While Trump dominated the conservative media, his influence operation was almost nonexistent, putting the campaign at a disadvantage. But over the course of the past year, the campaign and the Republican National Committee began integrating influencers and content creators into their election operation. Influential people were invited to the primary debates, and dozens of them attended the Republican National Convention in July.
Many of these creators exist in the manosphere, a community of men who traffic in racist and misogynistic content. Other Trump-aligned influencers who attended these events spread conspiracy theories about Harris, immigration, voter fraud, and more. Trump seemed to love it; shared posts and reveled in the online attention.
“When we live in a time like this, when there is such record distrust in traditional media, people trust people and influencers are people,” says CJ Pearson, co-chair of the RNC’s youth advisory council. “They’re looking for influencers to tell them what they’re passionate about, what makes them angry, what activates them, and that’s exactly what we wanted to do throughout this campaign.”
On the ground, the Trump campaign was at a disadvantage against Harris’s massive polling operations. Trump’s team largely outsourced its door-knocking efforts to America PAC and Turning Point Action, backed by Elon Musk. Both groups suffered buggy polling applicationsand WIRED reported that pollsters for Musk’s PAC in Michigan and Arizona were subjected to harsh working conditions and what they say were impossible-to-meet quotas. Republicans in battleground states like Michigan come under fire the meager effort of the campaign to get the votefor fear that it could cost them the elections.
But the in-person campaign may not have mattered. Bruesewitz believes the campaign’s digital operation may have been what pushed them over the edge.
“They all go hand in hand,” Bruesewitz says of the campaign’s field and online operations. “We were making direct contact with them at their doors and on their screens.”
Hasan Piker, a popular left-wing Twitch streamer, says it wasn’t just Trump’s willingness to appear on these podcasts, but also what he represented to his audiences. “Some of those guys are my friends. Others, not so much,” says Piker. “Podcasts themselves aren’t exactly what made Trump gain momentum or popularity. “They certainly played a role in outreach, but overall, I think he had a message that resonated with those people, and the podcast was just a vehicle to reach those people.”
Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist, tells WIRED that these online outreach campaigns are less effective at persuading the public on certain issues than they are at encouraging them to vote. “Many people don’t understand the role of influencer marketing campaigns,” he says. “It’s about whether they’re going to vote or not. And what we saw in some of the results is that those young men, specifically those who were in that target demographic of the various podcasts and influencers, came out (and) leaned dramatically toward Trump last night.”
The next challenge, according to Wilson, is to implement influencer marketing in more localized races. “It makes sense for a national campaign. It’s harder to execute for a state campaign because, you know, the audiences are getting narrower,” Wilson says.
“You can’t put a dollar amount on the earned media value we got through our podcasts and influencer meetups,” Bruesewitz says. “Jake Paul, whoever he is. “We were able to leverage President Trump’s personality to compile some of the most viral moments in modern history.”