There’s little doubt that Kamala Harris is winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the newest cohort of American voters, but Donald Trump has deployed his youngest son Barron to turn the tide.

The 18-year-old Barron and Bo Loudon, his influencer best friend, have been briefed by Trump and are now acting as his ‘de-facto social media team’, according to the Daily Mail.

Barron has been hard at work to secure interviews and appearances on some of the biggest platforms on the internet.

It coincides with Trump appearing alongside popular online streamers and influencers like Logan Paul and Adin Ross to try to boost his performance with younger voters.

Justin Waller, an influencer who is associated with Andrew Tate, said that he was involved in a dinner with other high-profile Trump supporters organised by Barron.

“Bo reached out to me and told me that Barron watches my content and would like to invite me to dinner at Mar-a-Lago,” he told the Daily Mail.

“They are certainly going to pave their own path for themselves and it’s very clear to see that they’ll be quite successful.”

Appealing to Gen Z?

Alongside a live interview on X with Elon Musk that was marred by technical troubles and dubious claims of a cyber attack, Trump has attempted to wrestle back control by appearing on the Impaulsive podcast and on Ross’s Kick stream, with the pair holding a considerable, albeit male-dominated, audience.

Throughout the interviews, he made several outlandish claims, dozens of lies and even claimed that rapper Kanye West was a “really nice guy”.

The interviews haven’t been without issues: Trump was forced to return a Cybertruck and Rolex gifted to him by Ross because it risked breaking campaign finance laws.

With his podcast appearance receiving more than six million views and the Ross live-stream over 500,000 concurrent viewers, it may appear that Trump is winning over the youngest members of American society, but the numbers tell a different story.

New voters

With more than eight million Gen Z Americans being able to vote for the first time in November, and about 47 per cent of them being people of colour, Trump has his work cut out if he is going to stop a campaign that has all the momentum in fundraising, polling and enthusiasm.

Harris has experienced a 13-point shift in support from voters aged between 18 and 29 since she entered the race and her approval rating has grown from 33 per cent to 49 per cent in the same period.

Mary-Pat Hector, the head of an Atlanta-based nonprofit for youth mobilisation called Rise, told The New Yorker that before Biden dropped out, it was difficult to motivate young people for the Democratic Party.

“Our students were chasing down voters,” she said.

“Now voters are chasing organisers down, trying to get involved.”

The youth vote has been difficult to nail down in the US, with one infamous political reporter once musing that people in Washington don’t take it very seriously, because they vote at a disproportionately low rate compared to the rest of the country.