Nelk is teaming up with Trump's VP pick — here's why

Donald Trump's vice-presidential running mate, J.D. Vance, is on TikTok — and he's collaborating with Canadian-American social media stars the Nelk Boys. 

Vance's first post on the social media site features a nine-second video where he can be seen accepting alcohol from Canadian Kyle Forgeard, one of Nelk's founders. 

"Yo J.D., we want to welcome you to TikTok," Forgeard says in the video, before handing Vance a box of Happy Dad, a brand of hard seltzers founded by Nelk in 2021. 

The collaboration is part of a new initiative launched today by a group of Trump allies called Send the Vote. It's a $20-million US voter registration and turnout program aimed at courting the kind of crowd attracted to Nelk's content — young men. The Nelk Boys TikTok account, which has more than 4.6 million followers, often revolves around frat-like parties, pranks and a whole lot of cursing.

The short video — which seems to be the first posted to Vance's TikTok account, where he had about 15,000 followers at the time of publication — appears to be a teaser for the initiative. Nelk says it's expected to have a more fulsome debut Friday on the popular Full Send podcast, with which they are also affiliated.

The collaboration is familiar territory for Nelk. The group has worked with Trump in the past.

They've had both Trump and Donald Trump Jr. on their podcast. The episode with Trump was eventually pulled down by YouTube because of the former U.S. president's lies about the 2020 election. It received more than five million views in 24 hours.

The group has also hosted controversial figures like Elon Musk, Andrew Tate, Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. 

The newly announced initiative comes as both major parties in the U.S. battle to attract young voters. 

Locked in a battle for voters

Prior to Joe Biden's dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate, there were reports that the Democrats were losing donors, said Lydia Miljan, a professor of political science at the University of Windsor. 

Since then, Harris supporters have organized several fundraising calls breathing new life into the Democrats' election efforts. 

"Once [Biden] bowed out from the race, then those same donors went flocking to her," Miljan said to CBC News in an interview Tuesday. 

One of those calls featured a type of voters that Donald Trump and the Republicans have long relied on for votes: white men. 

The Harris campaign wants "to make the case that not only do they have the traditional big donors, but they're going to have new voters, voters who weren't typically associated with the Democrats," said Miljan.

It appears that Trump and Vance's response, at least in part, is the Send the Vote initiative. 

Nelk comes with a lot of eyeballs — in addition to its TikTok account, the group boasts more than eight million subscribers on YouTube. Their brand of humour has a sort of subtle conservative appeal.

Past Nelk controversies

For example, in a 2022 video the group travels to Flint, Mich., in an attempt to capture and breed bigfoot in an amusement park. Forgeard jokes that there might be a "kind of political correctness maybe if we did get a male, just to satisfy the Democrats, like maybe have two gay bigfoots … just for some PC media bullshit?"

The group has also courted a lot of controversy.

In 2020, during the COVID 19 pandemic, Nelk threw massive parties in "protest" of public health rules. One event at Illinois State University sparked widespread criticism for drawing a crowd of people who weren't wearing masks. 

The parties led to the demonetization of Nelk's YouTube channel. The social media site said the group's behaviour violated the platform's Creator Responsibility Policy, which mandates that creators do not engage in "on- and/or off-platform behavior [that] harms our users, community, employees or ecosystem."

Nelk's partnership with Vance comes at a time when the Republicans are dealing with controversies of their own. The party's attacks have ramped up against Harris, with some Republicans having referred to her as a "DEI" candidate — a derisive reference to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the workplace. 

Others have decried Harris for not having biological children, echoing a comment that Vance made in 2021, when he called Harris and other Democrats "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives."