Democrats’ Progressive Influencer Problem

(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock)

“I DON’T KNOW how you sleep at night.”

“You are a sick, twisted piece of shit.”

“I hope you burn for this. I hope people find you.”

This is a sampling of the messages the then-chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, Roberta Lange, received in 2016 through texts, voicemails, and social media posts. What had Lange done to elicit such vitriol—kick a dog? Blow up a national landmark?

Of course, she’d done nothing. Senator Bernie Sanders had simply underperformed primary expectations in the state, and his angry supporters took it out on her. Some of the thousands of emails and messages Lange received even targeted her grandson.

At the time, Sanders was a newly prominent Democratic primary candidate riding a wave of populist progressive enthusiasm. After the hateful messages and threats culminated in aggressive discord at the state’s Democratic convention, he offered broad condemnations of the violent rhetoric and acting out. But he also refused to apologize for the actions of his more chaotic supporters.

Long before influencers became a fixture of presidential campaigns, Sanders had one of the first influencer-led online political fandoms. Many of us watched in real time as this novel-seeming movement started to take a now-familiar aggressive turn. Working on Hillary Clinton’s digital team in Brooklyn in 2016, I got an unusually close view of an emergent feature of the hyper-online progressive left: high-key belligerence and even intimidation.

Rudeness, undue aggression, and even deranged behavior have always been features of depersonalized online environments—on social media platforms, and before that in “flame wars” on message boards. That isn’t new. But much less discussed is how slow and apparently hesitant many left-leaning candidates have been to denounce behavior of this kind from their online supporters—or what it means for candidates like Abdul El-Sayed or James Talarico, current objects of intense online fandoms.

Donald Trump’s Twitter account and the army of MAGA trolls he inspired to harass and threaten journalists and Democrats—that’s what most people remember about the 2016 cycle, and justifiably so. But the story of what was happening on the Democratic side is important to remember as well. I observed (and frequently experienced) the viciousness some of Bernie Sanders’s most online supporters directed at Clinton’s campaign staff, supporters, and the candidate herself, plus anyone else they viewed as out of alignment with their goal of electing Sanders.

The “Bernie bro” phenomenon emerged (and was christened with its name in the Atlantic) in the fall of 2015. It received a fair amount of critical coverage at the time and generated recurring cycles of reaction on social media—liberals and even some Sanders-supporting progressives were particularly critical of the sexist undertones of the aggro movement—but the question of how much responsibility the candidate himself bore for his followers’ behaviors was left largely unresolved. During that time, the Sanders campaign never came under serious mainstream media pressure to answer for the toxicity of his most passionate fans, and his all-purpose repudiations of bad actions and behaviors aside, he never did.

During the 2016 election cycle, Chapo Trap House, a popular progressive podcast, emerged as a vector of a larger “dirtbag left” movement that appeared to some as a funhouse mirror image of MAGA—and not just for its general belligerence and burn-it-all-down, take-no-prisoners anti-establishment M.O.: The predominantly white and male voices associated with dirtbag leftism often aimed their attacks at minority groups and women in the Democratic party who didn’t see politics their way. A not-insignificant percentage of Bernie supporters would even go on to support Trump in the general election.

In a New Republic story published in July 2017, Jeet Heer described dirtbag leftist and Bernie bro types as practicing “dominance politics.” And the online personalities and influencers associated with Chapo had found quite an eager market for their angry wares: “If Trump insulted his way to the presidency, Chapo is insulting the Democrats to move the party leftward, using mockery and derision to push for a socialist America. . . . The show is extremely popular, generating more than $70,000 a month in Patreon subscriptions, outdistancing the other top podcasts on Patreon by nearly three to one.”

When these toxic dynamics resurfaced during the 2020 primary, mainstream journalists seemed more open to the idea that politicians should bear some responsibility for the bad behavior of their social media supporters. Sanders had tried to corral his movement in the run-up to that cycle, writing a letter to supporters in 2019 in which he condemned “bullying and harassment of any kind and in any space.” (His campaign simultaneously tried to deflect some concerns by characterizing the “toxicity” narrative as a “media-driven perception.”) But the problems remained, and Sanders drew fresh scrutiny for his “internet army.”

In February 2020, Sanders clarified that, “anybody making personal attacks against anybody else in my name is not part of our movement. I don’t want them.” It was a good enough line for the time, as expectations surrounding candidates’ relationships with their social media fandoms were still fairly inchoate. And while he did drag on the 2016 primary beyond the point that his loss became mathematically guaranteed, Sanders was a far more gracious loser in 2020, quickly endorsing Biden. In doing so, he helped to quash the sort of social media discord he had done little to combat in 2016.

---

Fresh reporting.
Sharp analysis.
Honest commentary.

---

BUT NOW, SIX YEARS LATER and with national politics fully digital-first, Sanders’s earlier, more hands-off approach to the virulence of his supporters is the one favored by the progressive male candidates who have followed in the Vermont senator’s footsteps—and in some cases, secured his endorsement—this midterm cycle while running against more moderate female opponents.

While campaigning in early April, Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed welcomed streamer Hasan Piker, one of the most influential—and vicious—voices in far-left online media, to appear with him at a couple of events. Over the months that followed, Piker, his supporters, and other left-leaning social accounts occasionally piled on El-Sayed’s primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, not only attacking her vociferously for her political positions, such as supporting military aid to Israel, but mocking her for her appearance and voice. Stevens’s campaign even cut an ad about the online harassment she’s received. The story of her rough treatment online got big enough that El-Sayed eventually addressed his supporters’ toxic online behavior directly, tweeting in mid-July, “It’s become impossible to ignore the way that people online make fun of my opponent for things that have nothing to do with her policies or politics. It’s unkind and unhelpful. If you support me, please stop.”

It’s a good sentiment, if slightly naïve-sounding, but El-Sayed’s words started to ring a bit hollow when, shortly after the post, CNN’s Jake Tapper confronted him over insults El-Sayed’s campaign and even the candidate himself had thrown at Stevens. How can you disclaim your followers’ bullying behavior after framing your opponent as someone who couldn’t “string together two coherent sentences” and whose “corporate money couldn’t buy her a personality”? The call, as they say, was coming from inside the house. (When pushed by Tapper, El-Sayed conceded that Stevens was “plenty smart and plenty capable.”) In the final days of his campaign, despite the perfunctory disclaimers on their social media bullying, the primary winner hosted a pool party for Piker and others. But then, after he won, El-Sayed praised Stevens as “one of the most committed public servants you’ll ever meet,” brushed Piker off as just “a streamer” in an interview, and in general seemed to adopt a new tone befitting his upcoming general election contest.

In Texas, progressive social media star and Democratic nominee for Senate James Talarico has had similar troubles in the toxic-supporters department. During the heated Democratic primary several months ago that pitted Talarico against Rep. Jasmine Crockett, influencer drama took center stage. A deep divide emerged after controversial comments from podcasters Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers and YouTuber Keith Edwards went viral; some of their criticisms of Crockett struck many of her supporters as racist and sexist. Local community leaders/influencers with whom the Talarico campaign consulted during the primary raised concerns about this rhetoric with campaign staff and asked them to proactively tamp down the online vitriol, but they claimed that these overtures were largely ignored.

Months later, Talarico, now the primary winner, is still struggling with black voter outreach—just as some of his campaign’s critics predicted would continue to be the case back in the spring. Rather than reflecting on why that might be, Talarico’s supporters continue to target Crockett for not doing enough to help his campaign. When he was finally confronted at a town hall last month about the continuing divisive behavior of Edwards and other high-profile boosters, Talarico finally spoke out.

One Texas community leader and influencer put the question to him directly: “What are you going to do to rebuke and admonish your supporters and surrogates . . . the likes of Keith Edwards, RogueDNC [a viral progressive account], and David Piper, the voice actor who harasses and threatens black politicos who politicians in this area depend on to promote voting education and voting mobilization?”

“Let me say this as clearly as I possibly can,” Talarico said. “If you claim to be my supporter . . . please keep Congresswoman Crockett’s name out of your mouth.”

Again, it’s a praiseworthy statement—but if Talarico feels this strongly, why didn’t he say something during the primary instead of waiting until he had the nomination in the bag? The fact that he offered this public disavowal now, amid his struggles to court a key demographic of Texas voters, casts a shadow of political opportunism over the candidate’s profession of principle.

---

EL-SAYED AND TALARICO obviously can’t control what Piker or Edwards say online. But they do control what they and their campaigns say—and what they remain silent about. Waiting to condemn your supporters’ harsh online behavior until the political costs of staying quiet about it start to outweigh the benefits of riding it out is the sort of thing that makes a candidate’s character seem like more of an instrumental than an intrinsic concern to them.

Because campaigns, especially insurgent campaigns, can benefit from staying mum for a while about bad behavior from raucous supporters. Even terrible actions like bullying and harassment can generate political heat and interest, lending enthusiasm and volatility to campaigns fighting for visibility of any kind. And once reporters begin asking pointed questions, or key constituencies begin taking exception to their rough treatment, candidates can always issue a statement to mollify critics while maintaining their momentum.

But political leadership requires a bit more than asking supporters to stand down only after you’ve gotten a leg up thanks to their bad behavior. It requires making a decision, before the pile-ons begin, about what kinds of politics you’re willing to benefit from.

Political influencers are certainly not going away. If anything, they are going to become an even more important vector for American electoral politics. By 2028, it’s likely that every serious Democratic presidential campaign will have cultivated its own network of influencers and highly engaged online communities. Potential frontrunner Gov. Gavin Newsom has already built an “online influencer machine.” But the candidates who distinguish themselves where it matters won’t be the ones with the loudest and largest online hype crews. They’ll be the ones willing to tell their online supporters “enough” before doing so becomes a political necessity—the ones whose campaigns most closely resemble the values they preach from the stump.