• The battle for voters in the 2026 midterm elections is playing out on the TikTok For You Page.
• One in four Americans say creator content has influenced who they voted for.
• Political candidates are scrambling to connect with more creators in order to reach voters.

Content creators are influencing much more than our coffee orders and skincare routines.

About one in four Americans (26%) say influencer content has affected who they've voted for, according to a survey of around 2,000 US adults conducted by Morning Consult in September, commissioned by Business Insider.

Creator content is an "underestimated avenue" for political campaigns, said Nicole Dunger, a founding partner at the marketing firm People First, which works with candidates and advocacy groups on their creator strategies. "It is a real player and a big player in this space now."

If 2024 was the podcast election, 2026 is shaping up to be the influencer one. Instagram and TikTok creators have joined Fox News hosts and personalities like Joe Rogan as go-to sources of information for voters.

Influencers like Jake Paul and Hasan Piker have emerged as main characters in politics this year.

Paul recently joined President Donald Trump in Ohio for a midterm rally, posting TikTok clips of his Air Force One flight. Piker, meanwhile, has become a campaign ally for progressives like Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed and a negative talking point for Fox News commentators.

As online attention has become a key asset in politics, influencers are helping candidates break through the noise.

A little over half of US adults (56%) told Morning Consult that creator content had affected their views on political or social issues to some degree. That figure jumped among Gen Z respondents, where close to three in four respondents said their views had been swayed by influencer posts.

For campaigns, the challenge is identifying the right creators to work with, particularly when many influencers don't regularly talk about politics.

"You have to have your base of people, your core supporters, and then you have to have a broader cultural space of people who don't always talk about politics," said Parker Butler, a managing partner at the digital strategy firm Luminary Strategies, which works on social strategy with Democratic candidates like James Talarico. "It's worth having different pockets of creators for different purposes."

Reaching creators with smaller followings than Piker (about 3 million Twitch followers), or Paul (around 21 million YouTube subscribers) is a focus in 2026, Butler said.

He said the goal is to shift the creator outreach strategy from "this person has a million followers" to identifying influencers who work in a particular niche a campaign is trying to reach.

Political chatter is moving from TV to YouTube

More and more, political discussions are playing out on digital platforms, whether that's podcasts, YouTube videos, or Twitch streams.

YouTube was the top source for political and election news among US adults in September, narrowly beating out TV, print, and X (formerly Twitter), according to a survey from Syracuse University.

About one in five Democrats and Republicans said podcast appearances could make them "more likely to support a candidate," according to a July through August survey of likely midterm voters from the podcast industry group Sounds Profitable. A smaller share of Independents (11%) said podcasts could make them more likely to back a candidate.

While campaigns see attention moving online, they're still spending the bulk of their ad budgets on TV.

Part of that may be because they're accustomed to buying TV spots. They're also reckoning with the fact that influencer marketing is harder to predict and measure, particularly as social-media feeds become more personalized and algorithmically driven.

"It can be very challenging, but you see the results in the end," Dunger said. "It's the same with door knocking. We know door knocking somehow works and has worked for so long, but it's not like we have those direct measurements."

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Creators ranging from Substackers to "SNL" stars are jumping off the screen to in-person events — and marketers can't get enough.

"IRL is the No. 1 brand equity builder of all the channels," said Justin Thomas-Copeland, CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As).

As it becomes harder to reach customers online, in-person events offer a way for brands to connect with their biggest fans — and hopefully inspire a flurry of social content.

One night last month, Snapple turned a decommissioned Staten Island Ferry into a floating comedy club featuring Colin Jost and Pete Davidson.

Lindsay Burstein, a top marketer at Snapple parent Keurig Dr Pepper, said the night resulted in about 200 pieces of user-generated content.

"It is the buzziest thing that the brand has done in a very long time," she said.

Events aren't a new phenomenon, but interest from marketers is surging. In its annual survey of marketers, Linqia found that 53% said they planned to work with influencers on events in 2026, up from 34% in 2025.

"We've seen an uptick in both custom brand pop-up experiences and brand activation at large events," Linqia's chief strategy officer Keith Bendes said.

Influencer marketers are becoming event planners

IRL activations and events can also help brands gauge the depth of a creator's connection with their audience — and how valuable partnering with them might prove.

Substack creators, for instance, have "rabid fans and followers" who are hungry to connect in person, said Rothy's VP Anna Doré.

After Substacker Erika Veurink's article for New York Magazine featuring Rothy's shoes went viral, Rothy's struck a partnership with the writer that included a vintage pop-up experience at a Rothy's in New York City.

The Rothy's pop-up drew over 200 people and grew the store's foot traffic by 75% that day.

There can be category-specific reasons some brands are going all in on events. Flushable wipes maker Goodwipes, for one, leans on IRL experiences, said SVP of marketing Meredith Diehn, "partially because it's an intimate category, but there's a lot of questions around flushability and why should I leave toilet paper for Goodwipes."

Still, it can often be harder to measure success from an IRL event and prove it's an efficient use of marketing dollars.

"Live experiences is not an efficient business," Bilt CMO Zoe Oz said. "It's like the most inefficient, unscalable thing you can possibly do. But we found those to be 10 times more effective than the other ways we used to spend money."

Events also aren't a foolproof strategy, Copeland of 4As said.

There's a lot that goes into an experience, and if one part goes wrong or a creator is involved in an inauthentic way, criticism can spread quickly.

They present practical challenges as well, sometimes forcing marketers to wear yet another hat: event planning.

Burstein said that planning Snapple's comedy event — despite its eventual success — took her "blood, life, sweat, and tears."

There was a time when moderation was a virtue and the middle ground, wisdom. Hyperbole was no more than a literary or rhetorical device. But not anymore. We live at the extremes. Raising everything to its highest possible level is the zeitgeist fate has handed us, and it comes with a suffix that colonizes the internet: maxxing. A highly versatile suffix: placed after the right word it means that, whatever you do, you are giving it your all.

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Linni Kral has always been preoccupied with her bowels, but as a food writer, it hasn’t usually been that end she’s focused on in her writing. Now, as the internet explodes with “scat chat,” Kral is ready to investigate whether obsessing over our bowel movements has any merit. The result is a giggle fest—though you’ll need the stomach for some serious poo talk.

One day, it seems, the internet woke up and chose BMs, and suddenly the hottest girl you know is posting about scat. Now you have to go out of your way to not eat fiber—prebiotic supplements are in our soda, our candy bars, our cold foam. The beverage case is dominated by the likes of Olipop and Poppi and Culture Pop, all offering varying degrees of digestive assistance. The other day, I saw a smoothie blend in the freezer aisle called “Fiber Supremacy,” and earlier this year, Frito-Lay launched a fiber-packed version of both SunChips and Smartfood popcorn. Kraft is making a purgative macaroni and cheese that boasts six grams of fiber per serving (or 15 grams if you eat the whole box—which is, let’s be honest, how most people consume Easy Mac). Outside the retail space, home cooks are finding ways to fit chia and flax into not just their breakfasts but their meat loaf. They’re pureeing beans into sauces and veggies into puddings and cakes. Literal doctors are posting their #fibermaxxing menus to TikTok. And while this may sound like just another wave on the ocean of content we surf daily, it gets…weirder.

For Men’s Health, Brian Underwood investigates the flood of sunscreen misinformation on Instagram and TikTok, where influencers push inaccurate data about chemical UV filters, play chemist and promote their own DIY formulas, or even encourage no sun protection at all. Underwood sorts fact from fear, talking with dermatologists, chemists, and professionals who are working to reshape the messaging around sun exposure and sunscreen.

Environmental concerns may have also shown up in your feed, with suggestions that these same filters are poisoning our oceans, giving rise to a whole category of sunscreens labeled “reef safe”—a meaningless marketing term that’s not regulated by the FDA (the same goes for products labeled “natural” or “organic”). Dr. Nelson’s point about “low-relevance models” is something to consider here too: The research demonstrating that oxybenzone, octinoxate, and other active ingredients may lead to reef bleaching was done in a lab setting where coral was exposed to levels of these chemicals significantly higher than has been found in the natural environment. It conveniently left out the fact that inorganic filters like zinc oxide (the one typically used in “reef safe” formulas) would have the same effect in similar doses.