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The moderates’ plan to slow Hasan Piker has already worked

The streamer has become a general election distraction for allies.

Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: The moderate plan to make Hasan Piker a general election liability has already worked

Last month, Francesca Hong lost the Wisconsin governor’s primary in a shock result. The next day, the person who was maybe her most prominent surrogate — leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker — said he may have played too big of a role in her race, and that he shouldn’t have been anyone’s biggest surrogate in the first place.

Then came Angie Nixon. The Florida progressive won her Senate primary and was promptly asked about Piker repeatedly (An interview with CBS News was the wildest example). Nixon, who has never appeared on his stream, said she didn’t really know who he was. So Piker, unprompted, announced he’d be staying away from her race so as not to hurt her.

And then there’s Michigan, where Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed — who campaigned with Piker throughout his primary race — has kept him at arm’s length and minimized his relevance as “a streamer in California” ever since Piker made controversial remarks about the relationship between Jewish institutions, Israel, and antisemitism while El-Sayed was trying to win over skeptical Jewish Democrats. Piker told Semafor the media attention was unfair, but that he understood if allied candidates needed to sometimes distance themselves from him to focus on their race, even if he might advise against it.

Taken together: that’s the ballgame in a nutshell. Six months after the Wall Street Journal published a Third Way op-ed arguing that Democrats are too cozy with Hasan Piker, the streamer is voluntarily removing himself from campaigns he wants to win, and a Senate nominee with no connection to him at all is being asked to answer for him on CBS.

So here’s a rough timeline of how Hasan Piker Derangement Syndrome infected the Democratic Party, at least from my courtside view.

Piker gained national prominence in the 2024 election and its aftermath, initially as an anti-Trump counterweight to the manosphere. In the Biden years, Democrats became uncool on the internet and, even worse, didn’t know it. Piker remains one of the few genuinely popular streamers explicitly discussing politics and news — roughly 3 million Twitch followers, north of 20,000 people watching on an average day and many more seeing clips, No. 3 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 25 most influential creators of 2026. He was an obvious fit for a Democratic Party conducting an open search for its own Joe Rogan.

His newfound access to the mainstream rubbed some the wrong way. The New York Times ran a profile in April 2025 headlined “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere’.” The New Yorker made him a central figure in “The Battle for the Bros.” A GQ profile and TIME’s creators list followed. And in November 2025, Crooked Media put him onstage at Crooked Con in Washington, DC, on a panel about the party’s dour image, next to Tim Miller and Symone Sanders Townsend.

That last one is what did it. When I asked Third Way president Jon Cowan in June what prompted the op-ed, he didn’t hesitate:

Cowan: “The specific impetus was that the ‘Pod Save’ folks — very prominent Democrats — had featured Hasan Piker at a conference where they are officially elevating him and aligning him with Democrats. That’s what triggered this for us, and then a series of other things beyond that.”

Cowan: “The specific impetus was that the ‘Pod Save’ folks — very prominent Democrats — had featured Hasan Piker at a conference where they are officially elevating him and aligning him with Democrats. That’s what triggered this for us, and then a series of other things beyond that.”

The op-ed itself —........

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