Hasan Piker on Kamala Harris’ Campaign: ‘Snatching Defeat From the Jaws of Victory’

The biggest influencer in young progressive politics has a problem with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Hasan Piker didn’t always feel that way. In fact, like a lot of other dyed-in-the-wool liberals, the Twitch streamer and social media star was pretty stoked three months ago. For the first time in the decade that Piker, 33, has covered politics, the Democratic Party appeared to be listening to its base.

“[They] did something that was truly unique to the Democratic Party’s track record,” Piker told Newsweek in an interview. “They were responsive to public pressure.”

Public pressure was what pushed President Joe Biden out of the race in July. It was what, Piker believes, led Harris to choose a running mate known for his progressive policies over a “safety pick” like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. That excited Piker: Having Tim Walz, the popular and avuncular governor of Minnesota, at the top of the ticket suggested that Democrats would bunker down and defend the policies that Republicans decry as radical.

“I thought that [the Democrats] would be trapped in a bind where they would have to actively communicate that feeding children is not radical, that family leave is not radical. That these are things that help Republicans and Democrats. That [Walz as VP] would have forced their hand into a great messaging campaign,” Piker said.

“And then the DNC happened.”

Piker, who has 2.7 million followers on the streaming platform Twitch and 1.42 million subscribers on YouTube, surprised even himself when the Democratic Party let him stream from the Democratic National Convention given his outspoken views on the war in Gaza.

Piker was born to Turkish parents in New Jersey and skyrocketed to fame on “The Young Turks,” a popular progressive YouTube show found by his uncle, Cenk Uygar. He’s since gone out on his own, delivering political content and democratic socialist hot takes takes for eight hours — every day — to a largely young and male audience on a platform, Twitch, that he says favors right-wing content.

In recent months, Trump has fully embraced those types of platforms over traditional media, appearing on podcasts and streams hosted by other popular influencers like Theo Von and Adin Ross—a strategy aimed at winning the so-called “bro” vote.

Piker said that while Trump’s charismatic personality and TV background lends itself well to coming across as “almost apolitical” for those platform’s typically center-right audiences, it’s a path Harris could never take in the same way, “authentically and organically.”

Harris rode into the DNC on a high. Despite having less than a month to pull together a presidential campaign, the vice president’s candidacy was warmly welcomed by a mostly relieved Democratic base. Harris not only drastically improved on Biden’s performance against Trump in polls, but also ignited enthusiasm among Democrats, including Gen Z voters whom Biden had been struggled with.

But even with all of that working in Harris’ favor, Piker said, “the Democratic Party has this profound skill of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”

“I knew, if they go right, they will cut away at this momentum—this massive fundraising campaign that they put together almost overnight because they responded to public pressure—[It] could all go away,” he said.

“The momentum could swing and it could swing wildly in the favor of the Republican Party.”

That appears to be happening. Since the convention, Harris’ standings have stalled, leaving political pundits wondering if her campaign’s honeymoon phase has ended and whether she is doing enough to break from Joe Biden and stand out to voters. Even after a well-received debate performance in September and a media blitz seeking to counter criticisms about running a “basement campaign,” Harris is still locked in a dead heat with Trump.

In order for her to win the White House, Piker believes the vice president needs to avoid running the campaign Biden ran in 2020 or the campaign Hillary Clinton ran in 2016, Instead, he said, she needs to hark back 16 years ago to Barack Obama’s historic run.

“She has to run on hope and change. She has to activate younger voters,” he said. “This is going to be an election where people are obviously demanding change from the current path that we’re on.”

Polls show that voters desperately want said change, especially on issues like immigration and the economy, and Harris has positioned herself as a change candidate. But only 46 percent of Americans said Harris embodies change more than Trump, the New York Times/Siena College’s October poll found. Comparably, 44 percent said the same of Trump — who was already president.

“That’s a real issue for [the Democrats]. It’s an issue that they would not have had if they had leaned on where people were hurting and how they were going to help them,” Piker said. “They didn’t do that. They went with a very conservative lean.”

That lean is most evidence in matters of immigration and border security, which have long been a political weak spot for the Democrats. After three years of GOP attacks, both Biden and Harris have separately taken firmer stances on the issue.

In February, the White House proposed a bipartisan bill that sparked fury among immigration advocates who sounded alarms that it was a return to Trump-era policies. The package would ultimately fail after Trump convinced his MAGA allies to knife it. On the campaign trail, Harris has cast Trump as the killer of that bill, suggesting that her administration would support similar legislation.

For Piker, the Democrats’ concessions on the border is part of a greater compromise that the party is giving into: The political landscape has essentially forced the Democrats out of the left.

“Whether Trump wins loses, we are living in Trump’s America,” he said. “He might lose this election and the Democratic Party will push Trump’s 2020 agenda. That’s what they’re running on, [at least] in terms of immigration.”

“That to me is crazy. That to me is genuinely terrifying to think about,” he continued. “It’s why I voted for Biden, right? I didn’t want Donald Trump to get a second term, and now four years after the fact, we’re gonna have a second [Trump] term, but with a D next to it?”

Harris’ willingness to appear more moderate in hopes of appealing to centrist voters is the reason her chances of winning remain on a tight rope, Piker said.

He blasted the party’s “harm-reduction strategy” which he said Democrats use to “shame voters… from extracting concessions” and towards “voting for the Democrats every single time” without pause “pushes a lot of people away from the party.”

“If you rely on that without offering things to people, well then you’re inevitably shrinking your base,” he warned.