American political candidates are having to improvise as campaigning moves entirely online, with down-ballot hopefuls starting to look a lot like influencers
of course every campaign wants to “go viral” but there's a huge diff btwn what Kennedy is doing, per this piece (FB live) and Markey (meme-ing himself on twitter) both “viral” but among diff ppl https://www.theverge.com/... Southpaw / @nycsouthpaw : Would make a certain amount of sense if politics was the one way to monetize a twitter account https://twitter.com/... B-Boy Bouiebaisse / @jbouie : i have to think we are less than a decade away from candidates actually just hiring influencers as campaign consultants. https://twitter.com/... Makena Kelly / @kellymakena : Really since Obama's '08, the internet has become incredibly important for politicians. But there have been fast and slow adopters. The pandemic is forcing candidates to speedrun a digital strategy they may not have relied on so heavily before. https://www.theverge.com/... Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz : Candidates can't campaign, so they're trying to go viral. Excellent story by @kellymakena https://www.theverge.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The pandemic had already forced US races off the trail weeks earlier, when COVID-19 confinement moved political campaigning entirely online and left campaign staff anxious about how to reach voters. This piece captures what that improvisation looks like in practice: in the Massachusetts Senate primary, Joe Kennedy III works Facebook Live while Ed Markey memes himself on Twitter — both chasing virality, but among visibly different audiences.
The reach gap isn't only a down-ballot problem: an analysis days earlier flagged Joe Biden's 32,000-subscriber YouTube channel as a weakness against Trump's online operation. Commentators in the thread go further, predicting candidates will soon hire influencers outright as campaign consultants.
First-order effects
- Kennedy and Markey are now competing on audience-building rather than event turnout, each optimizing a different platform's format — long-form Facebook Live versus self-aware Twitter memes — which rewards very different candidate skill sets.
- Down-ballot hopefuls without TV budgets have to staff for content production — filming, editing, posting cadence — capabilities traditional campaign operations were never built around.
Second-order effects
- The consultant market tilts toward creators: months later, researchers documented candidates and PACs increasingly paying influencers directly as platforms clamped down on bots and political ads.
- Platform policy becomes a budget variable — after Facebook and Google restricted political advertising, campaigns shifted marketing dollars toward email lists, influencers, and other channels where organic reach still worked ([[a:963051]]).
Third-order effects
- Political persuasion migrates from paid targeting to earned distribution through creator networks, so platform policy decisions — not campaign treasuries — become the binding constraint on which candidates get heard.
- If the pattern holds, the candidate-as-content-creator model hardens into standard practice; by 2022, analysts concluded Meta political ads offered poor ROI anyway, validating the pivot away from paid placement ([[a:983511]]).
The trend: Campaign communication is consolidating around creator-style organic distribution, with platform policy rather than ad budgets determining which candidates reach voters.