Democrats have been been doing some deep soul searching, and plenty of finger pointing, in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris‘ decisive election loss.
Some liberals have suggested that the key takeaway from the 2024 election is to build the left’s version of Joe Rogan. There were several things that contributed to Donald Trump’s massive victory among young men, but none were discussed with as much fury and fervor as his appearances on the podcasts and livestreams hosted by Rogan, Theo Von, Adin Ross and the Nelk Boys.
On the left, there’s precisely one influencer who commands such a large following.
Hasan Piker, a progressive Twitch streamer with 2.8 million followers, drew 313,413 viewers for his Election Night livestream. H was the third most popular streamer, and also the only non-conservative streamer, to break into the top 10 livestreams that night. So Piker knows a few things about existing in the so-called “bro” space.
Unfortunately for Harris and the Democrats, “You can’t podcast your way out of this problem,” Piker told Newsweek on Friday.
The 33-year-old influencer said it would do the Democratic Party little good to just flood the podcast market with eight other versions of the popular Pod Save America show, a liberal political podcast hosted by a crew of former former Obama aides.
“That’s not the problem,” said Piker, who would be somewhat to the left of the Pod Save boys. “People like me exist. I had one of the largest election night coverages out there.”
The real issue that Democrats are up against is the ideological divide between it’s base and the rest of the party. For Piker, the aphorism that Republicans fear their base and Democrats hate their base has never rung more true.
“Republicans can get away with taking advantage of that space,” he said, emphasizing that there are billionaire GOP mega donors who share the same interest as right-leaning influencers which leads to “cross-pollination.”
“But that same ecosystem doesn’t exist on the left. It barely exists for Pod Save America. CNN and MSNBC barely even cross-pollinate,” Piker continued. “The liberal and, I guess, ‘progressive’ outlets have completely shut off the independent media rom entering their sphere of influence. And besides that, there is a deep ideological divide.”
For months, Piker has warned Harris’ campaign that its failure to represent the voters who would cast their ballots for the Democratic nominee would lead to its collapse. He stressed that Democrats need to move more to the left and to stop trying to court moderate Republicans and center-right voters, who proved again on Tuesday that they would not budge for Harris.
Exit polls show that 94 percent of Republicans still voted for Trump, while independents only broke for Harris by 3 percent. In 2020, Joe Biden won independents by a whopping 13 percent.
“The Democratic Party has actively chastised and pushed aside a lot of people that would normally vote for them, and they continuously have done this cycle after cycle,” Piker said. And in the end, “the bottom fell out.”
It wasn’t just a large swath of young men who moved to the right.
This year, Trump won one-fifth of Black men and nearly half of Latino men, doubling his standing among the first group and moving Hispanic-majority counties on average 10 percentage points to the right. In Dearborn, Michigan, a majority-Arab community that helped Biden win in 2020, Trump won 42 percent of the vote to Harris’ 36 percent.
And none of it should have been a surprise, according to Piker. He argued that by sending pro-Israel Democrats, like Representative Richie Torres and former President Bill Clinton, to Michigan, Harris’ campaign “openly communicated that they did not want anyone who cared about Palestine to go out and vote for them.”
“They actively pushed aside these people with the hope that they could win the suburbs over, win these conservative voters over, and it was a failure,” he said.
The biggest mistake that Harris made, in Piker’s view, was not addressing voters’ concerns about the economy with direct policy proposals that separated her from Biden.
For the entirety of Harris’ campaign, poll after poll showed that the economy was a major voting issue for the nation. Exit polls showed that deep discontent with the Biden administration’s handling of the economy ultimately drove Americans to Trump. National exit polls revealed that 45 percent of people said they’ve gotten worse off under the current administration, making it the highest percent of the electorate to ever say as much — even higher than the 42 percent who agreed with that sentiment in 2008, in the throes of a global financial meltdown that was cratering the economy.
Piker said if the Democratic Party wants to recapture the attention of the voters they won in 2020, they have to abandon what he calls the “‘vibe session’ narrative,” where campaigns chalk up economic anxieties to the fact that Americans don’t understand the issue and that eventually, they’ll feel it when their wages catch up to inflation.
“[Most Americans] do not care about civility. They do not care about these institutions. They do not have an ideological fear. They just want to stop the hurt,” Piker said. “If Kamala Harris would have come out and been like, ‘I’m literally going to jail the Walton family,’ people would have been like, ‘Ok… as long as you’re promising that’s going to drop the prices of groceries, I don’t give a s—.”
“They’re on board with 20 million immigrants being deported because that’s what Trump is saying. ‘I’m gonna deport 20 million immigrants and it’s actually going to lower everything… it’s going to be the solution to the housing crisis,” he said. “It’s an insane thing to say. It is genuinely Hitlerian, but people are like, ‘Okay, well, I guess it’s going to work. Who knows? We’ll see.’ And they take a shot in the dark.”
“You can’t actively act like things are perfectly fine when things have not been fine for Americans for quite some time.”
Asked about early data that shows more than 90 percent of counties shifting in favor of Trump — suggesting that Democrats’ late pivot toward moderation may not have been the the problem — Piker isn’t convinced that it’s because Americans love Republican policies.
He still believes a Democratic candidate who can deliver Senator Bernie Sanders‘ economic populist message earnestly could yield enormous results in a general election. He argues that there are many low- and mid-propensity progressive voters who don’t always show up in the primaries, but could catapult the Democratic Party to major success if activated — much as the GOP has just experienced with its version on the right.
Piker used Missouri as an example. A deep red state, Missouri went to Trump with over 58 percent support and reelected Senator Josh Hawley, a populist Republican, with more than 55 percent support. And yet, the state voted in favor of two progressive ballot measures. On Tuesday, Missouri voted not only to create a constitutional right to abortion, but to also raise minimum wage and require paid sick leave.
And again, Piker said, it was Harris’ loyalty to Biden that prevented her from tapping into the politics at play.
“[Liberal polities] that are not attached to a Democratic politician are fantastic. They’re so popular all around the Rust Belt, all around the Midwest, in the Sun Belt, everywhere,” Piker said. “People like progressive politics and progressive policies. They don’t like the Democratic Party, and they especially did not like Biden.”
“They rejected Biden tremendously, and they also rejected Kamala Harris, partially because she had a very short window of opportunity and she used that short window of opportunity to rush towards Biden,” he said.
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