Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration and Harris campaign. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren In the campaign’s final weeks, KAMALA HARRIS has looked to shore up support with key groups, offering targeted outreach to Black men, Hispanics, women and moderate Republicans. But she has yet to speak quite as directly to the issues of another voting bloc that Democrats have typically won: young voters. Young men, in particular, pose a problem for the vice president, and not simply because they’re all enthralled with DONALD TRUMP’s tough-guy act. A new NBC News Stay Tuned Gen Z poll released on Wednesday shows Harris ahead by 17 points among voters under the age of 30 — 50 percent to 33 percent — but with a massive gender gap: Harris leads by 33 points with young women, but only 2 points among young men. To better understand what’s going on with these younger voters, West Wing Playbook spoke to RACHEL JANFAZA, the author of a newsletter focused on the Gen Z political zeitgeist and a consultant on youth engagement. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. So the gender gap in the broader electorate seems to be fairly pronounced among young people. Is that what you’ve found in your conversations and focus groups? Gen Z is not a monolith and cannot be treated as one. That said, there are trends and shared experiences that have come to shape and define the political experience for young people, and this gender divide is one of those dynamics. How did that come about? Young women who grew up during the Trump era have developed a sense of sisterhood, fighting for both abortion access, but also women's rights, that have pushed them to the left. And at the same time, there's this bubbling cohort of young men who, even if they are pro-choice, which many of them are, they are not prioritizing the issue in the same way when it comes to their voting motivation. So if young women have found some solidarity, what about young men? Young men don't necessarily have a singular cause that unites them, and this has resulted in many of them feeling sort of lost and not knowing if either party is looking out for them. These are the young men now calling themselves “Barstool conservatives?” Some of them, yes, align with Dave Portnoy and his being more liberal on social issues like abortion, but more conservative on fiscal issues. And there’s the outspokenness about “cancel culture” and political correctness. Where did that all come from? It’s been building. A lot of these young men were sort of getting that messaging from their entertainment, from their sports, from the people, the comedians … and meanwhile, as campuses came back from Covid and these more progressive ideologies were cemented on college campuses, you had a cohort of students who had just spent at least a year basically alone on their devices. And I think it just created this really fertile environment for this sort of rambunctious, anti-politically correct or anti-woke discourse to thrive. And these are the young men Trump is winning? Trump is making inroads. But ... at least in my research, there is a large cohort of young men who feel really lost in the middle. And in these final days, I think that Harris needs to be really intentional about reaching that cohort of young men who dislike where she is right now but also are not going to vote for Trump. If a fraction of these young men just decide that they're not going to vote at all, or they'll write in a candidate — which is something that I've heard from a number of them — that could spell trouble for Harris' campaign. What do they want to hear exactly? These young men who are frustrated by political correctness are not necessarily motivated to vote by abortion — they need to be hearing an economic message. Both Harris and Walz could go face to camera talking about the Harris campaign’s economic policies as it pertains to young people and their futures on issues like housing, rent, small business ownership and entrepreneurship, and college education, too. Haven’t they been doing a lot of this? Their youth vote operation is very intentional and has been purposeful about reaching students across different types of campuses, including community college campuses. And the vice president — on National Voter Registration Day, she was at the Community College of Philadelphia. She has been on college campuses, and her surrogates have been, too. [Democratic Rep.] Maxwell Frost has been traversing the country, going to college campuses; [Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] was at Penn State last weekend. But you're not hearing Harris talk to young people about the economy as frequently as she could be. So she should just record a video on her phone and blast it out? Yes! Young people are used to getting content from creators that is face to camera. That’s how they learn. This is what influencers are creating on the platform every day and I’m sort of surprised the campaign hasn’t done it. She’s done a lot of podcasts and interviews. Is there one platform or influencer she should do something with who could make a difference in the final stretch? If she was able to create a video with Taylor Swift — she’s popular across the board. And whatever Taylor Swift does gets shared far and wide. It makes every headline, and everyone would see it. 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