Battle of the influencers: Republicans and Democrats duke it out on social media

Barron Trump and his teenage influencer buddy Bo Loudon could be the most powerful weapon in former President Donald Trump’s arsenal as election season kicks into high gear. 

At 18, Barron Trump, the son of Donald and Melania Trump, can vote for his father in the November election but his best friend, Loudon, cannot. 

What they can both do is reach millions of young and undecided voters through an ambitious and smart social media campaign to get the message out about the presidential election, hype up the candidate, and discuss the issues on multiple social media platforms to reach Generation Z voters. 

The tech-savvy teenagers have been busy briefing the 78-year-old former president behind the scenes on a new landscape of influencers and TikTok, YouTube, and other social media stars who have millions of followers and sway with voters. 

Barron Trump and Loudon have become the de facto social media outreach team for the Trump 2024 campaign, with the Daily Mail citing sources confirming Barron Trump and Loudon’s impressive start. 

For example, it was Barron Trump and Loudon who lined up the former president’s interview with Kick influencer Adin Ross. The 90-minute interview was watched live by 500,000 people, though Donald Trump boasted on Truth Social there had been 100 million total listeners.  

The friends also got the GOP nominee to get close to their favorite content creators, such as Logan Paul, who has 26 million followers on Instagram and 23.6 million on YouTube. In his interview with Donald Trump, Paul asked him to weigh in on aliens, artificial intelligence, and the “big rap beef” between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. 

Barron Trump and Loudon also got the former president to reach out to billionaire business mogul Patrick Bet-David, host of the PBD Podcast, which has 2 million subscribers. 

Loudon himself is a social media powerhouse. 

He has close to 350,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok. On X, he proudly declared, “Gen-Z stands with Trump.” 

His feeds are also filled with pro-Trump videos, and he often parrots the former president’s bashing of the media, agreeing that anything negative is “fake news.” He also has pictures of high-profile Republicans such as Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and UFC mogul Dana White, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month. 

When Barron Trump turned 18 in March, he was given the go-ahead by his mother to help his father’s campaign.

Among his first moves was to team up with Loudon to host a “power summit” banquet for Bet-David, Colby Covington, his favorite MMA fighter, and Justin Waller, the business partner of controversial internet personality Andrew Tate, a British-American kickboxer-turned-reality star.

On his platform, Tate declares himself “a misogynist” and frequently teaches that women are inferior and only good for sex and deserve to be sexually, physically, and emotionally abused. He has over 8.5 million followers. 

Other top influencers pushing the GOP agenda include Tim Pool, Grant Goodwin, Jackson Hinkle, and the Nelk Boys, according to Wired.

A recent survey from the global creator agency Billion Dollar Boy reported that 1 in 4 creators was approached by political campaigns or organizations tied to the 2024 election to post political content. 

Send the Vote, a new PAC co-founded by John Shahidi, the president of the Nelk Boys, is raising $20 million to spend on voter registration drives aimed at young male fans. The drive was announced during a podcast with Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, and they included a link to an online tool to check voter registration status. The group also said it will be hosting parties leading up to the election where only registered voters can get access.

Donald Trump also had a sit-down with X owner Elon Musk on Monday. The two-hour conversation, which was delayed 40 minutes due to technical problems, marked Donald Trump’s triumphant return to X. The interview covered everything from immigration to union busting. The Republican National Committee’s website said 24.1 million people watched it. 

The Aug, 13 edition of Palm Beach Playbook, a newsletter from the Trump campaign, called the sit-down “the most successful X interview in history” and added that “in less than a day, over a billion people ‘tuned in’ to hear President Trump speak. President Trump’s post alone has generated over 200 million views and over 630,000 likes, while X app downloads reached an all-time high.”

Despite the discrepancy in numbers, Donald Trump’s presence on the social media platform has given him access to a much wider audience. 

On the Democratic side, Priorities USA, one of the largest liberal super PACs, has reshaped itself almost entirely as a digital political strategy operation.  

Executive Director Danielle Butterfield said the goal is to partner with influencers to deliver “an authentic message” that will resonate and be “powerful for their audience.” 

“Having these content creators who have a very authentic and an intentional relationship with their followers being the ones that deliver a political message can be really powerful,” she said. “We see that corporate brands are using content creators and influencers to get their message across, and there’s no reason why we can’t deploy that same tactic in politics.”

Priorities USA and Somos Votantes, the largest independent Latino civic and voter organization in the country, launched a new campaign featuring four YouTube influencers sending political and get-out-the-vote messages. 

One video features Daniela Legarda, a YouTuber with more than 1.6 million followers. Legarda cooks a traditional Latin American recipe while discussing abortion rights in the video. 

Another video is from comedian Christian Maldonado, who talked about the importance of making time to vote. Maldonado has 1.8 million YouTube subscribers, though the video had only 463 likes as of Friday afternoon.

On Aug. 14, the White House organized a Creator Economy Conference in which Good Influence, a creator network, helped recruit new participants. The event was part of the Biden administration’s effort to increase its digital presence, said Josh Cook, Good Influence’s president.

The company works with 300 content creators who generate more than 150 million views a day.  

“[Influencers are] where a lot of people are getting their news day to day, are trying to learn about issues day to day,” Cook told Digiday. “I think what the DNC is doing with the convention is just trying to make that easier for those creators — and that’s a super powerful thing in a fragmented media space.”

Democrats have also enlisted hundreds of influencers to create content throughout the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They will also be streaming the event across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. 

The Republican National Convention last month also had 70 influencers as part of a content creator program to reach more young voters. They were given access to go on the floor of the convention and make content using a creator hub.