As an avid gamer, Erik Balsbaugh had noticed the political climate among his fellow “Call of Duty” enthusiasts had been shifting for some time. “I saw people who were, [during] the Obama era, die-hard liberals, slowly start becoming much more reactionary and conservative,” the longtime Democratic operative and campaign consultant said.
But it was one moment in particular that hammered home just how much virtual ground liberals had conceded to the terminally online right. His 11-year-old son started questioning why they had a yard sign for Angela Alsobrooks’ Senate campaign because she was a “tax cheat.”
It turns out his son was watching a “Roblox” streamer on YouTube who likened his cheating in the game to Alsobrooks’ property tax mistakes in a quick aside. The MAGA-fication of this world was so complete that Republican talking points about a race in Maryland were seeping into casual conversations about a video game platform marketed to kids.
The last election cycle should be a wake-up call for Democrats, Balsbaugh argues. For years, he’s been warning colleagues that the party has ignored online communities at its peril.
During the 2024 campaign, his agency, At Dawn Campaigns, recruited thousands of young organizers through livestreamed content with influencers on YouTube and Twitch that was watched more than 27 million times, Balsbaugh said. But those efforts paled in comparison to the online armies mustered by conservatives that aimed to push young men to the right.
From Donald Trump joining streams with Adin Ross and the Nelk Boys, to Rep. Daniel Crenshaw of Texas appearing on Joe Rogan’s, Jocko Willink’s and Jordan Peterson’s podcasts, Republicans have been eager to show up on shows only tangentially focused on political news.
Meanwhile, Democrats were relatively slow to hop on podcasts and livestreams, even as their reach has grown — particularly among millennials and Gen Z — beyond sporadic one-offs like when New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played “Among Us” on Twitch in 2020.
For many who turn to streaming websites like YouTube and Twitch to follow influencers as they play video games, it’s not about passively watching; it’s about finding community. Some of these streams are so-called “esports” pros showing off their elite fragging skills, others are tutorials, while many are raw stream-of-consciousness and color commentary, with plenty of back-and-forth with viewers commenting in a live chat. Last month, Twitch streamer Kai Cenat — who has 16.5 million followers on the platform — broadcast himself sleeping to more than 25,000 live viewers.
These online communities are predominantly filled with young men, who in general have seen higher rates of suicide and drug addiction along with lower rates of educational attainment compared to women, and who have become disproportionately less social over the past two decades.
Analyses of the 2024 election show young men swung to the right: One Tufts University study showed men under 30 backed Donald Trump by 14 points. Pew Research Center surveys also show that young voters increasingly get their news from social media.
According to Balsbaugh, the issue isn’t just that Democrats are failing to talk to these heavily online voters, but that they are failing to listen to them. When the “League of Legends” chatter on his gaming headset turns from experience points to political experiences, Balsbaugh said, he hears young men complaining about housing costs and the lack of career opportunities, offering Democrats an opening to return to their economic populist roots.
“It’s pretty basic stuff that people want to hear, right? They want to feel better about their lives,” he said. “And we got to give them that, and not so much, ‘They’re taking away your rights’ or ‘The Constitution is ending.’ Most of these people don’t care that the Constitution is ending because they feel like they have no power.”
Organic and off cycle
It’s not just the gaming world where Democrats need to power up their outreach efforts, said Josh Cook, president of Good Influence, a progressive influencer networking firm. Conservatives have a big head start in the world of YouTubers, Twitchers, TikTokers and Instagrammers in general, having embraced it as the natural evolution from right-wing talk radio.
While Kamala Harris made some late forays into the online streamer ecosystem, an analysis by Bloomberg News showed that Trump dominated this space, netting millions upon millions more views.
Audiences are increasingly turning to the online world of niche influencers for entertainment options, like avid readers turning to #BookTok and yarn hobbyists following #KnitTok, Cook said, and Democrats need to follow these mostly apolitical spaces to reach people who are worn out by news — 43 percent of U.S. adults in 2024, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report.
In addition to running online outreach for left-leaning issue groups, Cook helped launch a nonprofit, Chorus, with the hopes of supporting an ecosystem of progressive content creators by connecting them to Democratic officials.
Democrats are finally taking the streaming world more seriously, Cook told Roll Call in between streaming-media training sessions he was giving on the Hill. “The viewership that they used to go to local news or MSNBC or CNN to reach … are [now] through these creators,” he said. “We work with YouTubers to get millions of views on long-form programming about what’s going on day to day, every single day. It is insane to not have senators and elected officials and governors on those shows.”
Last month, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., appeared on Stephen A. Smith’s podcast, which has over 1 million subscribers on YouTube, and Democratic Sen. Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut sat down for a lengthy interview with the comedian Hasan Minhaj, who has more than 1.7 million.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett, already a regular on online-first media, is going a step further. The Texas Democrat said that her team is figuring out the logistics to launch her own podcast, not unlike those hosted by some GOP members.
“It’s important that we start to get into all spaces,” she said.
“I don’t even listen to podcasts, but I do a lot of them because somebody listens to them, right?” Crockett added. “There’s a lot of people … who want that longer-form conversation and they want it directly from the source — they want it from somebody that they feel like is a trusted voice.”
The new media requires new approaches, Cook and Balsbaugh said. For decades, liberals took solace in the idea that politics is downstream of culture — as social norms change and progress, voters will eventually expect politicians to reflect those new views on issues like gay rights, for example. That may no longer be the case, they warned, at least among young men.
“We need to start winning on culture,” Balsbaugh argued. “This is the place that we can start generating those wins, that we can then add politics to down the road.”
On platforms like Twitch and TikTok, “authenticity” is critical. That means Democrats need to approach these influencers organically and off cycle, the way they do with more traditional forms of media like the Capitol Hill press corp, Cook said.
“It’s not a campaign tactic, it’s just a messaging tactic,” he said. “The news cycle moves so fast, that if you don’t jump on it when these people are talking about it, it’s gone the next day. You have to play the game at the speed it’s being played, and these creators are the only ones moving at that speed.”
The post Not just a game: Dems need to catch up on livestreams to earn back young men, advisers say appeared first on Roll Call.
