The Influencer Infestation of Our Politics

PICTURE THIS. It’s early January 2028. It’s cold, dark, and gloomy—but Democrats aren’t succumbing to seasonal depression or a post-holiday-season hangover. They’re eagerly, anxiously anticipating the first presidential primary contest, which is just a few weeks away.

The half-dozen candidates who are still in the race had imagined that the final days before voting started would be defined by debates over AI policy, health care, or housing. Instead, the race has been roiled by rumors spread by mid-tier content creators that one candidate was talking trash about another behind closed doors. During campaign stops at New Hampshire’s Red Arrow Diner and Iowa City’s Hamburg Inn, the roiling online drama is all that the actual press corps is asking the candidates about.

If that scenario sounds familiar—if not depressing—it’s because we just lived it the Texas Senate Democratic primary. The last few weeks of the race were consumed by heated debates about racism and identity politics—not because the candidates themselves had sparked them but because Morgan Thompson, a Dallas-based content creator, posted a TikTok to her nearly 200,000 followers claiming that James Talarico called his former primary opponent Colin Allred a “mediocre black man” in a private conversation. Talarico said his comments had been mischaracterized. But supporters of Allred and Talarico’s primary opponent, Jasmine Crockett, amplified Thompson. The back-and-forth became the predominant lens through which much of the national media covered the race.

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For many Democratic officials, the Texas episode was a startling example of the new challenges that campaigns face. Social media influencers who are posting about and even covering their races are playing by a looser set of rules and ethics than conventional journalists. And their impact is often many magnitudes greater as voters increasingly turn to social media and short-form videos for their news. The situation in Texas underscored just how tricky the relationship can be between campaigns and those influencers who are often incentivized to start drama that gains them clout, followers, and money.

When I asked Democratic campaign operatives about the role of influencers in politics, almost every one let out an audible groan. While some well-known influencers like Carlos Eduardo Espina—who has 22 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook—tend to be less catty and more professional, the operatives I talked to say the majority don’t exhibit those traits. And they emphasized that the internet is teeming with thousands of micro- and nano-influencers looking to make a name for themselves.

These smaller influencers still have very engaged and loyal followers—making them important communication tools for campaigns. But they often lack an understanding of how politics works—or, more specifically, an appreciation for the tradeoffs that often must be made—and tend to spread content that revolves around conflict and misinformation.

“Wild West,” “tinderbox,” and “chaos ecosystem” were just a few of the phrases that Democratic campaign staffers used to describe this era of political influencers.

“The 2028 primary, the whole discourse, all the news cycles: There’s a world in which they’re all rooted in things—true or untrue—that start from influencers,” said Democratic strategist Andrew Mamo.

As the midterms get nearer, campaigns are scrambling to figure out how to navigate these relationships. There are basic organizational questions that have to be sorted out, such as who on the campaign should manage creators. Is it the responsibility of the digital team, which typically oversees online content? Or should it be the press secretary, who deals with reporters? “It’s a weird in-between zone,” said Parker Butler, former director of digital rapid response on Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

Aside from the issue of editorial standards, there are also questions about money and transparency. The Federal Election Commission does not require influencers to disclose when they are paid to promote political candidates or causes, which has allowed a network of dark money groups to buy online influence almost unnoticed. Some Democratic staffers said creators have demanded campaigns pay them thousands of dollars to post a positive video and threatened to go negative on those campaigns if they don’t agree to the fee.

The lack of transparency about who is paying for what content has also fueled bitter speculation among staffers about whether rival campaigns are behind negative TikToks. Days before the March 17 Illinois primary, MS Now reported that a secretive political organization called Democracy Unmuted was offering content creators $1,500 to make negative videos about Kat Abughazaleh, a candidate for the 9th Congressional District.¹

“It’s going to be a disaster,” said Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki when I asked how influencers could, um, influence the 2028 primary. “Part of what’s hard about it is some of these things are organic and reflect the individual opinions of the creators. And some of them aren’t. And because there’s less transparency around this, it’s really hard for viewers to make those distinctions.”

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Last year, the journalist Taylor Lorenz published an investigation in Wired about the dark underbelly of paying political influencers for content. According to her reporting, the Chorus Creator Incubator Program—which is funded by a liberal dark money group called the Sixteen Thirty Fund—offered dozens of high-profile political influencers $8,000 a month to post pro-Democratic party messages online, under the condition that they not acknowledge the existence of the program or that their content was being paid for. After the r