Democrats have been doing some deep soul-searching, and a lot of finger-pointing, in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’s decisive election loss.
Some liberals have suggested that the primary choice of the 2024 election is to build a leftist version of Joe Rogan. There are several things that contributed to the great victory of Donald Trump among young people, but none were discussed with such anger and passion as his appearance on the podcast and livestream hosted by Rogan, Theo Von, Adin Ross and the Nelk Boys.
On the left, there is one influencer who commands a large following.
Hasan Piker, a progressive Twitch streamer with 2.8 million followers, drew 313,413 viewers for his Election Night livestream. He was the third most popular streamer, and also the only non-conservative streamer, to make it into the top 10 livestreams of the night. So Piker knows a few things about the place called “bro”.
Unfortunately for Harris and the Democrats, “You can’t make a podcast out of this issue,” Piker said Newsweek on Friday.
The 33-year-old influencer said the Democrats would just flood the podcast market with eight more popular versions. Pod Save America show, a liberal political podcast hosted by a crew of former Obama aides.
“It’s not a problem,” said Piker, who will rather be left on Save Pod male. “People like me are there. I’m one of the biggest election night coverages out there.”
The real problem Democrats are up against is the ideological divide between the base and the rest of the party. For Piker, the aphorism that Republicans fear their base and Democrats hate their base has never been truer.
“Republicans can get away with taking advantage of that space,” he said, pointing out that there are billionaire GOP mega-donors who have similar interests with their right-leaning influence leading to “cross-pollination.”
“But the same ecosystem doesn’t exist on the left, it’s almost non-existent Pod Save America. CNN and MSNBC barely even cross-pollinate, “Piker continued. “The liberal and, I guess, ‘progressive’ outlet has completely died rom its media entering the ball of influence. In addition, there is a deep ideological divide.
For months, Piker warned the Harris campaign that failing to represent voters who would vote for a Democratic candidate would lead to their downfall. He stressed that Democrats need to move further to the left and stop trying to win over moderate Republicans and center-right voters, who proved again on Tuesday that he will not back down for Harris.
Exit polls show that 94 percent of Republicans still favor Trump, while independents trail Harris by just 3 percent. In 2020, Joe Biden won independents with 13 percent.
“The Democratic Party has been actively punishing and alienating a lot of people who used to vote for them, and they’ve been doing this cycle after cycle,” Piker said. And in the end, “the bottom falls out.”
It’s not just a large swath of young people moving to the right.
This year, Trump won one-fifth of the Black people and almost half of the Latino people, doubling the number of the first group and moving the majority Hispanic district by an average of 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 no one should be surprised, according to Piker. He said that by sending pro-Israel Democrats, like Representative Richie Torres and former President Bill Clinton, to Michigan, the Harris campaign is “saying very clearly that they don’t want anyone who cares about Palestine to come out and vote for him.”
“They actively alienated these people in hopes of winning over the suburbs, winning over these conservative voters, and they failed,” he said.
The biggest mistake Harris made, according to Piker, was not addressing voters’ concerns about the economy with direct policy proposals that separated him from Biden.
For Harris’ entire campaign, poll after poll showed that the economy was the top electoral issue for the state. Exit polls show that deep dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s handling of the economy is finally driving Americans to Trump. A national poll found that 45 percent of people say they have gotten worse under the current administration, the highest percentage of voters who have ever said so much — even higher than the 42 percent who agreed with that sentiment in 2008, in the wake of the global financial crisis. economy.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Piker said that if the Democratic Party wants to appeal to the voters it won in 2020, it needs to abandon what it calls the “vibe session” narrative, where the campaign plays up economic anxiety because of the fact that Americans don’t understand it. The issue and that eventually, they will feel it when wages catch up to inflation.
“(Many Americans) don’t care about decency. They don’t care about the institution. They don’t have ideological fear. They just want to stop harm,” Piker said. “If Kamala Harris would come out and be like, ‘I’m literally going to jail the Walton family,’ people would be like, ‘Ok…as long as you promise to drop the price of groceries, I don’t give a s—.’
“He’s on board with 20 million immigrants being deported because that’s what Trump said. ‘I’m going to deport 20 million immigrants and I’m really going to bring them all down … that’s going to be the solution to the housing crisis,'” he said. “It’s a crazy thing to say. It’s original Hitlerian, but people are like, ‘Okay, well, I guess it will work. Who knows? We’ll see.’ And they take pictures in the dark.”
“You can’t actively act like things are going great when things haven’t been going well for the American people for a while.”
Asked about preliminary data showing more than 90 percent of swing counties voted for Trump — suggesting that Democrats’ recent pivot to moderation may not be a big deal — Piker was unconvinced that Americans like Republican policies.
He still believes that a Democratic candidate who can deliver the economic populist message of Senator Bernie Sanders can clearly produce big results in the general election. He says there are many low-propensity and mid-propensity progressive voters who don’t necessarily show up in primaries, but could lead the Democratic Party to great success if activated — just as the GOP has experienced with its version on the far right. .
Piker used Missouri as an example. A deep red state, Missouri went for Trump with more than 58 percent support and re-elected Senator Josh Hawley, a populist Republican, with more than 55 percent support. However, the country opted for two progressive electoral measures. On Tuesday, Missouri voted not only to create a constitutional right to abortion, but also to raise the minimum wage and require paid sick leave.
And again, Piker said, it was Harris’ loyalty to Biden that kept him from getting involved in politics.
“(Liberal politics) not associated with Democratic politicians is fantastic. They’re very popular throughout the Rust Belt, throughout 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 don’t like Biden.”
“He turned down Biden a lot, and he turned down Kamala Harris, partly because he had a very short window of opportunity and he used his short window of opportunity to rush to Biden,” he said.
