Black and Latino men could possibly overlook the racism of the Trump campaign because Trump appealed to their sense of machismo," Vigil offered.

Trump going on the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, where listeners overwhelmingly skew young and male, "was about trying to motivate young men to turn out," said Kathleen Dolan, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

"The rest of his performance of masculinity was to appeal to his base, women and men, who like him because they think he is 'tough' and a 'leader' and clearly aren't offended by the things he says," she told AFP.

Whatever Trump's x-factor was, it scratched an itch.

According to exit polling from Edison Research, some 54 percent of Latino men voted for Trump on Tuesday -- a whopping 18 percentage point gain for Republicans compared to 2020.

AFP

US President-elect Donald Trump won male voters under 29, with some 49 percent of the vote compared to Kamala Harris's 47 percent -- shattering the image of young people as generally left-leaning © CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP

Why young men turned out in droves for Donald Trump