There’s no getting around the fact that Donald Trump and President Biden are senior citizens and therefore may have trouble convincing young voters that they’re attuned to their concerns. “Young people are more engaged with people that look like them and share their lived experiences,” said Ashley Aylward, a senior researcher at HIT Strategies, a public opinion research firm that focuses primarily on younger voters and underrepresented communities. And, she says, because young voters are good at detecting slick and phony marketing, campaigns “kind of have to take this backdoor approach of reaching them through where their interests already are and through any of the messengers that they already trust.”
Enter fandoms, which are subcultures organized around devotion to specific cultural passions, from Beyoncé to sneakers to cult classic TV shows.
Tapping into fandoms for political purposes isn’t new. Ryan Broderick, who writes the Garbage Day newsletter about the internet, reminded me that Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House adviser, was one of the first people to see the potential of organizing fan communities, recognizing that gamers could be harnessed for his pet causes. There have been other episodes in which political activism has taken root in fandoms, like this one in 2020:
TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign’s official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.
But galvanizing fandoms for internet noise and/or chaos is a different project than getting them to vote en masse for a particular candidate or cause. Among the challenges involved in organizing fandoms, Broderick said, is the reality that “the internet is inherently borderless,” so it’s difficult “to target a fandom and then try to get the people in it that are of voting age, and then also in the areas you need them, to vote.”
I asked Nelini Stamp, the director of strategy for the Working Families Party, who is leading the fandom coordinator search, what her hopes for the role are. She said that she sees fandom coordinating as a logical next step in a long history of marshaling popular culture to get young people politically involved. She mentioned Bill Clinton and Madonna appearing on MTV in the 1990s and said that this is just the latest way “to meet people where they’re at.”
Part of the party’s outreach in the past has revolved around Bravo TV fandom (something near and dear to my own heart). In addition to using hashtags across social media platforms to join existing fan conversations about Bravo shows, the W.F.P. also hosts watch parties that sometimes involve voter registration efforts. It wants to hire someone for the fandom coordinator job who can engage in these fan conversations in an authentic way, she said.