Hasan Piker is an unlikely star for a negative ad campaign. He has never run for office and says he has no interest in doing so. He holds no leadership position in any political party. He has no political action committee. Most of the country has no idea who he is: In April, 60% of likely voters told Echelon Insights they had never heard of him.

That was before he started appearing in living rooms across the nation, in ads paid for by Republicans who want him to be one of the most famous men in Democratic politics — and before prominent Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, condemned him in an effort to distance themselves from a figure they fear is too polarizing to help them retake the majority in November.

Piker’s read on why is not exactly modest. “They do see me as a threat,” he said in an interview for the latest episode of MS NOW’s “Clock It with Symone and Eugene,” “and that’s precisely the reason why they’re attacking me with regular frequency.”

There are other reasons too. “My worldview is also very provocative,” he said. His style? “Rather incendiary.” And then there’s the trove of clips to draw from.

Piker, 35, is a self-described socialist and “anti-imperialist” who talks about politics on Twitch for seven hours a day, five days a week — with 3.1 million followers, some 25,000 people watching at any given moment and eight years of unedited commentary available to anyone with a clipping tool. His audience, by his own annual survey, is 43% under age 30 and 62% boys and men — demographics Democrats lost badly in 2024, when Donald Trump took 56% of men under 30, up from 41% four years earlier, according to Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

Piker has been a presence in leftist politics for years, mostly from his chair, interviewing Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and hosting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who joined his stream in 2020 to tell viewers to make a voting plan. This cycle, he got out of the chair — stumping with Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, canvassing with Melat Kiros in Denver and campaigning with Francesca Hong in Milwaukee. That has put him at the center of perhaps the most consequential midterm election in a generation and made him one of the most argued-about figures in politics.

Republicans have found a use for him. Democrats have not figured out what to do about it.

Now, with seven weeks left before an election, the argument over Piker has become a proxy for a harder one: whether a messenger who reaches the young men Democrats lost in 2024 is worth what he costs the candidates who have to answer for him.

Over an hour, Piker accepted nearly every factual premise put to him by MS NOW: that his audience is not representative of the overall electorate, that the base of the Democratic Party is Black voters, that Americans are less hostile in person than the internet suggests, that Hong, one of the candidates he campaigned hardest for, lost in part because she could not handle the national spotlight.

He granted all of it. What he did not grant is that any of it obliges him to say a single thing differently.

“My bet on this isn’t that I’m doing this just so Democrats can win elections,” Piker said. “I’m doing this because it’s true and I want people to understand and maybe even entertain a different perspective, even if they don’t fully internalize it and fully understand it.”

“Is what you’re doing helping people win?” my co-host, Symone Sanders Townsend, asked.

“My theory is that the anger and my beliefs are far closer to the majority position than the beliefs demonstrated by the national Democratic Party,” Piker said. “There’s this disconnect with how the people perceive the national Democratic Party — and how the people perceive even, like, the liberal side of mainstream media — and what the desires of the masses are.”

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Piker describes his goal earnestly. 

“I’ve always wanted to foment class consciousness in America,” he said. His diagnosis is that most working Americans do not identify themselves that way, and that this has allowed Republicans to fill a vacuum and redirect that anger toward marginalized groups.

He said he never wanted to be the center of political attention: “I cover the news first and foremost.” He started his career in media on “The Young Turks,” a popular left-wing commentary show, before leaving to start his own streams in 2018. That was his focus, he said, until he traveled to anti-ICE protests and No Kings rallies last year and started rethinking his role after talking to other demonstrators.

“They [were] increasingly frustrated with the feckless ineptitude demonstrated by Democrats in positions of power,” he said. “They were saying, ‘Where are our leaders? Why are they not doing anything?’”

The frustration is real. A Quinnipiac poll released last week found just 21% of voters approve of how Democrats in Congress are doing their jobs. But that same poll complicates Piker’s read of where the country thinks the fix is: Only 26% of voters consider themselves supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America, the group he is a member of and promotes. Among Democrats, that figure is about 59%.

Piker was candid about how little hard data informed his view of voters outside of his streaming audience. Asked what informs his understanding of voters’ views, he said much of it comes from travel and from strangers approaching him in public.

“It’s anecdotal for the most part,” Piker said. “In certain instances it’s just vibes-based, really. It’s not, it’s not hard-line data. But sometimes you have to, you have to put forth your beliefs regardless of whether or not they are going to be the most appealing.”

Polling of the broader electorate suggests that the vibes may be misleading him. Echelon found that 56% of Democrats want the party’s 2028 nominee to take the approach of figures such as Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg, compared with 33% who preferred the more progressive approach of Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Black and Latino Democrats — whose votes will carry weight under the party’s new presidential primary calendar — were far more likely than white Democrats to call themselves moderate rather than progressive.

Piker does not dispute that some of his views sit outside the mainstream.

Asked about his formulation that Israel is “a thousand times worse” than Hamas — is it provocation, or something he truly believes? — he said he believes it, and that Hamas’ violence is born of an occupation going on for 80 years.

Sanders Townsend pressed: Does he understand that people hear that as an endorsement of violence?

Piker answered by arguing that state violence is made invisible while resistance to it is coded as chaos, and compared the situation to protesting police brutality: The tear gas is normalized, the leaf blower that pushes it back is not. It sounded to her, Sanders Townsend said, like he was making some kind of comparison between Hamas’ violence and nonviolent protest; as someone who has protested police, she rejected the comparison.

Piker calls his approach to discourse “agitative propaganda” and says it has two purposes: to force his opponents into stating their real positions, and to shock everyone else into seeing injustices he believes they have been trained to ignore. As such, his list of provocative and potentially offensive comments is long.

That is where his method collides with electoral reality.

Piker’s model is, in part, Donald Trump, who proved an inflammatory style can win a national election. The difference, of course, is that Trump is a candidate for office and can choose the risks he wants to take. Piker isn’t running for anything, and the candidates he supports campaign on a very similar policy platform to what Piker promotes, though sometimes without the purposeful agitation.

Piker acknowledges the difference and does not think it matters. He points to the shift in American opinion on Gaza over the past few years as proof that his method works: Say the unpopular thing early, absorb the punishment and wait for everyone else to arrive.

At the heart of Piker’s foray into electoral politics is the fact that the behavior and language that is acceptable in Twitch chats and online are still not acceptable in the larger political arena. The internet rewards intensity and heat. Elections require persuading people who do not already agree with you. Piker has mastered the first and is only now learning lessons of the second.

“I do think that I am being helpful,” he said. “I’m a lefty content creator in a very hostile and reactionary internet space. I’m constantly out there opposing right-wing ideas, opposing right-wing disinformation campaigns. Part of the reason why Republicans have identified me is not because I have incendiary comments that they can point to over and over again. Part of that is because they do see me as a threat, and that’s precisely the reason why they’re attacking me with regular frequency.”

Recently, Piker has started wearing suits. Mostly gone are the muscle tees from the streams that made him Twitch-famous. It’s “respectability politics,” he said. “I’m not going to stop with this, so I might as well make something more presentable for older white women.”

He will change his clothes. He will not change a word.

The post Republicans made Hasan Piker a villain. Democrats still can’t decide what to do about him. appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.