The Influencer Economy Is Political Infrastructure

One Side Figured That Out First - But What’s Next?

Maria Comstock is a TikTok influencer who interviews former spies and intelligence officials. Before the 2024 election, her political persuasion wasn’t obvious. And so she started getting inbound inquiries to post paid political content from both sides of the aisle. And what she saw was staggering, the left offered her $2,000 for a sponsored video, and the right offered her $36,000 for the exact same deliverable. Same format, same audience, same production lift, a 1,700% difference.

“Because of my values,” she wrote in a post on LinkedIn, “I worked with organizations on the left and declined the offers on the right. But let’s be honest: for many creators, that delta makes the decision for you. For influencers, brand deals aren’t ‘extra.’ They’re rent. They’re healthcare. They’re payroll for editors. When someone offers you the equivalent of several months’ income for one deliverable, it’s not an abstract ethical debate; it’s survival math.”

And that is the story of the modern political social media economy in one anecdote.

But that’s about the 2024 cycle, why am I saying this now?

I have been talking about the political influencer economy for about a decade now, long before mainstream political strategists had language for what was happening, and long before people began to realize that the center of gravity in political persuasion had quietly migrated away from institutions and toward individuals who had built real relationships with audiences online. I was one of the first Democratic political influencers on Instagram, building an audience in the platform's vernacular at a time when most political professionals still believed it was a place only for kids’ photos and shoe-shilling, rather than a space where genuine political conversation could actually live.

And now I want to tell you what I see happening in the future - and how I’m worried dems are, once again, not ready.

Despite the learnings of the 2024 election, many people in political leadership have clung to the idea that political persuasion is still happening only in the places we grew up with: TV ads, cable news panels, and op-eds in a national newspaper. The places where their donors consume information. But the battlefield now extends to the same ecosystem as makeup tutorials, workout routines, cooking reels, and relationship podcasts.

The right understood this years ago, and more importantly, they treated it like infrastructure.

Infrastructure is not glamorous, it is not brat summer. It is the plumbing underneath the house … the systems that make everything else possible. It’s money and it’s effective information distribution systems. Maria’s anecdote is the result of years of deliberate investment by conservative donors who recognized that the future of persuasion would live inside the attention economy.

Turning Point USA’s 2021 taxes showing MAHA influencer Alex Clark as a full-time employee

The reason influencer content works has never been reach alone. Political ads reach people all the time and still fail to persuade them. The power of creator-driven political media comes from something much more subtle and much more powerful: the accumulated trust that develops when an audience feels like they actually know the person delivering the message. When someone has followed you for years they rely on you in a way that feels less like media consumption and more like conversation.

Until recently, the assumption inside left-wing campaigns and advocacy organizations has been that social media functions as little more than a distribution channel, another place to paste the same talking points and press releases that had already been written for television or print. The right understood that the algorithms and people of the internet want something different: they want culture wars, community, and aesthetics.

The fundamental premise of the way left-wing messaging infrastructure worked last cycle was as two symbiotic professional universes (1) pre-existing campaign and advocacy groups that came up with messages, and (2) influencers who built their own platforms, who then distribute those messages.

As you can imagine, this leaves a lot of gaps in the system. Are the messages being crafted to do well online? Are the influencers talking to people outside the activist base echo chamber? What happens when influencers (people who became successful because of a nose for virality) choose drama over message discipline? What happens when the groups are simply pushing the same messages they’ve been pushing (ineffectively) all these years?

The issue isn’t that these two universes exist; it’s that the way they were designed wasn’t to build something durable. The system was optimized for the campaign cycle, when money is flowing and urgency is high. But not sufficient emphasis was put on sustained relationships, with year-round presence. There was little compounding investment in the people and platforms that actually shape how audiences understand the world between elections until very recently. And there has been insufficient time spent building long-term messaging strategies crafted with the internet in mind.

There’s a nascent movement to reverse this trend, going on on the left - both the ones you’ve heard of (Chorus, Crooked, Courier) as well as a few you haven’t. But the vast tentacles of the right’s ecosystem far far far outweigh the one we are just building now.

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Charles Duhigg recently wrote a piece in the New Yorker where he outlines the distinction between mobilizing and organizing. Mobilizing is getting people to do a thing. Organizing is getting people to become the kind of people who do what needs to be done. A march is mobilizing. Faith & Freedom Coalition building year-round relationships inside evangelical churches, gun clubs, and homeschooling associations until they can reliably turn out millions of voters on cue is organizing. As Duhigg documents, the MAGA movement has been exceptional at the latter and the Democratic Party has been exceptional at the former, and as long as that’s true, Democrats will keep winning the spectacle and losing the structural war.

The same distinction maps almost perfectly onto how each party has approached the creator economy. Buying a one-off influencer video is mobilizing. You’re purchasing a deliverable, a targeted message during a targeted window. You treat the creator like a more trusted billboard and move on at the end of the cycle. What the right has been doing, systematically and patiently since long before 2020 when Turning Point USA formalized its creator recruitment pipeline, is organizing. They have built an ecosystem where being a conservative creator is economically and socially rewarding year-round, not just in the sixty days before an election. The $36,000 offer Comstock received wasn’t just a market rate; it was an invitation to join something, and that is a fundamentally different thing.

Turning Point USA (now under the helm of Erika Kirk) is deeply embedded in Republican infrastructure. Seen here with AR Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders

The right’s dominance in the creator economy didn’t come out of nowhere. It is the most recent chapter in a forty-year project to dominate the information environment, and the through line is consistent enough that there’s really no excuse for being surprised by it at this point.

It started with talk radio in the 1980s and 90s, a medium the left largely ceded, dismissing it as too low-brow to matter. Rush Limbaugh was reaching 15 million listeners a week by the mid-90s, with no Democratic equivalent anywhere in sight. It was a national organizing mechanism running continuously outside of election cycles, building identity and community and shared grievance in a way that no campaign ad has ever been able to replicate. Fox News launched in 1996 and, within a decade, had structurally reorganized the entire media landscape around its gravitational pull.

Then came YouTube and podcasts, then TikTok and Instagram and the full sprawl of what we now call the creator economy, and at every turn the same playbook repeated itself: identify the new channel early, fund the creators before anyone else is paying attention, make it financially and socially rewarding to be part of the ecosystem, and let it compound over time. A 2024 analysis from Media Matters found that nine of the ten most popular online political shows are right-leaning based on cross-platform following and engagement. Even the old-school orgs of the right are now engaged in new-media recruitment. The Leadership Institute, a group that’s excelled at conservative candidate grooming since the 70’s, has a Podcast School that pulls people into its pipeline. This is the result of decades of deliberate capital allocation and the cultivation of talent pipelines that most Democratic operatives were still calling fringe right up until they weren’t.

Pew Research Center data shows roughly 1 in 5 American adults now regularly get their news from social media influencers, and among adults under 30 that number is over 40%. If you are reading this newsletter, you are likely one of those 1 in 5 - so, again, why am I telling you all this which you probably already know?

New York Times

Looking ahead to the 2026 midterms, the financial asymmetry is staggering:

According to a New York Times analysis, Republicans entered the year with a combined advantage north of $550 million across party committees and aligned super PACs, more than double what Democrats hold. Then there’s the tech money, arriving at a scale that would have seemed implausible two cycles ago. AI companies, allied groups, and top executives donated at least $83 million to federal campaigns in 2025 alone. Leading the Future, the main pro-AI super PAC, has already amassed $100 million in commitments from the likes of Marc Andreessen, Greg Brockman, and Joe Lonsdale. Y Combinator just launched its own PAC. Crypto super PAC Fairshake is sitting on $193 million. Elon Musk, after a brief and uncharacteristic pause, dropped $30 million into Republican groups and races in December and January alone. This spending broadly benefits Republicans, who are seen as friendlier to the industries writing the checks. “Any Democrat who isn’t concerned isn’t serious,” Bradley Beychok, co-founder of Dem Super PAC American Bridge, told the Times.

This is the financial environment in which the Democratic influencer strategy must operate. And it matters not just because of what it buys in ads and opposition research and voter contact, but because of what it buys in the information ecosystem specifically. The $36,000 offer Maria Comstock received didn’t materialize out of nowhere. It is downstream of this money, this infrastructure, this decades-long project of treating information distribution as something worth funding seriously and continuously.

And now that ecosystem is being supercharged in ways that extend far beyond the sponsored-content gap. Meta reversed course at the start of 2025, ending fact-checking and reopening political content to its algorithmic recommendations — and the financial consequences have been immediate. According to reporting from Kyle Tharp, Political creators are now reporting monthly Facebook payouts ranging from $5,000 to $50,000, and one prominent creator shared a screenshot showing a single-month payout of $268,000. The platform is paying for views, views reward engagement, and nothing drives engagement like outrage. This isn’t a level playing field where good content wins. It’s a system with a thumb on the scale, pointed in a very specific direction.

Then there’s the infrastructural layer underneath that we’ve all started mumbling about, the deliberate reshaping of the information environment itself through AI. The Trump White House has already made AI-generated content a routine part of its official messaging strategy and used executive orders and federal buying power to steer the technology’s development in directions that serve its political interests. Elon Musk has gone further, directly intervening in Grok’s outputs when he didn’t like its answers, a demonstration of what it looks like when someone with both an AI company and the world’s most-followed social media platform decides to use both as political instruments simultaneously. A study published in Nature this year found that X’s algorithm shifts users’ political opinions toward the right, with effects that persist even after users return to a chronological feed. Analysts expect the gap between how the two parties are deploying AI to widen significantly through the 2026 cycle, and to the extent that AI delivers even a fraction of its promise on personalized messaging and persuasion, the side that got there first will have built yet another compounding advantage into a system that is already tilted. The right didn’t just invest in creators. They invested in the pipes.

The pattern is consistent enough at this point that there’s really no excuse for being surprised by it. Money flows toward the right, creators follow the money, the platforms restructure their incentives, the algorithms do the rest, and the information ecosystem shapes itself accordingly. Talk radio. Fox News. YouTube. Podcasts. The creator economy. AI. Each time, the same playbook: identify the channel early, fund it before anyone else, make it financially and socially rewarding to be part of the ecosystem, and let it compound.

What’s different about 2026 is the scale and the fact that the left is attempting to build something to counter it in real time, against a forty-year head start, with a fraction of the resources, in a financial and technological landscape more tilted than ever.

But we certainly can do it. We not only have truth on our side, we have a Republican party that is set on fucking over the American public. In a world in which rage-bait is the lifeblood of creator work, Trump is giving us a whole lot of rage to work with.

But the ecosystem - the groups who decide the messages of persuasion used to fight the critical political and cultural wars that shape our politics and policies - must stand ready to fight the battle we will be waging, whether they like it or not. What’s clear is what hasn’t worked: the system of pay-to-play sponsored videos with an emphasis on a messaging infrastructure that switches on in September and goes dark in November. The basic messaging used in TV ads and devoid of personality and fight. The right didn’t build what it has by treating any of this as a line item. They built it by treating it as a project. The question going into 2026 is whether anyone on the left has finally decided to do the same, and, if so, whether there is still enough time for them to get it done.

—> P.S. Tomorrow I’m going to send you an example of a massive, undisclosed right-wing influencer campaign going on right now.

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