Influencer campaigns overstate sway over Gen Z voters, essay argues

Surveys show young voters turn to family and friends for political advice

Alex Bronzini-Vender, a writer living in New York who identifies as a member of Gen Z, published an opinion essay in The Guardian on Oct. 30 headlined “I’m a gen Z voter. Content creators have far less power than politicians think.” In the essay, he argues that both parties are operating on what he calls a “wishful theory” — that online creators can simply upload political opinions “straight into our heads” — and that there is little evidence creators play much of a role in how zoomers actually vote.

Bronzini-Vender points to 2024 as the election in which Gen Z voters “actually earned the spotlight.” In Michigan, Donald Trump won by about 1.4 points, with Trump and Kamala Harris evenly splitting the youth vote — a 24-point collapse in the Democratic edge since 2020, he writes. If young voters made up just 15% of the state’s electorate, their swing toward Trump would be worth roughly 3.6 points, larger than Trump’s entire margin of victory, the essay calculates.

Since then, both parties have scrambled to court the creators they believe have young voters’ ear, according to the essay. At her debut briefing, former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reserved a “new media seat” in the briefing room, inviting podcasters, influencers and content creators to apply for credentials. The NRCC, House Republicans’ campaign arm, has paid more than $120,000 to a network of conservative influencers, listing the expense simply as “media.”

The DNC, meanwhile, has partnered with more than 500 online personalities through its “Influencer & Creative” operation and has floated the idea of a creator-hosted debate during the 2028 primaries. Bronzini-Vender, who writes that he finds the theory behind such efforts “rather patronizing,” argues it is also unsupported: “Plenty of people watch influencers, but very few people deeply trust them.”

The essay cites survey data to back the point. In a Media Insight Project survey conducted this year, 63% of 18-to-34-year-olds said they get news from influencers “at least sometimes.” Among teens and adults who actually receive news from influencers, just 9% reported having a great deal of confidence in what they are told; AI chatbots drew a nearly identical trust rate of 10%.

A YouGov survey of young voters across eight battleground states in September found that half named a family member as the person they turn to for political advice and three in 10 named a friend; just 6% named an influencer. In a survey released this spring by Circle, a civic-engagement research center at Tufts, 9% of young respondents said they got political information from social media posts by influencers and celebrities, and 14% said they got it from podcasts hosted by influencers, artists, comedians or other celebrities. The largest share, 45%, said they got information from political, advocacy or community organizations they follow, while nearly a third cited conversations with family and friends.

To whatever extent internet personalities actually persuade people, Bronzini-Vender argues, their power rests on the illusion that they speak for themselves — an illusion the parties have shattered by paying for those voices. He details a string of paid arrangements this cycle: Tom Steyer paid at least 17 influencers $5,000 or more apiece in the California governor’s race; Katie Porter’s campaign paid one lifestyle creator $25,000 for what appeared to be a single post; a TikTok creator with 1.7 million followers said a Republican-affiliated group offered her $36,000 for a video; and a company with deep Republican ties once paid a squad of Gen Z creators to defend Ken Paxton, now Texas’s Republican Senate nominee, on X.

Some influencers attempt to keep those partnerships hidden, according to the essay, which notes that The New York Times found Josh Greene, a progressive creator with nearly 800,000 followers, had not always disclosed that he had taken money from at least seven candidates and allied groups this cycle. And when payments come to light, they can destroy the credibility campaigns sought to buy: a Rainey Center for Public Policy study this summer found that 47% of voters said they would trust a creator less after learning a political post had been paid for by a campaign, while 11% said they would trust them more.

The essay acknowledges that the internet can matter. Zohran Mamdani, who won young men by roughly 40 points in last year’s New York mayoral race, has said many New Yorkers he met knew him only from his appearances on podcasts such as Flagrant, hosted by comedian Andrew Schulz. Bronzini-Vender quotes Mamdani as telling Democrats to “stop treating young people and young men with the condescension that we often see and hear in our politics.” Trump’s tour of the podcasting sphere in 2024 had racked up more than 100 million YouTube views by the day after the election that year.

But Bronzini-Vender notes that both were interviews, not simply paid content, and that “the podcast-interview format itself isn’t magic”: Kamala Harris’s appearance on Call Her Daddy, he writes, seems to have done little to move young voters. He closes by suggesting that young voters, like swing voters twice their age, have ditched the Republican Party because “prices remain stubbornly high” — and that “the most surprising thing about gen Z voters may be just how boringly ordinary we are.”