Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are launching a new digital ad on social media urging young men — specifically young Black men — to get out and vote in November. The ad is a parody of a popular web series that features men and women popping balloons if they are not interested in a potential match. 

“Pop the Balloon or Find Love” is a series from social media influencer Arlette Amuli. The premise is that a group of about a dozen women or men will stand in a line in a room and Ms. Amuli will bring in a man or a woman to introduce himself or herself, almost like a blind date. Ms. Amuli will ask questions of the contestant about his or her personal life, and if the other participants don’t like what they hear or see, then they pop a balloon to say they are no longer interested. 

Ms. Amuli has more than 625,000 YouTube subscribers, more than 291,000 Instagram followers, and has over 100 million views across social media platforms of the balloon popping series. 

Ms. Harris’s ad is an obvious parody of Ms. Amuli’s series, featuring a young man and a group of women who are attracted to him. 

“I work in finance making six figures,” the bachelor says to a group of impressed women in the satire. He also says he is 6 feet and five inches tall. 

When one of the women asks the man if he has a plan to vote in November, the man says no. “Uhhh, I didn’t plan on it,” he says, leading all the women to grimace and pop their balloons. 

“Don’t get popped,” the Harris team writes in bold, red letters at the end of the ad. “Vote.”

Ms. Harris’s new digital ad is clearly a play for the votes of young Black men — a group with whom she has been struggling for weeks. President Obama faced backlash when he said publicly during a small meeting with Black men in Pennsylvania that he felt the demographic wasn’t as excited for Ms. Harris as they were for him in 2008 simply because she is a woman. 

The vice president has brushed off concerns publicly about her dismal levels of support among young men. She has been pressed on the question of why young Black men aren’t supporting her at the same levels as they had supported Mr. Obama, President Biden, and even Secretary Clinton, but she has only said she is fighting to “earn” every vote. 

“You can look at the audience and see there are people of every background and gender who are showing up by the thousands, and I think it is because they know I intend to be a president for all Americans, and that’s how I’m campaigning to earn the vote of every American,” Ms. Harris told NBC News during an interview after a rally in Pennsylvania this week. 

A recent survey from Ms. Harris’s alma mater, Howard University, shows that she is holding her own with Black voters of all demographics except men under 50 across the battleground states. In the seven critical contests of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the vice president leads President Trump by a margin of 76 points among all Black voters — 84 percent to eight percent. 

Among Black men under 50, however, Ms. Harris is falling behind. She only has a 47 percent lead over Trump among that group, 68 percent to 21 percent. It is by far her worst sub-group within the Black community, with just nine percent of Black men over 50, seven percent of Black women under 50, and three percent of Black women over 50 support Trump.