This liberal influencer calls Democrats 'smug, disinterested.' He's right. | Opinion
Republicans say Kamala Harris lost because she was too extreme. What if it's because she wasn't extreme enough?
Throughout the first few months of President Donald Trump’s second term, I’ve been asking myself one question. Where are the Democrats?
Sure, there have been some moments of true resistance to the Trump administration. Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, heckling the president during an address to a joint session of Congress comes to mind.
So does the tour that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, took to energize people across the country. But is there actual party-level organizing or changes in top-down messaging?
Forget it.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-New York, and other party leaders are nowhere to be found.
I’m not the only one who is perturbed by this. While polls are showing a dip in Trump’s popularity, the Democrats’ favorability is also declining. An April CNN poll found that the party’s congressional leadership had a net 27% approval rating.
I wanted to get a left-wing perspective on how the Democrats should handle their messaging amid this PR crisis. So I called up Hasan Piker, a growing voice in the political space.
Who is Hasan Piker? A streaming superstar with a massive liberal audience.
Piker, 33, is a bit of an anomaly. He has a massive audience – 2.8 million followers on the streaming platform Twitch and 1.6 million followers on YouTube – whom he speaks to in daily, hours-long live streams about the political happenings of the day.
Unlike most content creators of this caliber, like Charlie Kirk or Ben Shapiro, Piker is a socialist who does not mince words when describing the Democrats’ pitfalls.
“They come across as out-of-touch, elitist, smug, disinterested in all of the real issues that plague the American working class, and they are far too comfortable with the institutional donors,” Piker told me.
Republicans have repeatedly said that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election because she was too woke and failed to connect with regular people. That's a mischaracterization of the moderate campaign she ran.
In our conversation, Piker said he'd describe Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign as more progressive than the one Harris ran. Instead of focusing on the working class, Piker said, the vice president softened her stance on billionaires.
Despite his criticisms of the party, it’s clear that the Democrats need Piker and more content creators like him to counter the rise of right-wing influencers. It’s why the Twitch streamer has been compared with Joe Rogan in almost every story written about him. News outlets from The New York Times to CNN have made that connection.
However, it’s one thing for the Democratic Party and news outlets to consider Piker the solution to the left’s declining support among Gen Z men. Listening to what he’s been saying and making it part of the party platform is another thing entirely – and something mainstream Democrats don’t seem keen on doing.
Democrats are failing to rise to the opportunity Trump's handing them
He pointed to several issues where the Democrats failed on the messaging front in the 2024 election. In particular, their shifting messaging on issues like immigration, economics and trans rights.
“This election cycle was the first time I saw the Democrats actually take a hardline, ‘immigrants constitute a national security threat’ position,” Piker said. “This is not correct. It is entirely borne out of the most virulently racist fantasies of the right.”
Prior to the 2024 election (and despite their own legacy of deportations), Democrats had always taken a pro-immigrant stance. Then something shifted.
In October 2023, President Biden’s administration rolled out plans to allow the continuing construction of a border wall after years of opposing the idea.
“Even the dumbest guy looks at that and thinks, ‘Oh, you got caught,’ ” Piker said. “They look at the Democrats and go, ‘What do you mean? You said the border wall was racist, now you want to do a border wall?' ”
To him, this was just one example of how the Democrats looked at every issue this past election cycle: Instead of standing firm on issues they had campaigned on in 2020, they shifted further to the right to try to win over Republican voters who were never going to switch parties in the first place. This seems to be clear to everyone but the Democrats, who have been virtually nonexistent since Trump began his second term.
“That allows the Republican lies to basically dominate the entire media landscape, and inevitably shift people’s perspectives,” Piker said.
I agree with him on this front – Democrats have been playing defense year after year, and they’re shockingly bad at it. Instead of sticking to the core values they’ve espoused since Barack Obama’s presidency, they’ve become reliant on surface-level identity politics to get votes instead of making life better for the average American.
If Democratic leaders believe that their party is the only one that can save democracy, they need to act like it. There is no time like the present. Trump is polling terribly. He is tanking the economy with his tariffs. He is destroying the fabric of government with cuts to the federal government. He is deporting people without due process.
Democrats should be pointing out all of this and using their collective power to disrupt the Trump agenda. The party has the opportunity to show us a better way forward. Instead, they're politely getting out of the way.
“The only reason why Americans are still oblivious to this dangerous agenda of the Trump administration is because the Democrats haven’t made a big stink about it,” Piker said.
Hasan Piker is not without controversy
Piker comes with his share of controversies. At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, the streamer said, he had some of his clearances revoked on the final day of the event after he criticized the fact that the party didn’t let Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American, speak on behalf of the uncommitted movement.
“I thought that that was ridiculous for, obviously, the immoral nature of just refusing to talk about this major issue, but I also thought it electorally was a stupid move,” Piker said. “My criticisms for the Dems were always twofold in that regard.”
That isn’t the only skirmish he’s had with the Democrats. In November 2024, Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-New York, called on Twitch to investigate Piker for using “antisemitic rhetoric.” Piker said the reaction was unwarranted and in “bad faith.”
“He tweeted about me more than he tweeted about his own district,” Piker said, noting that Torres comes from the poorest congressional district in the nation. “That’s crazy. That’s not normal.”
He also gets a lot of heat from the right. On May 4, Fox News aired a segment calling out his "pro-Hamas, radical, antisemitic views," lamenting that he has any influence. Despite the people who perceive him as too extreme, it’s clear he’s doing something right. He wouldn’t have tens of thousands of people listening to him daily if his ideas weren’t popular.
A different voice in the age of Trump
Even with his criticisms of the Democratic Party, Piker isn’t one of the populists who shifted toward Trump in this election cycle. He expressed his horror at the way Republicans are infringing on free speech in this country, such as the arrests of students on college campuses who protested for Palestine.
“We’ve become so cruel so fast,” he said.
New Jersey native Piker grew up in Turkey, a country that has restricted free speech through various laws. While he admits that America, a country that once put communists on trial, is not perfect, he said the Trump administration’s attacks on free speech could equate to the U.S. version of the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1930s Germany.
“Noncitizens and citizens alike have First Amendment rights in this country, and not only are these people not saying anything that is truly horrifying to begin with, even if they were saying something truly horrifying, the government would not have a right to deport them for their speech,” Piker said.
You must wonder what would happen if the Democrats were championing free speech and immigrant rights as a response to Trump’s extreme agenda. At the very least, they’d provide much-needed counterprogramming to Trump’s “nefarious, fascist agenda,” as Piker puts it.
Follow Paste BN columnist Sara Pequeño on X, formerly Twitter: @sara__pequeno