Three weeks before Election Day, Donald J. Trump appeared on a podcast hosted by two former professional football players. They spent about an hour together, talking as much about sports as his presidential bid.
At one point, the hosts asked Mr. Trump why he had made time for them and other similar shows, spending dozens of hours in podcast studios over the course of the campaign.
“It’s a young world,” he explained. “You’re in a young world, right?”
Mr. Trump’s gamble that courting this “young world” — an increasingly influential sphere of podcasts and personalities built for, inhabited and consumed overwhelmingly by young men — would motivate them to vote for him appears to have paid off, at least according to early data.
And while many factors contributed to Mr. Trump’s victory, Democrats are seizing on exit polling that suggests he improved his performance with Gen Z men, with a focus on the so-called manoverse, as they seek to rebuild a fractured coalition after Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss. As young men increasingly reported feeling left behind, Mr. Trump wooed them in part by tapping into a right-leaning online media ecosystem that celebrated traditional masculinity while speaking to their economic insecurities.
The Democratic Party failed, some Democrats and young progressives said, to confront the cultural issues motivating Gen Z men, and to offer a coherent message on pocketbook issues that would appeal to them. Now, they are engaging in a period of soul-searching, reckoning with the splintered media environment that Mr. Trump was able to master and casting about for a response. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the prominent New York Democrat, has been speaking directly to the camera on her Instagram page, asking conservative viewers what forms of media they consume.
“Republicans have used culture as a gateway to politics,” said Brian Tyler Cohen, a Democratic influencer who posts news analyses and interviews to his 3.4 million subscribers on YouTube. “These are people who are influential to young men through culture, and then politics comes along with it. We do not have that infrastructure.”