From Hasan Piker to the 'Kornacki Cam': How influencers dominated midterm election coverage
A successful midterm performance for Democrats highlighted an evolving battleground for news consumers, as digital livestreamers like left-leaning creator Hasan Piker draw audiences substantial enough to rival legacy media networks.
Broadcast television has historically anchored election-night coverage.
However, as viewers shift toward online personalities to parse major political events, mainstream networks are striving to rebrand their existing reporters for digital spaces.
This shift was evident Tuesday evening when Comcast’s NBC News unveiled the “Kornacki Cam,” an almost 11-hour digital broadcast starring data analyst Steve Kornacki.
Combining minute-by-minute election statistics with off-camera glimpses, the stream accumulated 29 million total views across platforms and maintained a peak of over 300,000 simultaneous viewers for nearly three hours.
Yet traditional outlets faced intense competition from unaffiliated creators whose political footprint has expanded rapidly over the past year.
Prominent among them was Piker, a self-described Marxist whose controversial statements, including declaring that “America deserved 9/11,” have generated friction among Democrats.
Abdul El-Sayed requested that Piker temper his commentary after the streamer asserted that pro-Israel Jews ought to be worried about their personal safety, according to CNN reporting.
El-Sayed secured victory in Tuesday’s Michigan Senate election, positioning him to become the first Muslim senator.
Data from analytics firm Streams Charts reveals that the 35-year-old streamer hit a peak of 241,783 concurrent viewers on Twitch during election night. Gathering 1.75 million total hours watched, Piker’s broadcast stood as the second-most-viewed individual stream of the evening, trailing only NBC’s “Kornacki Cam.”
Those figures roughly tripled the audience for ABC News’ YouTube stream and were five times larger than CBS News’ digital offering.
Even so, standard television continued to command larger overall ratings, with Nielsen figures indicating primetime averages of 6.8 million viewers for NBC, 5.1 million for ABC, and roughly 4 million for Fox News.
“It’s hard to pick a singular label like 2024’s ‘podcast election’. But if there was one channel that really gained steam this election cycle, it was livestreaming,” noted Jasmine Enberg, co-founder of the creator economy startup Scalable.
Digital influencers previously altered political outreach during 2024 when Donald Trump won a second presidential term, illustrating how campaigns can leverage online figures to engage audiences outside mainstream media channels.
