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Influencers have never been more important to electoral politics. They’re tastemakers, meme sharers, video creators, and organizers; they also wield significant power when it comes to encouraging their followers to vote. That’s why we built a visual and interactive list of influencers and content creators from the right and the left, where you can see how their followings compare to one another and how they’re connected to this election.
The list we put together here likely includes some creators you know and others you might not: Ever since the 2020 election, the internet has become increasingly fragmented and personalized with social media algorithms creating bespoke feeds for each user. We put together this list to show who’s who in politics in communities across the internet.
The size of each creator’s bubble corresponds with the number of followers they have on their primary social media platform, despite many of these creators touting massive audiences on multiple others. You can tap or scroll over each bubble for a more detailed breakdown.
The creators we’ve picked out for this project are just a sampling of some of the most influential people pushing political content on the internet, including everyone from micro influencers to billionaires like Elon Musk. The creators need to meet some combination of criteria for inclusion, including whether they post primarily about politics or have worked directly with political campaigns or PACs. If they don’t have a large audience, they need to hold influence in at least a specific community of people, whether that be immigrants or people who are disabled. They also need to show their content is impactful by either driving news cycles or inspiring political change. On the right, that means a lot of meme creators and talk radio-type influencers.
Throughout the 2024 election, influencers, content creators, and podcasters have received invitations to ritzy political fundraisers, party conventions, and rallies, as they share what it’s like to be onstage and behind the scenes to their millions of followers online—something made meaningfully distinct from the parties’ traditional courting of the famous and infamous by mass audiences which influencers can address in real time. A recent survey from the global creator agency Billion Dollar Boy determined that at least one in every four creators was approached by political campaigns and organizations to produce political content ahead of the 2024 election. This year is the first time the Democratic National Convention credentialed influencers alongside journalists.
Influencers have opened their audiences to the candidates in turn, as well: Trump has appeared on numerous creator-led podcasts, and the Harris campaign’s embrace of “brat summer” and the influencers who championed it became a defining moment in this cycle. The biggest influencers on the right include billionaires like Musk and more mainstream right-wing media figures like Charlie Kirk. That’s likely why they have significantly larger followings than some of the younger creators on the left.
Political influencers aren’t going anywhere, but it’s still unknown just how much their followings could sway the election. They’ve already changed the ways we experience politics online—now we’ll see whether they can actually encourage voters to hit the polls.
Getty Images; Yuvraj Khanna/Redux (Sisson)
