Say What You Want About Hasan Piker. His Picks Are Winning.
Zohran Mamdani just took New York's Democratic primary, and the streamer who called America 'closer than ever to socialism' is looking uncomfortably prophetic right now.
The endorsements are working. Sit with that.
Darlings, while the last two weeks have been a full festival of Hasan Piker controversies, from the UK ban to the Charlamagne quote to xQc and Asmongold forming a whole grief support group about his community, something boring and inconvenient happened on Tuesday: Zohran Mamdani won New York's Democratic primary in what the Hollywood Reporter is already calling a "tsunami." Piker had backed NYC candidates as recently as June 13 and declared the country "closer than ever" to socialism. He said the thing out loud and then a socialist won.
That is not nothing. That is actually a fact.
Now WDET out of Detroit is running a piece today in which Piker explains his endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed for the Michigan US Senate race. The Michigan race already sparked NYT coverage back in March when his rallies drew backlash in the Democratic primary. He kept going anyway. Was that reckless? Sure, allegedly, per approximately forty op-eds. Was it ineffective? The jury is still very much out, and the jury has been eating up his predictions elsewhere.
The whole media conversation about Piker has been built around the liability framing. Denver. The Kiros ad. Democrats quietly debating whether to let him near their events. And that framing is not wrong, it is just incomplete. The same energy that makes him a liability in a competitive swing district is the energy that apparently moves votes in a New York City mayoral-adjacent primary race where turning out young and left-leaning voters is the entire game.
He is not one thing. He is a streamer who gets banned from countries and also gets candidates elected. Both are true. The punditry keeps trying to write the obituary before checking whether the patient is actually down.
My loves, keep receipts. Because if El-Sayed pulls something off in Michigan, the entire "Piker is a millstone" genre of political media is going to need a very quiet correction.
We do love growth. Allegedly.
