The Content Creators Turned Democratic Operatives

Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat trying to win the governor's mansion in Texas, confessed her love for the Wicked musical whilemixing a strawberry milk latte witheli.rallo (an influencer with 1.2 million TikTok followers).

Peggy Flanagan, the Democrat trying to win a Senate seat in Minnesota, ran around the state fair withemmalinechilds (300,400 TikTok followers), wielding“pronto pups” — Midwestern corn dogs — and declaring it the “best day ever.”

And Roy Cooper, the Democrat trying to win the Senate race in North Carolina, stood on the sidelines of a campaign rally to askmerenator (57,800 Instagram followers) what her biggest challenge is,teeing up a response about a shaky economy for small business owners.

This is campaigning in the age of influencers. As political campaigns are waged more and more on the internet — a place where everyone seems driven by an insatiable hunger for attention — a debate is brewing about whether elections can be won or lost online.

After Trump’s 2024 victory, Democrats are playing catch up by taking a page from the GOP playbook: Influencers are being deeply embedded into campaigns, from Florida to Alaska, and candidates are popping up on screen with them, on their turf. Developing an influencer program is now a common component of a campaign, mapped alongside traditional voter outreach methods like door-knocking and phone-banking.

This approach isn’t without controversy. Within the Democratic Party there’s a raging discussion about the ethics of engaging boisterous online personalities — and sharp disagreement about whether influencers should be brought on board at all. No one can agree if they should be paid or remain volunteers or if they should be considered independent journalists or campaign surrogates or something else entirely.

Longtime Democratic consultants tend to be antsy about influencer adoption, skeptical that any investments will reap dividends come Election Day. Meanwhile a cottage industry of digital firms specializing in connecting campaigns with vetted influencers is booming — a new consultant class eager to cash in on Democrats’ internet inexperience.

“This is not something that is optional anymore,” says Stuart Perelmuter, co-founder of digital firm Good Influence, one of those operations. “In the ‘26 cycle, that's when our side woke up to the power of this work.”

Nearly 20 years ago, rapper/producer will.i.am of Blackeyed Peas fame stared directly into the camera, looking somber. As a few guitar chords began to play, Barack Obama, a baby-faced Democrat running for president, appeared on a split screen. “It was a creed written into the founding documents…” the pair intone in union. A rapid succession of celebrities from Scarlett Johansson to Common to John Legend chime in for a call-and-response production cribbed from Obama’s 2008 New Hampshire primary concession speech, “Yes We Can.” Filmed early in Obama’s first presidential campaign, the black-and-white video demonstrated how politics could be pop culture, and politicians could be made cool by being surrounded by cooler people.

Overproduced videos selling candidates got shorter and snarkier. In the age-old quest to fake authenticity, politicians capitalized on social media trends: Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign staff doing the “mannequin challenge.” Joe Biden co-opting the “Dark Brandon” MAGA meme. The joke became that Democrats knew they were being cringey by trying to rebrand themselves in the language of younger generations — but they did it anyway. “This is the ranking rizzler on Appropriations,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro declared in a 2024 TikTok.

But the GOP was way ahead of the game. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump dominated online discourse by building a vast influencer network and engaging the manosphere, an entire ecosystem and industry that has sprung up that signals hostility to feminism and comes amid the loneliness and idleness of young men. He offered them hope: “You’re a true hero for this country,” popular Twitch streamer Adin Ross told Trump. “Homie,” comedian Theo Von called him. Joe Rogan, the most persuasive podcaster in America, endorsed him. The Nelk Boys pranksters rode on Air Force One and registered young men on college campuses.

Kamala Harris did manage to score some points online that year. After Charlie XCX approvingly tweeted, “kamala is brat,”the Harris campaign quickly adopted the neon green signage from the British pop star’s Brat album cover, delighting hyper-online young progressives. “This just won her the election,” posted one. “#Team Kamala,” posted another. Harris even embraced “coconuts.” But for the most part, her team’s approach to the culture was confined mostly to one-off Tik Toks and memes — and she caught flak for not engaging with influencers early enough or appearing on Rogan’s podcast. Now, Democrats say they’re learning from the past and going forward, they’ll be a lot less lame online.

These days, working with influencers has become an inevitable part of politics — something Democrats are, somewhat reluctantly, beginning to embrace. Interviews with a dozen statewide Democratic campaigns indicate they are no longer solely relying on big name national political influencers who made a career out of posting partisan rage-bait (like Carlos Eduardo Espinaand Josh Greene) and increasingly value micro-and-mid-level creators (with handles mostly unknown to out-of-staters) who usually post about food and fashion. It’s aimed at breaking into the algorithms of the less politically engaged.

This new group of political influencers are mostly college-age or millennial women, attractive, working day jobs as pediatricians or therapists or marketing consultants. A lot of them started posting about politics in the aftermath of the 2024 election, dismayed that Democrats were once again caught off guard by Trump’s cultural cachet and furious that the official party apparatus was not creatively engaging voters during election off-years.

There’s a strong sense of urgency behind these efforts, which still tend to be small-scale, usually managed by only a handful of digital campaign staffers who spend hours recruiting influencers through endless scrolling and DMs. Democrats have a tremendous amount of work to do to catch up to the GOP’s massive online infrastructure, a well-financed, well-coordinated behemoth, ahead of the 2028 presidential election. And they’re attempting to do so one TikTok trend at a time.

“The temptation right now for a lot of campaigns is: get the most number of eyeballs, go everywhere, do everything, be as big as possible,” says a Democratic Senate campaign staffer, granted anonymity to speak about strategy. “Everyone's being fed this drumbeat of, ‘You got to go bigger, you’ve got to be doing all of these other splashy things.”

But Democrats are far from united about using content creators, particularly in the wake of the controversy over Hasan Piker, the insanely popular Twitch streamer with a history of inflammatory comments. While some campaigns are stacking front rows of events with influencers, other Democrats are fearful that a reliance on chronic posters introduces too much risk — and the upside of investing in them is way overblown.

Those skeptics also say influencers are untrained in the ways of political communication and can be difficult to work with. Some campaign staffers tell POLITICO Magazine that influencers they’ve worked with have sometimes failed to show up for engagements with candidates. Or they’ve caused trouble by pushing back on internal decisions like who the candidate associates with or whether they have spoken out on a prominent issue, like LGBTQ rights.

“It's a setup for failure a lot of times because the perception is that there's traction and money and attention that comes with it, which isn't always the case,” says a senior Democratic communications expert, who advises campaigns not to pay influencers and was granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal discussions.

“I’ve yet to see going on an influencer[’s channel] turning into doors knocked. I’ve yet to see it generate a lot of money.”

The Democratic primary race for Texas Senate was heating up. State Rep. James Talarico, a seminary student with a strong social media presence, was facing off against Rep. Jasmine Crockett, the Dallas congresswoman who’d already gone viral for her snappy comebacks during committee hearings. Her late entrance into the race booted out Rep. Collin Allred, a mild-mannered Black congressman who’d lost the Senate race to Republican Ted Cruz two years prior.

So when feisty Democratic strategist James Carville endorsed Talarico, his team blasted it out.

Dallas-based influencer Morgan Thompson (215,600 TikTok followers), who’d been participating in Talarico’s influencer program, was furious. She was still seething over Carville’s column in the New York Times when he called on Democrats to drop “woke” politics and embrace “rage,” which she viewed as an affront to Black interests — and felt the Talarcio campaign was aligning itself with that view by promoting Carville’s endorsement of his candidacy.

When she raised those concerns to the staffer leading the campaign’s content creator program, that person set up an off-the-record chat — a common journalistic practice — with Talarico himself, according to posted screenshots oftexts between the pair.

According to Thompson, during their conversation, Talarico told her, “[I] signed up to run against a mediocre Black man, not a formidable, intelligent Black woman."

Thompson was so bothered by the comment she picked up her phone to blow up that off-the-record deal, recounting her version of their unrecorded interaction on social media. She had already told her followers that she was switching allegiances to Crockett.

Allred jumped on the opportunity to condemn Talarico. Crockett joined his side. Their supporters raged online. “Black folks are warning us about James Talarico,” said Crockett booster Christopher Bouzy (299,600 followers on X). “Maybe this time y'all should listen.”

Hours after the infighting took off, Talarico issued a statement, calling Thompson’s post a "mischaracterization of a private conversation” and said he would “never attack [Allred] on the basis of race.”

Other Senate campaigns were watching the fallout with astonishment. At that point early on in the election season, influencers were becoming more embedded into campaigns than ever before, and here was a worst case example of what could go really wrong.

“What I have learned this cycle and implored upon the folks I work with is that influencers have different incentives than you do,” says a Democratic strategist working on multiple high-profile races. “Even if they say they're Democrats and they want to help you win, at the end of the day, their business is clicks and attention. And unlike the press, they do not have editors, and they do not have a code of standards.”

“A lot of campaigns brought them in too close because they felt like friends, and then when things got weird, they couldn't stop them or they couldn't say, ‘Hey, hey, hey, that's not the rules,’” the strategist says.

Thompson, in an interview with POLITICO at the time of the controversy, said she felt compelled to come forward: “I’m a content creator. I take sharing information and dispelling misinformation very seriously as part of what I do.”

The dustup demonstrated the damage that can be dealt to a campaign when a relationship with an influencer goes haywire. Part-journalist, part-salesperson, part-friend-in-the-know, influencers don’t fall into a neat category. And more and more they’ve taken on a new title: part-campaign adviser. Campaigns often treat creators like VIP stakeholders. They’re given briefings on internal polling and updates on ad spending. They’re managed by staffers via group chats on Signal and Instagram and email listservs. They’re given one-on-one time with candidates where the conversation terms are set. “Sometimes you do have to say, ‘Hey, this isn't for the internet,’” says another Senate campaign staffer.

“I will tell campaigns, ‘Hey, I really want you to say something about this, or can you speak up about this, or this issue really matters. I wish you would do more about this,” says North Carolina influencer bullcityanna (37,800 instagram followers). As a side gig, she produces social media interviews with big names in Democratic circles like Stacey Abrams and Justin Pierson and Andy Beshear. She issues calls to action when major news breaks. And she also shares a recipe for pesto alongside a pitch to vote for a Democrat running for the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Trusting outsiders free to speak on behalf of a candidate as they please — even still on a short leash — is a noteworthy shift for a risk-averse party long obsessed with achieving perfect choreography on the campaign trail. And sometimes that means letting said outsiders push boundaries.

At first glance, Florida-based influencer sarah_wiles (417,000 Instagram followers) looks like any content creator who has perfected the Instagram aesthetic: bright blonde hair, flawless skin, carefully applied makeup. Wiles in a star-spangled bikini on vacation in the Florida Keys. Wiles bedazzling household objects. And then there are her political posts, like the one where Wiles poses coyly in a sports bra and leggings beside a stripper pole, while sharing information about how to sign up to be a poll worker. That post was part of a creator-led social media campaign designed to use sexy photos to catch people’s attention — then direct them to volunteer work. Hundreds of influencers participated and more than 30,000 people across the country signed up as poll workers, according to an influencer who was involved.

Wiles was part of the group of influencers who burst into the political space after the 2024 election, feeling motivated to use her background in digital marketing to boost Democrats like Florida Senate contender Angie Nixon.

“Because my audience trusts me, that trust transfers on,” Wiles says. “And so I found that embedding myself in a campaign in a more traditional organizer way helps me tell that story digitally a whole lot better and becomes a whole lot more compelling for people.”

After establishing herself as a vocal supporter during the primary, Wiles is now employed by Nixon’s campaign as its “creator organizer.” Before that, Wiles says she was not paid directly by any campaign for her political work, like most local influencers, but she did participate in paid creator cohorts like Chorus. Now, as an official campaign employee, Wiles says her job is to wrangle influencers to post on behalf of Nixon to “get more eyeballs on her, and that can really help shift fundraising dollars and national media.”

Alongside choreographed videos, campaigns deploy armies of curated content creators to amplify important moments in races in hopes of manipulating perceptions of their candidates.

Take Juliana Stratton’s Illinois Senate campaign. It was January, two months before the primary, and the state’s lieutenant governor was being massively outspent on the airwaves and down double digits in polls. Her campaign was searching for a breakout moment.

Staring down an upcoming spree of debates, Stratton’s team decided it was time to deploy the network of local online content creators her staff had been busy cultivating for months by keeping in constant contact and arranging conversations with the candidate. The mission: get more people to pay attention to little-noticed candidate debates broadcast on local TV during the evening weekday rush.

If 2024 was the first serious influencer election, then 2026 digital campaign strategy will be remembered as the first clipping election. “Clip farming” is now part of the internet lexicon. Brief moments with the potential to amass large numbers of clicks get clipped from longer videos and blasted online.

Stratton’s team uploaded clips of her attacking Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robin Kelly to a shared Google Drive folder for outside allies to find. On the eve of one of the matchups, the campaign held a conference call with creators to brief them on the approach: Access the clips via the folder and share them with their audiences.

Then the clip blast began.

“Stratton made it clear she is ready to bring the bold and progressive leadership we have in Illinois to Washington,” brooke.talks.politics (17,000 followers) said on Instagram alongside a clip of Stratton slamming her challengers for supporting ICE funding.

“Seeing women like me fight for the rights of our community >>,” jackieshawnn (5,800 followers) said while posting a clip of Stratton, a mother of four, talking about growing up as a daughter of a public school teacher.

The number of likes and comments on the posts were minimal. No matter. In the eyes of a campaign, it all adds up, even if it’s impossible to say how many views translate to votes. Political operatives are convinced that the person recommending where to grab a late-night meal or what moisturizer to buy is also a compelling person to recommend who to vote for. And they’re sold on the argument that influencers can help them reach young voters and voters of color of all ages who have shut out traditional media in favor of getting their news on social platforms.

Stratton’s operation believes creators boosting her progressive brand over her moderate opponents is partly why she went on to clinch the Democratic nomination, putting her on a glide path to replace retiring Sen. Dick Durbin. “Our ability to clip that content, share it online, and extend its reach really made those debates even more impactful than people necessarily saw coming,” says Allison Janowski, the campaign’s communications director.

The campaign engaged influencers in other ways. Chicago-based influencer, mamafreshchi (22,500 Instagram followers), aka Jenny LaFlore, a “mom blogger,” hosted a debate watch party for the Stratton campaign along with other creators. She got involved in politics following an invitation to the 2024 Democratic National Convention as part of its brand-new influencer initiative. The more than 200 content creatures lured to the DNC were given special privileges like backstage access with candidates and a curtained-off VIP lounge. Getting wooed by the Democratic party was LaFlore’s first taste of politics — and she was enthralled.

“That fire is kind of lit within you,” LaFlore says. “Then you get how important your local policy and local campaigns are.”

Republicans, meanwhile, continue to go all-in on influencers, engaging the apparatus to amplify pro-ballroom messaging in the aftermath of the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner last spring and inviting more than 100 of them to the party’s midterm convention this month. But the major schism among conservative influencers like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens over the Iran war and the Epstein files has Democrats frothing at the opportunity to exploit that rift.

The burgeoning Democratic online infrastructure is much greater than ad hoc campaign efforts. The DNC continues to nurture relationships with content creators, partnering with more than 550 influencers, and is considering hosting a creator-led debate during the 2028 presidential primaries.

And operations like Good Influence are raking it in from Democrats eager to learn the ways of the internet. Mary Peltola’s Alaska Senate campaign paid the firm $87,000 for “digital fundraising” this cycle, according to the most recent second quarter FEC reports. House Majority PAC paid Good Influence $349,895.50 for “social media consulting.” Mark Warner’s Virginia Senate campaign paid them $60,000 for “online advertising.” Good Influence also did work for Haley Stevens in Michigan, Graham Platner in Maine and Dan Osborn in Nebraska.

Campaigns deploying influencers — in both paid and unpaid capacities — is just a small slice of the political creator economy. Nonprofits, political action committees and dark money groups are responsible for the biggest expenditures on influencers, which makes it far more difficult to trace the money trail between causes and creators. The FEC’s rules around political advertising do not apply to influencers, and campaign finance reports often only show payments to consulting firms, not individual creators. Only a handful of states like Texas and California require influencers to disclose if they have been paid by campaigns.

“There is just layer upon layer of obfuscation about where political money is flowing and which influencers are being paid for the messages that they’re delivering to their audience,” says Brendan Fischer, director of strategic investigations at the Campaign Legal Center.

“It’s a big problem for the public’s right to know.”

Some influencers say they’re willing to go unpaid because they do political work out of a sense of obligation. But they claim that a partywide reticence to pay creators big bucks or invest in a year-round online ecosystem greatly disadvantages Democrats in the influencer arms race against the GOP.

Political influencer Maria Comstock, in a recent viral post, said she was approached by funders from both parties — and their pitches revealed the huge gap between what they’re willing to pay. A funder representing Democratic interests offered her $2,000 for a single video. The Republican funder? $36,000.

“Because of my values, I worked with organizations on the left and declined the offers on the right,” Comstock posted on Linkedin. “But let’s be honest: for many creators, that delta makes the decision for you.”

Even as Democratic candidates warm toward using influencers as a campaign tool, the deep pockets of the party remain unconvinced. There’s little research linking investments in influencers to electoral outcomes, which has kept many major Democratic donors on the sidelines when approached to back large-scale, paid influencer initiatives, according to conversations with Democrats pushing those efforts. That apprehension is what’s keeping some Democrats from scaling up in a big way to fight back against the GOP online.

“Democratic investments are so anchored in individual campaigns and outcomes, whereas Republican donors have been pretty laser focused on cutting really large checks over really large timelines to let Republicans get creative and innovate and try new things,” says Danielle Butterfield, president and executive director of Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC that runs digital voter persuasion campaigns in battlegrounds.

“That continues to be an uphill climb for us because it prevents us from thinking on a longer term basis about things that we can plan for not just one year out, two years out, but 10 years out,” she says.

That’s a sentiment with which Elizabeth Booker Houston, @Bookersquared(756,000 Instagram followers), a Democratic influencer with one of the largest followings, heartily agrees. A native of Memphis, Houston first garnered attention during the 2024 election for her viral legal commentary — at the time, she was an attorney with the FDA — as well as her potty-mouthed, comedic takedowns of Trump on TikTok and Instagram. (She’s also a stand-up comic.) These days, Houston, who has worked with groups like the Congressional Black Caucus, Planned Parenthood and ACLU, is quick to criticize the Democratic Party’s influencer strategy, which she argues is about 10 years behind the times. Democratic candidates aren’t growing a large enough online following, she says, thanks to “control freaks” who try to micromanage creators’ content by writing scripts and controlling posts

“They're a little too risk averse,” Houston says.

“And this is not the time to be so risk-averse.”