Campaigns keep buying TV while 26% of adults credit influencers with swaying their vote

The 26% is a self-report. Morning Consult surveyed about 2,000 US adults in September and shared the results exclusively with Business Insider ^[1]. The report does not include the question wording or a party breakdown. In the same survey, 56% said creator content had affected their views on political or social issues to some degree ^[2]. That is 30 points above the vote figure ^[13]. Whether either number translates into votes, we do not know yet.

Money has not followed attention. Campaigns still spend the bulk of their ad budgets on TV ^[14]. Business Insider offered two reasons: campaigns are accustomed to buying TV spots, and influencer marketing is harder to predict and measure as social-media feeds become more personalized and algorithmically driven ^[15]. Nicole Dunger, a founding partner at People First, did not dispute the difficulty. "It can be very challenging, but you see the results in the end," Dunger said. "It's the same with door knocking. We know door knocking somehow works and has worked for so long, but it's not like we have those direct measurements." ^[7] In our view the comparison asks campaigns to accept weak measurement on the strength of precedent.

The people vouching most directly for the channel do creator work for campaigns. Dunger's firm works with candidates and advocacy groups on their creator strategies ^[10]. "It is a real player and a big player in this space now," Dunger said ^[6]. Parker Butler's firm, Luminary Strategies, works on social strategy with Democratic candidates such as James Talarico ^[11].

Butler described where that work is heading. Reaching creators with smaller followings than Hasan Piker (about 3 million Twitch followers) or Jake Paul (around 21 million YouTube subscribers) is a focus in 2026, he said, and the goal is to move from "this person has a million followers" to influencers who work in a niche a campaign is trying to reach ^[9]. "It's worth having different pockets of creators for different purposes," Butler said ^[8].

The trade-off is between targeting and measurement. Niche creators let a campaign aim at a specific audience, and each one adds to a channel already hard to predict and measure ^[15]. A campaign that moves money this way takes on that risk. One that stays on TV keeps the format it knows how to buy and may miss audiences that, according to the Morning Consult survey, creators are already influencing ^[1].