Staring at a new poll from Michigan, I saw some findings that confirmed my suspicions about the overblown attention Hasan Piker was receiving of late, and wrote about it at New York:
To hear a lot of the chatter about the pivotal U.S. Senate race in Michigan this year, you’d think the election was a referendum on Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. The fiery progressive with a large online following has campaigned for and with Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed, to be sure, but so have a lot of other opinion leaders. Still, El-Sayed’s critics during his intense primary battle with Representative Haley Stevens, which he narrowly won, and now his general-election opponent, Mike Rogers, have made the biggest possible deal out of his association with Piker.
Piker hasn’t helped by keeping a low profile, of course. Even as El-Sayed worked to unite Michigan Democrats behind his candidacy after becoming the party Senate nominee, Piker stirred up fresh controversy, as my colleague Nia Prater noted last month, when he warned that “someone is going come around and take action” against American Jews if they don’t distance themselves from Israel. El-Sayed distanced himself from those remarks after previously criticizing Piker’s past comment that America “deserved 9/11.”
Rogers has really harped on the El-Sayed–Piker connection, broadcasting it nationally in his speech to the GOP’s Midterm Convention in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, as the Michigan Advance reported:
“As millions of Republicans tuned into coverage of the Republican National Committee’s midterm confab. Rogers invoked El-Sayed’s connection with leftist influencer Hasan Piker, and the streamer’s belief that America deserved the Sept. 11, 2001 tragedy … ‘I’ve spent much of my life confronting this enemy head-on. I know what they’re capable of, and I know what happens when America becomes afraid to call evil by its name,’ Rogers said from the stage. ‘That’s why I never imagined that 25 years after 9/11, I would be running against somebody that campaigns with Hasan Piker, who thinks America deserved it. Yeah, but here we are.’”
The Republican even referred to Piker as El-Sayed’s “running mate.”
But what about the other side of the coin? We’ve been told many times that Piker is absolute magic — just a total wham bam — among young voters. The Times itself did a report back in April that wrote glowingly of packed college audiences in Michigan devouring his message. And Piker has leaned into this perception of himself as a sort of socialist Pied Piper, telling the Times in an interview that criticism of him is a sign of “boomer desperation.”
So what do the kids in Michigan think of Piker, per this Times-Siena poll, after months and months of free publicity for and about him? Sixty percent of under-30 voters say they haven’t heard of him, and those who have aren’t exactly jazzed. Overall, 14 percent of 18-to-29-year-old likely voters in Michigan have a favorable opinion of Piker and 23 have an unfavorable opinion.
The obvious takeaway is that El-Sayed doesn’t have much to lose electorally by distancing himself from Piker, much as Barack Obama famously distanced himself from his controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright in 2008 en route to a landslide victory. But even more than that, it appears Michiganders who loathe Piker are mostly Republicans who aren’t going to vote for El-Sayed anyway. The streamer is a classic red herring. So it might be a good time to pay less attention to Piker and more to the 55 percent of likely Michigan voters who strongly disapprove of the job being done by Donald Trump.
