Meet the GOP Boogeymen

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Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer with a niche yet growing following, is about as left as you can get. The GOP has done everything it can to elevate some of his most objectionable takes— about communism, about Israel. But he’s also really electrified some younger voters. One way was by showing up at the Republican midterm convention on a giant screen in his underwear.

Piker’s brother in liberalism is podcaster and YouTuber Adam Mockler. Like Piker, he’s been spending a lot of time talking to younger voters, getting them to debate him. He then attempts to translate what “the youths” are saying to the (presumably older) cable news viewer on networks like CNN.

Recently, the New York Times had the headline “Calls for Generational Change Don’t Resonate in Voting Booth,” which doesn’t square with what Piker and Mockler are hearing.

“I really disagree with that,” Mockler said. “Because we are seeing, right now, a massive shift in the power center of the Democratic Party towards younger voters, especially in the primaries.”

Nearly 20 percent of Congress is leaving their seats. Longtime folks like Sens. Gary Peters, Dick Durbin, and more are packing it in. Does this mean a new generation is going to take their place?

“The generational shift isn’t just about whether you’re an incumbent or a challenger,” Mockler said. “It can be communication on social media. It can be the way that you promise to use the power, once you actually have it, to change the lives of Americans. Or it can just be authenticity.”

On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Piker and Mockler about whether the November midterm could be one of generational change, and whether that change is actually here already. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: I’m just going to take this back a little bit. I feel like ever since Joe Biden took to a debate stage and face-planted, Democrats in particular have been having this “generational change” conversation. And even though Kamala Harris eventually replaced Biden on the ballot, I feel this question—what if he passed the torch sooner?—is looming. And we’re about to have this midterm election, and it basically started off with the generational question. You had David Hogg, the activist survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting, basically saying, “I want to primary people. We need a generational change.”

It was interesting to me because even his message was a little bit muddied. In the beginning, he was explaining why he was supporting an 80-year-old incumbent in Illinois who eventually stepped out of her race. It shows to me how this generational change thing, you can’t define it by data points so well. But I do feel like what happened with Hogg was this moment where I realized how rocky things were going to be for the Dems. Are things better now? 

Adam Mockler: Forcibly so, yes. The voter base has changed the incentives that politicians follow, and the incentive is no longer to take money from special interest groups and do scripted, consultant-written television hits every single Sunday. Now it’s these more nimble, flexible videos, where you’re talking about the corruption of the system. I think the voters shifted the incentives of what politicians have to do in a campaign.

How do you see that? Are there particular races where you see this happening?

Hasan Piker: Yeah, absolutely. Melat Kiros in Denver unseated a long-term incumbent. Abdul El-Sayed is obviously the most nationally significant race. But Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated another incumbent, the head of the congressional Hispanic caucus, Adriano Espaillat. That’s a deep-blue district. But then Michigan is, quote-unquote, a purple state, or a swing state. I oppose that framing.

Why?

Piker: Michigan is never supposed to be a swing state. We turned it into a swing state with our ineptitude, with our incompetence, with NAFTA, and then also by not leaning into the populist rage that people were feeling. And that created a unique opportunity for the Republicans to basically farm that outrage and redirect it back to marginalized groups and generate a more convincing message that they were going to be the anti-war side—twice. Once against Hillary Clinton and also once against Kamala Harris, when it’s clear that they were never going to be anti-war. I mean, they are warmongers. They always start way more wars than even the Democrats do. This was very frustrating to observe from afar. That’s why I think Michigan is a blue state. It’s only turned into a swing state because we’ve missed.

I look at Abdul El-Sayed, and I actually see both the case for and against generational change. The New York Times just did a survey, and they showed that he has more support among young people than they’ve ever seen before—like 80-plus percent support from 18- to 29-year-olds, which is amazing, right? But that rests on them turning out. 

And then there was [Hasan Piker’s] involvement in the race, which has become a huge lightning rod because El-Sayed needs Jewish voters to turn out, and a lot of more conservative Jewish voters have looked at your involvement in that race and they’ve basically said, “You need to distance yourself from Hasan Piker.” Do you have any regrets, looking back at when were you out there?

Piker: No, I do not have any. I did not have any concerns with my involvement whatsoever. I don’t think that it was the wrong thing to do. I think that we showed once again that we were able to defeat $70 million in outside expenditures.

But barely, right? The polls said that Hasan would perform way ahead, and he was much closer. I think that as we get closer, that’s where people are like, Oh, he’s making us nervous. 

Piker: Look, money in politics is obviously very important, right? It’s also very successful. I believe the stat is like 96 percent of the time, the side that has more money wins. And that makes sense. That means that you can set the narrative, you can set the agenda, you can disparage your opponent. Then your opponent has to spend a lot of money defending himself. Money plays a pretty formative role in these races.

Adam, I want to get you in here because I feel like another thing we’ve sort of danced around is what’s happening in Texas, where we have James Talarico. Here’s what I see when I look at that: I wonder if that race is about generational change or about a terrible Republican candidate on the other side. James Talarico is young, and he is pulling ahead of Ken Paxton, which is kind of amazing because Beto O’Rourke wasn’t doing that. But Paxton is a remarkably bad candidate. Even Donald Trump doesn’t seem to like him. Talk to me about this race. 

Mockler: It can be both/and. Obviously Talarico is a really strong candidate while Paxton is a very unique candidate. But it goes back to the framework I laid out at the beginning. You have to look at how Talarico is promising to use power once he gets it and how he’s communicating online. There’s this really viral video of Talarico calling Paxton’s cellphone number and asking him to debate him on Fox News, and Paxton doesn’t answer. He’s running from the debates. He’s openly admitting that he basically gave a plea deal to a [sex offender] named Adam Hoffman. He was impeached by his own party. All of this is true.

But on the other side of that, Talarico has very impressively used digital media, and look at his campaign promises. They are revolving around making the system work for the average voter. Many young people right now are skeptical that the system can even respond to us in a meaningful way, even if we did vote someone in. So, Talarico is proving that he will use this power in a very responsible way and to help people. A few weeks ago, Talarico went on Jimmy Kimmel’s show—that has 15 million views on YouTube. That’s using the new media, or at least the decentralized YouTube platform, to push your narrative. He makes short-form clips. He is a fighter who is bringing the fight to Ken Paxton, demanding that there’s some sort of debate. And overall, I think just taking money out of politics, advocating for a ban on gerrymandering, Supreme Court reform.

The GOP seems legitimately scared of Talarico. 

Mockler: Yeah, I know they are.

A lot of the candidates really don’t want to debate.

Piker: Yeah. Mike Rogers ran away too. Mike Rogers ran away from the first debate. And he pointed to the fact that Roop Raj, who’s a very well-respected, credentialed reporter in Michigan, was biased in Abdul’s direction. I think it was a little bit racist for him to imply that. Because Roop Raj is brown, and they are obviously presenting Abdul as this, like, scary brown guy. Having said that, I think voters are seeing that. They’re not responding positively to that. And the cult, the base of power, that the Republicans have is shrinking every single day.

I do think we have to look at a couple of examples that argue against this idea that whatever happens in November is about generational change. I would start with Ohio, where we have Sherrod Brown, who’s in a good position to get back into the Senate. And he was there for years. And then you can look at North Carolina, where Thom Tillis is out, and Democrats nominated former Gov. Roy Cooper. That race is going so well for him that the GOP recently pulled money out of it. Those are two races where it is kind of about the same old Democratic Party. What do you say to that? 

Mockler: I think that Roy Cooper is a really strong candidate. If we back up, you can’t generalize with every single race that the nonincumbent is going to win. Different politicians have different coalitions. The coalition that Andy Beshear has in Kentucky is far different than the coalition that Zohran Mamdani built when he was winning in New York. Of course Ohio is going to look slightly different than Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed is likely to win. There are going to be exceptions to the rule, but oftentimes you see even these candidates leveraging social media and talking policy in a different way.

Piker: Look, Sherrod Brown is probably one of the more progressive Democrats, and he was a resilient force in Ohio politics for decades. And part of that was because of his uncompromising values. When it came to labor, he’s always been the guy backed by the state labor unions. And that is now giving him another unique opportunity to take a shot and to get back into office at a time when people are looking for that.

“Generational change” is people looking for real fighters. It is people that are demanding change in general. And yeah, if it works, it works. I’m not going to oppose more establishment-aligned Democrats winning their seats in places like North Carolina. I don’t want Republicans to be in office. I don’t want them to be in power. And I think that’s the beauty of democracy and is the beauty of this big-tent coalition that we’re trying to build here. There’s gonna be people like Zohran Mamdani, and then sometimes there’s going to be people like Roy Cooper as well.

Mockler: Or Liz Cheney, unfortunately. I mean, Hasan, every podcast or debate I go into over the past few months, people try to grill me on you, and they’re like, “Do you disavow Hasan Piker?” And it’s obviously not that simple. We disagree on certain things, but—

Do you disavow Hasan Piker? 

Mockler: In what regard? I mean—

Piker: I disavow myself all the time. Every day I wake up, I’m like, “I disavow myself.”

Mockler: Does Hasan have comments in 2019 that I disagree with? Yeah, sure. Even he disagrees with them. Does Hasan have policy positions that we can talk about in a rational way? Sure. But I keep getting asked about this. And I think the reality is: When we’re up against fascism, you have to look back at World War II. In World War II, they had such a broad coalition that you had, like, the communists, the socialists, you had the liberals, and you had even more Republican-leaning people all coalesced together to beat the fascists. So, if it’s Hasan Piker, if it’s Liz Cheney, whoever wants to stand up against this current administration, then they are welcome in the tent.

I love this kumbaya moment. 

Piker: We have to build allegiances. We don’t have the opportunity to just cast aside potential allies because of some twisted moral-purity attitude that we have.