In tight races, any group that shifts a few points can be called decisive. In 2024, however, gen Z voters actually earned the spotlight.

Take Michigan, where Donald Trump won by about 1.4 points: he and Kamala Harris evenly split the youth vote, a 24-point collapse in the Democratic edge since 2020. If young voters made up just 15% of the state’s electorate, their swing toward the president would be worth roughly 3.6 points, larger than Trump’s entire margin of victory.

Ever since, both parties have scrambled to court the tastemakers who seem to have gen Z’s ear.

At her debut briefing, the former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reserved a “new media seat” in the briefing room, inviting podcasters, influencers and content creators to apply for credentials. The NRCC, House Republicans’ campaign arm, has paid more than $120,000 to a network of conservative influencers, listing the expense simply as “media”.

Not to be outdone, the DNC has partnered with more than 500 online personalities through its “Influencer & Creative” operation – and has lately floated the idea of a creator-hosted debate during the 2028 primaries.

The same wishful theory undergirds all these efforts: both parties seem to think online creators can simply upload political opinions straight into our heads.

As a zoomer myself, I find this theory rather patronizing. More to the point, it isn’t true: there’s little evidence that online creators play much of a role in how zoomers actually vote. And if young voters decide these midterms, influencers shouldn’t get the credit. Plenty of people watch influencers, but very few people deeply trust them.

In a survey this year by the Media Insight Project, 63% of 18-to-34-year-olds said they get news from influencers “at least sometimes”. Yet among teens and adults who actually receive news from these people, just 9% report having a great deal of confidence in what they are being told. (AI chatbots enjoy a nearly identical rate of trust, at 10%.) Other polls have found much the same thing: when YouGov surveyed young voters across eight battleground states in September on whom they actually turn to for political advice, half named a family member and three in 10 named a friend. Just 6% named an influencer.

In another survey of young people released this spring by Circle, a civic-engagement research center at Tufts, just 9% of respondents said they got political information from social media posts by influencers and celebrities. Another 14% pointed to podcasts hosted by influencers, artists, comedians or other celebrities.

By contrast, 45% of respondents – the largest share – got their information from political, advocacy, or community organizations they follow, while nearly a third cited conversations with family and friends.

To whatever extent that internet personalities actually persuade people, their powers rest entirely on the illusion that they speak for themselves. Naturally, both parties have responded by shattering that illusion.

Campaigns and their allies increasingly pay for those voices, often at exorbitant prices. In this year’s race for California governor, Tom Steyer paid at least 17 influencers $5,000 or more apiece, while Katie Porter’s campaign paid one lifestyle creator $25,000 for what appeared to be a single post. A TikTok creator with 1.7 million followers said a Republican-affiliated group had offered her $36,000 for a video, and a company with deep Republican ties once paid a squad of gen Z creators to defend Ken Paxton, now Texas’s Republican Senate nominee, on Some influencers attempt to keep these “partnerships” hidden.

The New York Times found that Josh Greene, a progressive creator with nearly 800,000 followers, had not always disclosed the fact that he’d taken money from at least seven candidates and allied groups this cycle.

And when the payments do come to light – as they tend to – they risk destroying the very credibility that campaigns were trying to buy. As the Rainey Center for Public Policy found this summer, 47% of voters said they’d trust a creator less after learning a political post had been paid for by a campaign; only 11% said they’d trust them more.

Obviously, the internet matters. Zohran Mamdani, who won young men by roughly 40 points in last year’s New York mayoral race, has said many New Yorkers he met knew him only from his appearances on podcasts such as Flagrant, hosted by the comedian Andrew Schulz. (As Mamdani put it, Democrats should “stop treating young people and young men with the condescension that we often see and hear in our politics”.) And Trump’s tour of the podcasting sphere in 2024 had racked up more than 100 million YouTube views by the day after the election that year.

Still, both appearances were interviews, not simply paid content. Even if the questioning is friendly, the candidates still do most of the talking. And the podcast-interview format itself isn’t magic: Kamala Harris’s appearance on Call Her Daddy seems to have done little to move young voters.

Every older generation finds the next one inscrutable, and gen Z is an especially tough read. Older Americans can be forgiven for struggling to grasp what it means to come of age in the era of social media. (Our memes are, admittedly, really weird.) Still, if you ignore our screen time, we’re pretty normal after all. Like swing voters twice our age, we’ve ditched the Republican party because prices remain stubbornly high. For all the money Washington is spending to decode our political decision-making, the most surprising thing about gen Z voters may be just how boringly ordinary we are.