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The left’s favorite political Twitch streamer, Hasan Piker, doesn’t know if he’s voting for President Joe Biden and doesn’t care if you do either.
Nearly every day, Piker streams on Twitch for around eight hours to his more than 2.6 million followers on the platform. He’s not a household name by any means, but he’s become one of the most influential political commentators for Gen-Z and young millennial audiences online over the past four years. A few years ago, he hosted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on his Twitch stream to play Among Us and urge his audience to go out and vote. So it matters if he doesn't support Biden.
Let’s talk about it.
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Who’s Excited About Joe Biden?
Hasan has never been the biggest Biden fan, so his disregard for the top of this year’s ticket is not much of a surprise. But on the WIRED Politics Lab podcast this week, when Leah Feiger (our host and my editor) asked Piker about it, he said he wouldn’t support any candidates this year before ultimately replying, “I don't know if I'll be voting for Biden, I'll be honest.”
“If you think that lesser-evil voting is working for you, if it makes you feel better, go ahead,” he told us.
One thing he definitely backs is voting uncommitted. “I'm an advocate of full-blown pressure,” he said.
Biden shouldn’t expect any of the (little) support Piker offered the last time around. “I urged and lent support to Joe Biden in the last election, and there were a lot of promises that he had made in the last election on domestic policy, codifying Roe v. Wade, protecting abortion rights and immigration,” Piker told us. “He was going to basically reverse everything that Donald Trump had done, and he did none of that.”
Biden’s administration has actually had a lot of successes. But even when Biden secures significant funding for a project or campaign promise, his team has never been good at relaying that to voters. Even Biden’s TikTok is barely about Biden—it mostly bashes Trump rather than communicating the president’s accomplishments.
But that gets at the communication of it all, and Hasan also touched on something pertinent that everyone seems to be talking about this week: The Youth Vote (™).
On the pod, Piker explains his and his young audience’s disenchantment with Biden and their sense that the president has walked back many of the promises he made to them in the last cycle.
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“If I'm young, I don't see anyone right now that is captivating me,” Piker told us.
Pollsters and strategists like to make the case that Biden won the last election in part to the young voters that turned out for him, but over the past few months, polling has suggested that their support is wavering. A new set of New York Times/Siena polls out this week also claim that in every battleground state except Wisconsin, Biden is polling behind former president Donald Trump, and the youth vote could be a large reason why.
Streamers like Piker are arguably some of the most influential creators on the internet, and there’s no doubt that they could have a real impact on 2024. Earlier this week, I spoke with Samuel Drzymala, the founder of Progressive Victory, a liberal group that works with streamers on get-out-the-vote initiatives. He told me that Twitch’s format allows for the kinds of back-and-forths that can change a person’s mind.
“The long-form discussion allows for a lot of nuance and detail to be discussed and creates a greater understanding, like these people are educating their audiences when they choose to speak on issues,” Drzymala said.
Progressive Victory’s approach to moving online activism into IRL has proven successful. In a recent Ohio canvasing event, the group was able to bring together around 20 streamers and 300 volunteers to knock on 40,000 doors for state progressives.
“They’ve built communities around their personalities and the way that they speak to their audiences,” Drzymala said. “The live nature allows for the creators to make really compelling asks of their audiences and can get people to take crazy amounts of action.”
Unlike Drzymala’s group, Piker focuses more on issues advocacy than electoral politics. Though he will sometimes encourage followers to vote in down-ballot elections, his largest priorities are the causes he cares about.
“I think that my impact is way more important when it comes to a Chipotle unionizing in Lansing, Michigan. I went to the UCLA encampment, and all the SJP and JVP students I met were like, ‘I’m here because I started watching you in 2020 and you really broadened my horizons,’” Piker told us.
That impact won’t be reaching the Biden campaign anytime soon. The Biden campaign declined to comment on what Hasan said about voting, but it has made significant investments in its relationships with supportive influencers, as we’ve talked about multiple times in this newsletter. But is a video with Luke Skywalker more effective than deeply engaged online communities? I guess we’ll find out.
The Chatroom
On Monday, I spoke with Erin Hattamer, a comedian on TikTok with more than 1.6 million followers. For the past two weeks, she has spearheaded a program called #PassTheHat, pairing creators like herself with families in Gaza to raise money for them to either evacuate, pay medical bills, or rebuild their lives.
The grassroots group Operation Olive Branch finds and verifies the families in need, and as of this week, Hattamer has matched more than 700 Palestinian families with online creators. Once a creator is paired with a family, the creator will continue to post about them and their GoFundMes until their goals are reached.
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“I’m working on it all day. I’ll take breaks, but I’m working on emails. I do a lot of coaxing creators,” Hattamer told me over the phone. “Evacuation is just the first step. The infrastructure in Gaza doesn’t exist anymore, and there’s some people who want to stay and rebuild. There’s some people that need to fully start new lives in Egypt or wherever they go next. So it’s also about continued support.”
For months now, TikTok users have been demanding that their favorite creators speak out on Palestine. In the past few days, I’ve seen far more creators speaking out on the conflict than before, and I’d bet it’s largely due to Hattamer pestering them.
This gets at the question of whether influencers with platforms should be required to speak out on political injustices. We saw this at a large scale with the George Floyd protests in 2020, and again now.
What do you think? Leave a comment on the site, or send me an email at mail@wired.com.
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What Else We’re Reading
🔗 Mexico Is In a Crisis. Political Candidates Are Busy Dancing on TikTok:This year, Mexicans are expected to vote in more than 20,000 races. Some strategists say the candidates are too obsessed with going viral on TikTok instead of discussing policy. (Rest of World)
🔗 Peter Thiel’s VC Firm Backs Election Betting With Polymarket Investment: Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and the cofounder of Ethereum are dumping millions of dollars into Polymarket, a top crypto-based election betting platform. It’s an unusual investment since the Commodity Futures Trading Commission just proposed banning these markets. (Bloomberg)
🔗 Biden and Trump Agree to a Debate on June 27: Joe Biden and Donald Trump have agreed to a June 27 CNN debate after egging each other on for the past few months. It’s not totally set in stone, but it’s plenty likely. (New York Times)
The Download
I mentioned this week’s podcast episode up top, but please go and listen to the rest of it! The three of us—Leah, Hasan, and I—discuss the election, as well as Joe Rogan and a little internet drama. Twitch is a relatively untapped platform for politicians, and we get into the weeds on why it’s one of the most influential spaces on the web.
Find the episode wherever you listen to podcasts! This is a fun one.
You can get in touch with me via email, Instagram, X, and Signal at makenakelly.32.
