This Was the Year of the Influencer Political Takeover

After years of sitting on the sidelines, content creators became a part of the mainstream political media this year, delivering election news, analysis, and political commentary to their online fans—all while sidestepping the traditional press.

Eighty-one-year-old Joe Biden was serenaded on camera by the delightfully cringe TikTok singer Harry Daniels. Bernie Sanders stumped for Kamala Harris on a Twitch stream cohosted by an anime catboy VTuber. Donald Trump collabed with the quintessential creator brothers, Jake and Logan Paul. Instead of making time for traditional sit-down interviews with the mainstream press, Harris and Trump relied on creators to galvanize votes and spread their campaign messages.

“There’s just no value—with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press—in a general election to speaking to The New York Times or speaking to The Washington Post, because those [readers] are already with us,” Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign manager for Harris, told Semafor in December.

Influencing has grown into a $250 billion industry. More than 70 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 say they follow an influencer on social media, a Pew Research survey found last year. A more recent survey, published in November, found that one in five US adults get their news from news influencers. That shift in media consumption was met with record spending on creator partnerships. Priorities USA put at least $1 million toward influencer marketing. The Harris campaign paid at least $2.5 million to management agencies that book creators for political advertising campaigns.

This election, creators were everywhere—the Republican and Democratic conventions, fundraisers, rallies, and even parties at Mar-a-Lago. But the foundations for this creator takeover of political messaging were propped up nearly a decade ago. In 2016, Trump showed how social media platforms like Twitter could influence voters. Throughout the 2020 election, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg spent more than $300 million on a presidential campaign that recruited influencers and meme pages as paid digital surrogates, and the Biden administration routinely invited creators to the White House for briefings.

By embracing creators, politicians have started blurring the lines between talking heads and journalists. Unlike reporters, news creators are often not beholden to editorial standards and substantial fact-checking—something that is one high-profile defamation lawsuit away from changing but that, for now, marks a difference. Many creators do work similar to what journalists do—absorbing, translating, and communicating news to audiences online. But in the online political ecosystem, many of them come off more as fans than as objective observers. Some are explicitly party activists. Still, they are often provided access similar to what the traditional press gets.