Donald Trump’s Win Cements a New Era for Campaigning Online

As president-elect Donald Trump finished his victory speech early Wednesday morning, he gave the floor to Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO, to thank a group of men few in the mainstream political bubble knew before this year.
“I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ With The Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan,” White said.
Over the final stretch of the 2024 campaign cycle, Trump went on a grand tour of podcast interviews, appearing alongside these popular influencers, streamers, and podcast hosts, and, perhaps more importantly, in front of their predominantly young male audiences. One of the Trump campaign’s most promising strategies, they believed, was to drive up the margins with medium and low propensity male voters.
To do so, the campaign took Trump away from the television cameras and in front of podcast mics, setting a new standard for how to run a campaign online.
“The corporate media, a lot of the mainstream media, don’t know how to talk to men anymore. I think that’s a big issue,” Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump campaign adviser, tells WIRED. “The messaging that comes out through the mainstream media doesn’t resonate well with the average American man. And so a lot of them find their news through less traditional means.”
For more than four years, political groups and campaigns have invested significant time and funds in building out vast networks of influencers to amplify their messaging online. President Joe Biden invited them to the White House for special policy briefings, and they followed him along the campaign trail until Vice President Harris took over.
After Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, her campaign was flooded with new donations. By October, they had received more than $1 billion in new fundraising, according to CBS News. The massive cash infusion gave Harris an advantage, especially in digital and traditional advertising. The Harris team outspent Trump 20 to 1 in Facebook and Instagram ad spending the week of their debate alone, according to The New York Times.
To make up that difference, the Trump campaign decided to flood the zone with influencer content that cost a fraction of what traditional advertising would do. “We had to get creative on how to maximize President Trump’s exposure and this was a fun way to do that,” says Bruesewitz.
While Trump dominated conservative news outlets, his influencer operation was nearly nonexistent, putting the campaign at a disadvantage. But over the course of this past year, the campaign and the Republican National Committee began integrating influencers and content creators into their election operation. Influencers were invited to the primary debates and dozens of them showed up to the Republican National Convention in July.
Many of these creators exist in the manosphere, a community of men who traffic in racist and misogynistic content. Other Trump-aligned influencers who attended these events spread conspiracy theories about Harris, immigration, election fraud, and more. Trump appeared to love it; he shared posts and reveled in the attention online.
“When we live in such a time as this, when there is such record distrust in the traditional media, people trust people, and influencers are people,” says CJ Pearson, cochair of the RNC’s youth advisory council. “They look to influencers to tell them what to be passionate about, what to be enraged about, what to be activated about, and then that’s exactly what we wanted to do throughout this campaign.”
On the ground, the Trump campaign was at a disadvantage to Harris’s massive canvassing operations. The Trump team largely outsourced its doorknocking efforts to the Elon Musk–backed America PAC and Turning Point Action. Both groups suffered from glitchy canvassing apps, and WIRED reported that canvassers for Musk’s PAC in Michigan and Arizona were subjected to harsh working conditions and what they say were impossible-to-meet quotas. Republicans in battleground states like Michigan criticized the campaign’s meager get-out-the-vote effort, fearing that it could cost them the election.
But the in-person campaigning may not have mattered. Bruesewitz believes the campaign’s digital operation may have been what put them over the edge.
“They all run hand in hand,” says Bruesewitz of the campaign’s online and field operations. “We were making direct contact with them at their doors and on their screens.”
Hasan Piker, a popular leftist Twitch streamer, says it wasn’t only Trump’s willingness to appear on these podcasts, but also what he represented to their audiences. “Some of those guys are my friends. Others, not so much,” says Piker. “The podcasts themselves are not exactly what caused Trump to gain momentum or popularity. They played a role, for sure, in outreach, but overall, I think that he had a message that resonated with those guys, and the podcast was simply a vehicle to get to those guys.”
Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist, tells WIRED that these online outreach campaigns are less effective at persuading audiences on issues than they are at rallying audiences to vote. “A lot of people misunderstand the role of influencer marketing campaigns,” he says. “It’s about whether they’re going to vote or not. And what we saw in some of the results is that those young men, specifically who were in that target demographic of the various podcasts and influencers, that they went out [and] swung dramatically Trump’s way last night.”
The next challenge, according to Wilson, is implementing influencer marketing in more localized races. “It makes sense for a national campaign. It’s harder to execute for statewide campaign because, you know, the audiences get narrower and narrower,” says Wilson.
“You can’t put a dollar amount on the earned media value that we got through our podcast and influencer meetups,” says Bruesewitz. “Jake Paul, whoever it may be. We were able to leverage President Trump’s personality to garner some of the most viral moments in modern history.”