Influencer Influencers have never been more important to electoral politics. They’re the trendsetters, meme-sharers, video creators, and organizers; they also wield significant power when it comes to encouraging their followers to vote. That’s why we’ve built a visual, interactive list of influencers and content creators from the right and the left, where you can see how their followings compare and how they’re connecting with this election.
The list we’ve compiled here may include some creators you know and some others you may not: Since the 2020 election, the internet has become increasingly fragmented and personalized with social media algorithms creating individual feeds for each user. We created this list to show who’s who in politics in communities across the internet.
Each creator’s bubble size corresponds to the number of followers they have on their primary social media platform, although many of these creators advertise huge audiences on multiple other platforms.
The creators we selected for this project are just a handful of the most influential people driving political content on the internet, including everyone from micro-influencers to billionaires like Elon Musk. Creators needed to meet a combination of criteria to be included, including whether they primarily posted about politics or worked directly with political campaigns or PACs. If they didn’t have a large audience, they needed to have an impact on at least one specific community, whether it was immigrants or people with disabilities. They also needed to show that their content had an impact by pushing news cycles or inspiring political change. On the right, that means a lot of meme creators and talk radio-style influencers.
During the 2024 election, influencers, content creators, and podcasters received the invitation to lavish political fundraisers, party conventions, and rallies, as they share what happens onstage and behind the scenes with their millions of online followers—something that stands apart from traditional parties courting celebrities and the infamous by reaching mass audiences that influencers can address in real time. A recent survey from Billion Dollar Boy Global Creative Agency determined that at least one in four creators were approached by political campaigns and organizations to produce political content ahead of the 2024 election. This year was the first time the Democratic National Convention certified influencers alongside journalists.
Influencers have also expanded their audiences for candidates: Trump has appeared on multiple creator-led podcasts, and Harris’s campaign has championed “summer of the kids,” and the influencers who endorsed it have become 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, which may be why they have significantly larger followings than some of the younger innovators on the left.
Political influencers aren’t going away, but it’s unclear how their followings can influence elections. They’ve changed the way we experience politics online—now we’ll see if they actually encourage voter turnout.
Getty Images; Yuvraj Khanna/Redux (Sisson)
