The attempt by the Kamala Harris campaign to reach out to the new celebrities to help promote her campaign is not going well as huge streamers and influencers are turning her down, with a few even openly supporting Donald Trump.
As reported on Tuesday night by Rawsalerts, Twitch streamer Kai Cenat, a person with almost 13 million followers, said he’d been getting calls from the Secret Service and the Harris campaign, requesting they do a collaboration, but Cenat made it clear that he’s not interested.
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To be sure, there are influencers that are definitely taking up the offer to collaborate, but it appears these people are being paid to do so. Arizona state senator Jake Hoffman was reportedly given a letter by an influencer showing that a woman named “Alicia Howard,” working for a company called MJ Ventures, was offering paid partnerships to influencers to promote the Harris campaign.
“An Instagram whistleblower with nearly 150k followers contacted me with screenshots exposing a sophisticated Astroturfing effort underway by the Harris-Walz campaign,” Hoffman posted along with the letter.
Apparently, they aren’t all biting. In fact, some of them are actively supporting Donald Trump.
Kick streamer Adin Ross and Twitch’s most viewed streamer, XQC, are both openly boosting Trump and meeting with him personally for livestreams. According to TheWrap, Trump’s interview with Ross had 564,000 viewers at its peak. The stream included Ross gifting Trump a Tesla Cybertruck wrapped in the picture of Trump raising his fist below the American flag after the assassination attempt, while XQC accompanied wearing a shirt featuring Trump’s face.
Approaching streamers is the best way to reach out to the Gen Z/Millennial vote, as Hollywood stars have lost their luster. Streamers tend to develop parasocial relationships with their viewers and are very influential, especially to the young. However, Harris doesn’t seem to be raking in as many influencers to help her as she’d like, with the most popular ones either turning her down or supporting Trump.
What’s more, some influencers aren’t very good at hiding the fact that they’re acting, and some are flat-out embarrassing. Streamers like Ross, XQC, and Cenat are far more real with their audiences, and blunt in their honesty. Cenat announcing that he turned down the Harris campaign live on stream is highly embarrassing. Paired with Hoffman’s exposure of a group offering influencers money to create astroturf support is only going to make things look worse.
Mark my words, this is going to cause a domino effect and more streamers and influencers will come forward to say they were approached by the Harris campaign and that they turned her down.
