In recent weeks, Democrats have been debating a key question: how big should their tent be? One of the big takeaways from their 2024 defeat was that they had struggled to connect with young male voters. As part of this, they had likely hurt themselves by refusing to engage with media hosts from outlets with large — and largely male — audiences, such as Joe Rogan or the Flagrant crew.

Enter a new face: Hasan Piker.

On the surface, Piker’s appeal for Democrats isn’t hard to see. The 34-year-old, Left-wing Twitch streamer has amassed a huge audience that skews heavily young and male. As Oliver Bateman wrote last year for UnHerd, “With his impressive physique, casual approach to gender expression, and seemingly effortless ability to discuss everything from video games to socialism, Piker appears custom-engineered to draw young men back to progressive politics.” At a time when the party is desperate to find a “Joe Rogan of the Left” who can connect with this core demographic, some progressives view Piker as an obvious vessel.

The rub, however, is that Piker has gained notoriety in no small part due to his long history of sordid comments that are likely to antagonize many normie Americans. Among his controversial actions are claiming “America deserved 9/11”, declaring he felt “no patriotism toward America” during a propaganda trip to China, saying it “doesn’t matter” if Hamas raped Israelis on October 7 and that they were “1,000 times better than Israel”, and turning a story about date rape on college campuses into a grotesque cost/benefit analysis.

Nonetheless, some Democrats are beginning to embrace Piker, including Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is set to hold rallies with the streamer this week. But it’s not just Left-wing Democrats. During a conference billed as the “CPAC of the Left”, the hosts of the popular #Resistance podcast Pod Save America helped mainstream Piker by putting him onstage with party strategists. Potential 2028 presidential candidate Ro Khanna also invoked Piker’s name when he said Democrats need “a new moral direction”. All of them have defended their associations with Piker, at least in part, on the grounds that the party needs a bigger tent.

This has engendered strong pushback, most notably from the center-left group Third Way, which stirred up a debate in recent weeks when it called out the party for being “too cozy” with Piker. It demanded that El-Sayed, specifically, say whether he supports several of Piker’s aforementioned views. In response, those in the Left-wing “big tent” faction argued that Third Way, which had previously cautioned against litmus tests, was being hypocritical.

For Democrats, it’s worth asking two questions about their association with Piker. The first is practical: does a Los Angeles-based millionaire and self-identified socialist who plays video games for a living and has a long history of off-putting comments actually help them build a bigger tent capable of winning swing states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania? The question would seem to answer itself. In fact, there is no real evidence that Piker is capable of connecting Democrats with voters who are interested in what they have to say at all.

The second question is moral: should the party associate with someone with his background? Or, put another way, should there be “no enemies to the Left”? This partly depends on what it means to “associate” with someone. It’s hard to argue that Democrats should actively avoid Piker but still be willing to go on the shows of other controversial hosts like Rogan. Simply engaging with him — and making an effort to reach his audience — is one thing. But embracing and elevating him in the party, as El-Sayed and the Pod bros have done, is something else entirely. If Democrats want to credibly call out Republicans for their associations with fringe figures on the Right, they can’t be playing footsie with a problematic personality on their own side.

Ultimately, the type of voter Democrats need to bring back into the fold to regularly compete in institutions such as the Electoral College and US Senate is, as Matt Yglesias has observed, “a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb”, and who is also likelier to be ideologically Right-leaning — hardly the portrait of a Piker fan. This doesn’t mean the party shouldn’t engage with him or his audience, any more than they shouldn’t try to reach some of Trump’s voters. But they must also be realistic about what it means to get in bed with Piker, and ask themselves whether doing so is worth the cost.

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Michael Baharaeen is chief political analyst at The Liberal Patriot substack.

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