- The battle for voters in the 2026 midterm elections is playing out on the TikTok For You Page.
- One in four Americans say creator content has influenced who they voted for.
- Political candidates are scrambling to connect with more creators in order to reach voters.
Content creators are influencing much more than our coffee orders and skincare routines.
About one in four Americans (26%) say influencer content has affected who they've voted for, according to a survey of around 2,000 US adults conducted by Morning Consult in September, shared exclusively with Business Insider.
Creator content is an "underestimated avenue" for political campaigns, said Nicole Dunger, a founding partner at the marketing firm People First, which works with candidates and advocacy groups on their creator strategies. "It is a real player and a big player in this space now."
If 2024 was the podcast election, 2026 is shaping up to be the influencer one. Instagram and TikTok creators have joined Fox News hosts and personalities like Joe Rogan as go-to sources of information for voters.
Influencers like Jake Paul and Hasan Piker have emerged as main characters in politics this year.
Paul recently joined President Donald Trump in Ohio for a midterm rally, posting TikTok clips of his Air Force One flight. Piker, meanwhile, has become a campaign ally for progressives like Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed and a negative talking point for Fox News commentators.
As online attention has become a key asset in politics, influencers are helping candidates break through the noise.
A little over half of US adults (56%) told Morning Consult that creator content had affected their views on political or social issues to some degree. That figure jumped among Gen Z respondents, where close to three in four respondents said their views had been swayed by influencer posts.
For campaigns, the challenge is identifying the right creators to work with, particularly when many influencers don't regularly talk about politics.
"You have to have your base of people, your core supporters, and then you have to have a broader cultural space of people who don't always talk about politics," said Parker Butler, a managing partner at the digital strategy firm Luminary Strategies, which works on social strategy with Democratic candidates like James Talarico. "It's worth having different pockets of creators for different purposes."
Reaching creators with smaller followings than Piker (about 3 million Twitch followers), or Paul (around 21 million YouTube subscribers) is a focus in 2026, Butler said.
He said the goal is to shift the creator outreach strategy from "this person has a million followers" to identifying influencers who work in a particular niche a campaign is trying to reach.
Political chatter is moving from TV to YouTube
More and more, political discussions are playing out on digital platforms, whether that's podcasts, YouTube videos, or Twitch streams.
YouTube was the top source for political and election news among US adults in September, narrowly beating out TV, print, and X (formerly Twitter), according to a survey from Syracuse University.
About one in five Democrats and Republicans said podcast appearances could make them "more likely to support a candidate," according to a July through August survey of likely midterm voters from the podcast industry group Sounds Profitable. A smaller share of Independents (11%) said podcasts could make them more likely to back a candidate.
While campaigns see attention moving online, they're still spending the bulk of their ad budgets on TV.
Part of that may be because they're accustomed to buying TV spots. They're also reckoning with the fact that influencer marketing is harder to predict and measure, particularly as social-media feeds become more personalized and algorithmically driven.
"It can be very challenging, but you see the results in the end," Dunger said. "It's the same with door knocking. We know door knocking somehow works and has worked for so long, but it's not like we have those direct measurements."