"I'm not going to defend ... all of his views,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) told The Hill. “That's for him to do.”
But “I don't know why all of a sudden the standard is you have to agree with everything he said,” she added, noting lawmakers regularly work with colleagues they don’t share the same views with.
In the fierce fight for the open Senate seat in battleground Michigan, affordability, the U.S. trade war with Canada, data centers and health care have emerged as key issues. But the Los Angeles-based influencer has dominated the cable news shows and social media chatter.
“It is absolutely ludicrous that so much oxygen from sitting elected officials in the United States Congress is being dedicated to discourse around a Twitch streamer for young people,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told The Hill.
Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers has dubbed Piker, who joined Abdul El-Sayed on the trail during the primary, as the Democratic opponent's “running mate” and pressed El-Sayed to disavow the far-left Twitch streamer’s controversial remarks.
Piker has been denounced for suggesting that Jewish people’s support for Israel could make antisemitism worse. He has also come under fire for his remarks on Hamas, the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel and 2019 comments stating, “America deserved 9/11.”
Piker has pushed back on accusations of antisemitism, saying his criticism is of the U.S. and Israeli governments. He acknowledged that he could have phrased his comments about 9/11 differently, apologizing to any he may have offended.
A spokesperson for Piker did not respond to The Hill’s requests for comment.
But it’s not just Republicans that have condemned the influencer. Many Democrats also want to draw a line in the sand.
Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-Mich.), a prominent critic of Piker’s, told The Hill that he “has engaged in a level of hate speech that has no place within our party — deeply anti-American sentiments that I think should be condemned roundly by everyone and not embraced by this party.”
"Not only should people not be on stage with him or take his support, they should condemn his views and what he has said,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) echoed. “And I think anything short of that is unacceptable.”
‘A cathartic experience’
While Piker is widely known as one of the most prominent Twitch streamers on the far left, his reach extends well beyond just one platform.
Bites of his livestreams — rapid fire commentary about politics and culture blended with real-time reactions to audience chats — are cut up and circulated everywhere from YouTube to TikTok, often getting picked up by media outlets like Fox News and MS Now, where commentators dissect his remarks.
“Here’s the structural problem with what I do as a livestreamer,” Piker told The New Republic in April.. “I’m talking for 10 hours a day on very volatile issues.”
“If you were talking for 10 hours a day, you’re going to say stuff that could very easily be misconstrued,” he added later.
Some argue that Democrats should be tapping into Piker’s audience, which is male-dominated.
“I think that we have been talking about how we need to reach out to all parts of our party, and also how difficult it is sometimes to get people to pay attention to politics, and so streamers are important in that,” Jayapal told The Hill, noting Piker isn’t the only online personality Democrats should court.
One of Piker’s first forays into the mainstream political sphere happened in 2020, when Ocasio-Cortez) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) played the video game “Among Us” popularized during the pandemic with Piker and other popular Twitch streamers in a push to turn out younger voters for the election. The stream garnered 400,000 views per Mother Jones.
In 2024, Piker attended the Democratic Natiional Convention as part of organizers’ push to reach younger voters via social media influencers. Piker was later kicked out of the convention, which he attributed to his criticism of organizers for not hosting a Palestinian American speaker. He initially backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2020 before ultimately getting behind former President Biden that November.
He declined to endorse former Vice President Harris for the 2024 nomination.
That year election cycle male voters shifted to the right. And this demographic makes up much of Piker’s audience. Piker told Semafor in March that an average “Hasanabi head” is a white male in their mid-to-late 20s, noting that many have college degrees.
Piker gives fans “high level political analysis in a language that sounds like you might hear it across the bar,” Brandon Harris, a University of Alabama professor that studies creators and sports media, told The Hill.
A key part of his appeal, Harris explained, is his ability to tap into Gen Z and millennial angst over the economic instabilities facing their generation.
“They're angry at not being represented, they're angry at being told that their desires and political aspirations are childish,” Harris said. “And I think that, for many people, Hasan Piker is a cathartic experience.”
‘He does have a certain reach’
Yet, most Americans still don’t know who Piker is.
“I think the attention is way, way overstated. Over 80 percent of the voters do not know who he is,” said longtime Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who’s working for El-Sayed's campaign but spoke to The Hill her personal capacity. “And I think that a lot of conservatives are using it to divert attention from Trump.”
A June poll from The Economist/YouGov found that just 12 percent of respondents viewed Piker favorably while 66 percent did not know him. Sixty-eight percent of voters who cast ballots for the former vice president in 2024 also did not have a position on the streamer.
Younger generations — those between ages 18 and 29 as well as ages 30 to 44 — were more likely to know the streamer.
“I don’t know about all Democrats, but certainly for those of us who represent younger demographics, he does have a certain reach,” Omar, who has campaigned with Piker, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins last month.
And Piker has only become more involved in the political scene in the last two years.
Piker was an early supporter of now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s insurgent campaign in New York City. He also made national headlines in September of that year after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the late conservative activist whom Piker was set to debate later that month. Piker wrote an op-ed for The New York Times condemning “the rising tide of political violence.”
Mamdani’s main opponent — former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), who ran as an independent in the mayoral race— seized on Mamdani’s association with Piker. Ads paid for by a super PAC supporting Cuomo’s bid pointed to Piker’s 9/11 comments, NBC News reported. Piker has apologized for the remarks, which Mamdani called “reprehensible.”
These comments have defined the Twitch streamer on the national stage as he’s stepped up his campaigning for progressive and democratic socialist candidates this year — prompting some members of the Democratic Party to disavow him and urging their own to avoid appearing alongside him.
“He's not a Democrat. He's a Democratic socialist. So easy answer, no,” Scholten told The Hill when asked if Piker should play any role within the party.
Piker, however, has shrugged off the idea that he is a drag on his choice candidates.
“I think the fact that the Abdul race was so close meant that, you know, the fact that I was able to bring in the under 45 crowd early on and fundraising in key moments probably helped a lot in driving him across the finish line,” he told Vox earlier this month.
'A liability’ with ‘potential political power’
Regardless, some Democrats worry that Piker has turned into distraction — a detriment to the party as they seek to flip the House and Senate this fall.
“[At] this point, he's a liability because we can't seem to talk about the issues facing Michigan, and how Abdul is a better candidate than Mike Rogers because the whole conversation is around Piker,” said Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright.
Harris, however, pointed out that Piker could be an asset to grassroots Democrats moving forward. He pointed out that Twitch streamer has galvanized his audience to make donations or phone bank for candidates.
Still, his role on the campaign trail moving forward will likely be up to the very people that have denounced him.
“His potential political power and influence in the Democratic Party is very much limited by what they're going to accept on their platform,” Harris said.
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