How Influencer Marketing Won the 2024 Election

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My first real introduction to digital marketing came from Barack Obama.?

In 2008, Obama became the first “internet president” by leveraging the web and social media to raise massive grassroots donations and support. The campaign flooded Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter with aspirational content, turning young supporters into a social marketing army. It built sophisticated voter databases and targeted potential supporters with online ads; it A/B tested email and SMS messaging to maximize donations and turnout.?

Now that I think about it, Obama is the reason that Nancy Pelosi has been PLEADING with me over text for the last 234 consecutive days.?

The '08 Obama campaign started a trend: Winning presidential campaigns market like forward-thinking CMOs. Losing campaigns lagger a few years behind.

In 2016, the Trump campaign masterfully used Facebook micro-targeting to turn out infrequent voters in droves, with help from Cambridge Analytica's data-theft pixie dust. His strategy mirrored the approach of the fastest-growing B2C brands.

In 2024, the Trump campaign and the Republican party won yet again by acting like a forward-thinking CMO and fully embracing influencer marketing. But unlike most CMOs, the Trump campaign was willing to embrace some of the most controversial and misogynistic influencers on the internet.

It’s the most underappreciated reason why Trump yet again outperformed the polls. Even if you don't care about politics, everyone in media and marketing needs to understand how Trump won.

The media and marketing game has changed more than you think.

New-school CMO vs old-school marketers

If you subscribe to this newsletter or follow me, you know I’m your typical Brooklyn Democrat dad — a caricature who donates and phone banks and wears a Kamala Harris tank top to my Sunday morning ultimate frisbee game. (Tucker Carlson would have a field day with me.)

As election day approached, what freaked me out the most were reports of Trump and Harris's diverging marketing strategies. Harris was vastly outspending Trump on Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads. Meanwhile, Trump was going all-in on influencers.?

The diverging strategies of the two campaigns reflected the divide I see in the marketing world right now. The most forward-thinking and successful CMOs I know are going all-in on building deep, long-term relationships with influencers. They know that the ROI on performance marketing has plummeted thanks to market saturation, skyrocketing costs, and limited targeting in a post-cookie world. The most efficient way to reach people is by collaborating with the influencers who have already won their trust.?

While the Harris campaign was acting like a pre-COVID CMO, pouring money into Facebook, Instagram, Google, and TV ads, the Trump campaign was acting like a 2025 CMO, building out a vast influencer network and cozying up to manosphere influencers with massive audiences like Joe Rogan, Kill Tony, Adin Ross, Theo Von, and the Nelk Boys.?

The Trump campaign understood that media power and influence no longer lie in traditional outlets but in individual creators, podcasters, and Substackers — especially if you want to reach undecided voters, who tend to be disengaged, don’t follow political news, and are disproportionately young dudes. The voters that would sway a close election weren’t watching CNN; they were watching Joe Rogan and Kill Tony on YouTube.??

Taylor Lorenz has an excellent breakdown of how this happened in The Hollywood Reporter. While the Harris campaign had a legitimately great social team, it treated influencers as a transactional media channel. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign understood the game and went all-in, treating influencers like true collaborators.

As Lorenz explains:

But while both campaigns worked overtime to court influencers, their strategies were divergent. The Harris campaign prioritized shortform clips, investing in quick videos and viral remixes on TikTok and Instagram. The Trump campaign went deep and long, investing heavily in longform YouTube podcasts and building partnerships with livestreamers. Ultimately, the latter proved wildly more successful.?

The Trump campaign traveled to meet with various content creators, while Harris sought to make influencers meet on her own turf. When she and Walz filmed an episode of creator Kareem Rahma’s hit series Subway Takes, for instance, which is meant to be shot on a New York City subway, the Harris campaign insisted on filming it on a bus in Pittsburgh. When Harris was invited on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the campaign responded by requesting that Rogan leave his studio in Austin, Texas and travel to them. They also wanted to cut the format to an hourlong interview, rather than his notoriously long discussions that usually last three to four hours. The interview did not happen. The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.?

The difference in strategy here is really important. If you want to connect with a creator’s audience, you need to go deep and speak their language. It can’t feel like a one-off sponcon hit.??

Trump invited influencers on his plane, face-timing with their friends, and to his election watch party. In the process, Trump reached infrequent voters and created a permission structure amongst young men to support him.?

I was skeptical that all these young dudes would actually update their voter registration and turn out to vote for Trump en mass; after all, I remember being an irresponsible 20-year-old. But they did. Young male voters shifted 28 points to the right as Trump won 18-29-year-old men 52-46, propelling his much-discussed gains amongst black and Latino men.

As Scott Galloway put it, it was the “manosphere election.”

But things get even crazier once you realize how this strategy came together — and the unexpected character at the center of it all.

Barron Trump, marketing prodigy?

Many CMOs get their best marketing strategies from their kids, and in 2024, Trump was no different.?

This weekend, Vice reported that Trump’s influencer strategy was inspired by his 18-year-old son, Barron Trump, whose best friend is conservative influencer Bo Loudon. Trump tasked Barron and Bo with getting out the young male vote, and they worked their network, setting up interviews with notoriously racist and sexist mega-influencer Andrew Tate and controversial streamer Adin Ross, a wildly popular Jewish boy from Florida who’s hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes and got banned from Twitch for using a homophobic slur.?

After his interview with Trump, Ross went viral for gifting Trump a cyber truck custom-decaled with an image of Trump’s post-assassination-attempt fist pump. In that scene, you see how well Trump got the influencer game. He didn’t just pose for a photo op. He got in the truck with Adin and filmed more behind-the-scenes content.?

Most brands would never touch these influencers, but the Trump campaign is anything but brand-safe, and it worked. Undecided voters tend to be less engaged and not follow politics, and according to data for progress polling, Trump dominated amongst voters who don’t follow political news:

Winning the crypto bros

An underrated aspect of Trump’s influencer strategy and why it worked so well with young men was his unabashed embrace of crypto, again inspired by his son Barron.

With Barron’s help, Trump launched his own coin and talked crypto with every manosphere influencer he engaged with. A lot of young male voters walked away convinced that a Trump victory would help send their crypto holdings to the moon.?

This election was about the economy, and in the crypto economy, the math was simple: A Trump win would spike the value of their holdings, enriching young crypto bros before Trump ever took office.

An influencer victory years in the making?

I know this may seem like a dizzying TikTok fever dream that makes you want to unplug the internet forever, but this is how the media works in this bizarre day and age.?

Newspapers and TV stations have way less influence than you think. Creators and influencers have way more.?

Trump's marketing victory wasn’t a last-minute accident; as Lorenz reports on her Substack, wealthy Republican donors have been backrolling conservative streamers and influencers like Charlie Kirk, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, and Tim Pool for years. (Sidenote: Read Lorenz's story.) They’ve founded conservative streaming platforms like Rumble and DLive and used them like a minor league training academy, paying up-and-coming influencers hundreds of thousands of dollars and inflating their in-platform metrics to grow their status.

Democrats, meanwhile, have no significant influencer ecosystem. As Lorenz notes, Harris didn’t lose because she didn’t go on Joe Rogan; she lost because Democrats don’t have their own Joe Rogan. The Democratic party doesn’t cultivate its own influencers and creators — I’m not talking about millennial celebrities who make one-off endorsements or play a song at a rally to amp up supporters. I'm talking about YouTube and Twitch-native influencers who build trust with people who don’t follow politics through hours and hours of content.

The closest thing the Dems have is Pod Save America, but that’s a show hosted by former Obama speechwriters and tailored to normie liberals like me who are going to vote and canvass no matter what.?

Over the past couple of days, I've been thinking a lot about a screenshot in Lorenz's story by Twitter personality "James Medlock." It's one of the funniest and most accurate tweets I've read in a long time: “Dem operatives should be scouting young guys with left politics on Twitch the way baseball scouts watch the Dominican League for kids who can throw 100 mph.”

Honestly, it's true. If Democrats want to win another election, they need to recognize how the media environment has changed and invest real time and money to cultivate an ecosystem of influencers that can build trust with the disaffected voters they need to reach. And they need to craft a compelling message and story to arm those influencers and help them pull working-class voters to their side.

Otherwise, Brooklyn dads like me will be asking, “How did this happen?” for a long, long time.

This week's must-clicks

Why Democrats Won't Build Their Own Joe Rogan (Taylor Lorenz/User Mag)

How Barron Trump and the 'Bro Vote' Helped Sway the Election (Vice)

The Book That Predicted the 2024 Election (Ezra Klein / NYT)

The New Talent Paradigm of AI Innovation: Blended Teams (My latest research report for A.Team)

I'm the Fractional Head of Content at A.Team and best-selling co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Click the subscribe button above to join 150k+ marketers who read this newsletter for lessons on the art & science of storytelling in the AI Age. For weekly storytelling strategies, subscribe to my Substack.