Zackory Kirk, an influencer based in Atlanta who goes by the name The Zactivist and has more than 220,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms, has been churning out mostly progressive content for more than four years.
It was only in the final stretch of the 2024 election that any real paid opportunities for him emerged from Democrats seeking to boost support for Vice President Kamala Harris, downballot candidates and issues such as reproductive justice. Nearly all the money Kirk made — and it wasn’t that much, he added — came in the nine weeks between Labor Day and Election Day.
“Up until the end, everything was pretty much free work,” he said.
And since Harris lost?
“Nothing.”
Now Democrats are facing a reckoning, not just over Harris’ loss to President-elect Donald Trump but also over how the left got so badly outflanked online. The sponsorship spigot that many influencers say was turned on too late is now running dry. And the content creators who embraced Harris fear falling even further behind their Republican rivals, one viral TikTok at a time.
Interviews with more than a dozen Democratic content creators reveal a pervasive belief that Republicans have helped incubate a highly organized and well-funded ecosystem of influencers, podcast hosts and other online personalities who successfully amplified and spread pro-Trump content. And the content creators are blaming scattershot and underfunded efforts by Democrats to make an impression in a sphere they said the party as a whole had overlooked for at least a decade.
While many on the left have spent the last few weeks debating whether Harris should have granted an interview to Joe Rogan, the right-leaning host of the world’s most popular podcast, some progressive influencers are now more interested in building up a Rogan of their own.
They are banding together to create their own networks to make content year-round and not just in the final months before elections. Their goal is to eventually forge self-sustaining advocacy groups and networks, a left-wing answer to the nonprofit Turning Point USA or the media company The Daily Wire on the right. But first they need buy-in — and cash — from the Democratic Party’s donors and institutions to compete in the new attention economy, where people’s time is the currency.
Exactly how much was spent on the creator space in the election is shrouded in secrecy, with much of the funds routed through nonprofits subject to only minimal disclosure. The Harris campaign did disclose millions of dollars going to firms that work with influencers, but that amounts to less than 1% of what was spent overall. The vice president spent tens of millions of dollars more than Trump on digital advertising, but it was not enough.
“Conservative influencers have year-round support, and those of us on the left have been left to fend for ourselves, and it’s not working,” said Leigh McGowan, who goes by iampoliticsgirl and has more than 2 million followers across various platforms.
McGowan is a charter member of a new venture called Chorus that was formed this month by a group of influencers who believe the Democratic apparatus has come up far short with social media. It’s the brainchild of a private company, Good Influence, and its goal is to provide resources and guidance to creators and to also identify and amplify new voices.
“We have an obligation to do it because the Democratic Party has been so slow in adapting to the media environment that we’re in right now,” said Brian Tyler Cohen, another inaugural Chorus member and the host of a popular YouTube channel where he once interviewed President Joe Biden.
Although many factors contributed to Trump’s victory, the steady drumbeat of conservative voices online clearly played a role in shaping popular opinion. In one signal of their influence, Dana White, the CEO of the UFC, took the stage at Trump’s election night party and went through a credit list: “I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ With The Boys and, last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.”
Trump sat for interviews with each of them in the final months, and while they might not be household names, they have tremendous reach online — particularly with young men and infrequent voters, demographics the Trump campaign focused on heavily.
Podcasters and TikTok stars constitute a big part of what progressive observers see as a winning formula for Republicans. Conservative groups work to identify and grow talent, supporting them until they can be financially solvent on their own.
“We made long-term investments in creators and in influential voices that we believe will be the opinion shapers of tomorrow,” said Charlie Kirk, the executive director of Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit and political action committee that many on the Democratic side see as a model.
Turning Point has supported or incubated roughly 350 right-wing influencers over the years, the group said, including some of the biggest names on the right, such as Benny Johnson, Candace Owens and Alex Clark. One past influencer, Anna Paulina Luna, is now a member of Congress from Florida.
“Win the culture, win the country,” Kirk said. “That’s what we believe.”
David Pakman, who has a progressive YouTube channel with 2.7 million subscribers and is part of the new Chorus venture, has looked enviously upon the Turning Point network. “We just don’t have anything like it at all on the left,” he said.
He was among a small group of influencers invited to meet with Harris for an off-record meet-and-greet linked to the State of the Union address last March. But he had to pay his own way there and for his lodging.
“I think I got a tea bag and some hotel water,” he recalled.
Now he worries that Harris’ loss has sapped enthusiasm on the left and that there’s no plan from the party to keep supporters engaged. He has complained on his program since the election that he and other Democratic influencers were seeing “record” numbers of paid subscribers canceling, including the shrinking of his own YouTube subscriber base. He said Democrats were doing exactly what they should not be: “Our instinct is the opposite of what the right does.”
Next month, Turning Point will hold its annual America Fest in Phoenix, with Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr. and Matt Gaetz, Trump’s withdrawn pick for attorney general, among the listed speakers. They will be joined at the event by a host of right-wing influencers, including Brandon Tatum and Clark, a health and lifestyle podcaster who got started in 2019 with a conservative pop culture show in the Turning Point network.
That cross-pollination gives credence and credibility in both directions — validating the politicians to the creators’ audiences and the creators to their audiences.
“The right has been building an influencer ecosystem intentionally as infrastructure,” said Emily Amick, a former counsel to Sen. Chuck Schumer who posts to her nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram as @emilyinyourphone and is not involved in Chorus. She recalled a conservative colleague telling her years ago that the right would be building its own apparatus. “You guys have Hollywood, and we knew we had to build our own,” she recalled the person saying.
Stuart Perelmuter, the CEO of Good Influence, said he’d been contemplating Chorus for some time, but Harris’ defeat crystallized the urgency.
“We got killed in alternative media,” said Perelmuter, whose firm finds political and advocacy opportunities for creators and was paid more than $500,000 by the Harris campaign and other Democratic committees during the election. “Republicans have been investing in that space for years. And on the left, we have treated creators who are not in legacy media as gig workers.”
Within a week of the election, he held a call to organize Chorus with his colleague Josh Cook, a former digital strategist for Barack Obama, as well as Cohen, Zackory Kirk and others. He likens Chorus, which will have nonprofit and for-profit arms, to a television newsroom, where editors, producers, researchers and fact-checkers support the creation of content year-round and not just when there’s an election coming.
Last week, Chorus launched a website, and Cohen and several other participants posted videos asking for donations. Their primary goal is to recruit big donors, but some 1,200 people made small contributions, totaling roughly $35,000.
Several months ago, Rynn Reed, a political organizer in Philadelphia, started a separate group called Creator Congress to cultivate and support influencers. The group is seeking around $500,000 a year to cover two or three years of activities, according to a prospectus reviewed by The New York Times.
The group has so far recruited more than 20 progressive influencers, ranging from a political creator with just over 20,000 followers to a largely comedic account that has 2.3 million followers on TikTok. According to Reed, there is plenty of enthusiasm for the project; all that’s missing is financial support.
“We just have to find the investment from donors to actually think about building an ecosystem that can actually be around 10 or 20 years in the future,” said Reed, who was laid off from Run for Something, which recruits progressive candidates, about a week after the election.
Like a lot of progressive creators, Michael McWhorter, who goes by TizzyEnt, finds it hard to resist some finger-pointing after Trump’s victory. He said the Democratic Party’s efforts were well-intentioned but “too little, too late.”
McWhorter, who has nearly 8 million followers spread across Instagram, X and TikTok, said the difference between the parties when it comes to the internet was glaring. “Even big creators have to beg to get a Democratic politician on their shows, and they often still don’t come through,” he said.
Last spring, several progressive advocacy groups including the Hub Project pooled resources to found Trending Up, a content creator community.
Its first event, in May, was held in Washington and drew around 140 influencers. Another “activation” event for creators had been planned for Nov. 7, on the theory that they’d be needed to help drum up support for Harris in case of a contested outcome. After Trump won decisively, organizers tried to turn it into a conversation about what role political creators should take in a second Trump term, but many creators ended up canceling. Only around 10 attended in person, said the director, Heeyoung Leem.
“Campaigns come and go,” Leem said, “but we need to continue to be there for creators so they stay in the game.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Within a week of the election, he held a call to organize Chorus with his colleague Josh Cook, a former digital strategist for Barack Obama, as well as Cohen, Zackory Kirk and others. He likens Chorus, which will have nonprofit and for-profit arms, to a television newsroom, where editors, producers, researchers and fact-checkers support the creation of content year-round and not just when there’s an election coming.
Last week, Chorus launched a website, and Cohen and several other participants posted videos asking for donations. Their primary goal is to recruit big donors, but some 1,200 people made small contributions, totaling roughly $35,000.
Several months ago, Rynn Reed, a political organizer in Philadelphia, started a separate group called Creator Congress to cultivate and support influencers. The group is seeking around $500,000 a year to cover two or three years of activities, according to a prospectus reviewed by The New York Times.
The group has so far recruited more than 20 progressive influencers, ranging from a political creator with just over 20,000 followers to a largely comedic account that has 2.3 million followers on TikTok. According to Reed, there is plenty of enthusiasm for the project; all that’s missing is financial support.
“We just have to find the investment from donors to actually think about building an ecosystem that can actually be around 10 or 20 years in the future,” said Reed, who was laid off from Run for Something, which recruits progressive candidates, about a week after the election.
Like a lot of progressive creators, Michael McWhorter, who goes by TizzyEnt, finds it hard to resist some finger-pointing after Trump’s victory. He said the Democratic Party’s efforts were well-intentioned but “too little, too late.”
McWhorter, who has nearly 8 million followers spread across Instagram, X and TikTok, said the difference between the parties when it comes to the internet was glaring. “Even big creators have to beg to get a Democratic politician on their shows, and they often still don’t come through,” he said.
Last spring, several progressive advocacy groups including the Hub Project pooled resources to found Trending Up, a content creator community.
Its first event, in May, was held in Washington and drew around 140 influencers. Another “activation” event for creators had been planned for Nov. 7, on the theory that they’d be needed to help drum up support for Harris in case of a contested outcome. After Trump won decisively, organizers tried to turn it into a conversation about what role political creators should take in a second Trump term, but many creators ended up canceling. Only around 10 attended in person, said the director, Heeyoung Leem.
“Campaigns come and go,” Leem said, “but we need to continue to be there for creators so they stay in the game.”
© 2024 The New York Times Company