Tom Steyer spent tens of thousands of dollars on political influencers with millions of followers, and he didn't even make it to the general election in California. Spencer Pratt went viral, appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast in front of nearly 12 million listeners, and still lost his race for mayor of Los Angeles. At some point you have to ask: what exactly are campaigns buying here?
The Strategy That Won Once and Now Everyone Won't Stop Copying
The logic is simple enough that you can't blame anyone for trying it. Donald Trump sat down with streamers, podcasters, and Joe Rogan in 2024, made serious inroads with young male voters, and won the presidency. Every campaign operative in America watched that happen and thought: got it, we do the internet thing now.
The problem, as NPR is reporting this week, is that the strategy has produced results that range from 'fine, probably' to 'genuinely embarrassing.' Campaigns are chasing viral moments and influencer co-signs like they're tokens you can collect and cash in for votes on election day. It doesn't quite work that way.
Republican strategist Eric Wilson put it bluntly to NPR: social media and content creators are 'a blunt force object.' Great for national campaigns trying to move mass opinion. Considerably less useful when you're running in a specific state primary and need specific registered voters to show up on a specific Tuesday. 'Even if someone has millions of followers across the country,' Wilson said, 'when you slice that down to who's actually in this state and who's actually a primary voter, you start to see sometimes the juice isn't worth the squeeze.'
The Hasan Piker Question Nobody Agrees On
The most interesting fight in this whole conversation is happening inside the Democratic Party right now, and it centers on Hasan Piker, a streamer with nearly 10 million followers across major social media platforms who has become one of the more polarizing figures in left-wing online media.
Piker is a committed leftist, fiercely anti-war, and has made statements that have generated serious backlash, including saying in a recent interview that he 'would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.' That quote has followed him into campaign season, and plenty of Democrats think touching him is radioactive.
Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive running for U.S. Senate in Michigan, disagrees. El-Sayed campaigned with Piker in early April, and according to NPR, the move sparked outrage from both parties. El-Sayed's response to the backlash has essentially been: the outrage is coming from people who aren't his target audience anyway. 'There have to be on-ramps back to politics,' he told NPR. 'We cannot be shunning certain media platforms because in effect, we're shunning the people who pay attention to them.'
What El-Sayed Says He's Actually Seeing on the Ground
Here's what makes this a more interesting argument than the usual 'controversial endorsement' news cycle: El-Sayed says the criticism simply isn't registering with voters he talks to in person. 'It's not something I hear about when I'm on the stump,' he told NPR.
What he does hear, he says, is older voters asking how he got so many young people to show up, and younger voters telling him they found him through Piker's platform. That is exactly the dynamic he was trying to create. Whether it translates into enough votes to win a Senate primary in Michigan on August 4th is a different question entirely.
El-Sayed's campaign told NPR there was a real, measurable spike after the Piker appearances: more volunteer sign-ups, a wave of fundraising dollars in the first days after the events were announced. Spikes are not wins. But they're not nothing either.
The Uncomfortable Math Under All of This
Wilson, the Republican strategist, laid out the actual cost-benefit question campaigns have to answer: 'Does the baggage that comes with that person outweigh the potential benefits?' It sounds simple. It is not simple.
The voters you're trying to reach with an influencer are often not the same voters who are going to be furious about that influencer's past statements. That's what El-Sayed is betting on. The people losing their minds about Piker's Hamas comment on Twitter are probably not the under-30 disengaged voters he needs to find. But primaries are won on turnout, and turnout is unpredictable, and the people losing their minds on Twitter do sometimes actually vote.
Piker has continued supporting other Democrats this cycle beyond El-Sayed, and NPR notes that some of those candidates have gone on to win their primaries. That's ammunition for the 'influencers work' camp. The Steyer and Pratt results are ammunition for the 'influencers don't work' camp. The honest answer right now is that nobody actually knows, and campaigns are spending real money finding out in real time.
The Part Everyone Keeps Glossing Over
Trump's 2024 influencer strategy worked, and everyone is treating that like a replicable formula. But Trump was a former president running against an incumbent party during a period of genuine economic anxiety with a coalition he'd spent years building. He didn't win because Joe Rogan interviewed him. Rogan was one piece of a much larger picture.
Copying the 'nontraditional media appearances' part of Trump's 2024 strategy while ignoring everything else about his specific political moment is the kind of thing that sounds smart in a campaign strategy meeting and looks very silly in the post-mortem. Tom Steyer had influencer partnerships. He lost. You can pay for access to an audience. You cannot pay for that audience to care about your candidate.
The Dingo Take
Here is the actual dynamic at play: influencers are getting paid, getting exposure, getting their follower counts boosted by association with political campaigns, and in exchange, campaigns are getting... vibes. Sometimes a fundraising spike. Occasionally a win they probably would have gotten anyway. The political consultant class has discovered a new line item to put on invoices, and the candidates are signing the checks because nobody wants to be the campaign that didn't try the thing that worked for Trump.
The El-Sayed and Piker situation is at least honest about what it's attempting. El-Sayed isn't pretending the criticism doesn't exist. He's making a deliberate bet that the voters he needs are not the voters who are mad about it, and that the trade is worth making. That's a real strategic argument, not just vibes-chasing. Whether it's correct is something Michigan Democrats will settle on August 4th.
But the broader lesson here is the one nobody in campaign world seems to want to learn: an audience is not a constituency. Followers are not voters. Going viral on a Tuesday doesn't mean anything if your people don't show up on the Tuesday that counts. Spencer Pratt went on Joe Rogan. He lost his mayoral race. The podcast did not save him. At some point, you have to actually give people a reason to vote for you, and no amount of influencer co-signs is a substitute for that.
