Why Hasan Piker thinks Democrats are moving in his direction

Here’s what’s undeniable: The Democratic electorate has dramatically shifted when it comes to the United States’ relationship with Israel.

Earlier this year, a national poll from Gallup found that 41 percent of Americans sympathize with Palestinians and 36 percent with Israelis — the first time since Gallup began tracking the metric in 2001 that Israelis do not hold a clear lead in US sympathies. Among Democrats, the gap is a chasm: 65 percent side with Palestinians, just 17 percent with Israelis.

A Pew survey from March, meanwhile, found that 6 in 10 Americans now have a very or somewhat unfavorable view of Israel, up 7 percentage points since last year and nearly 20 points since 2022 — and among Democrats and Democratic-leaners, that figure climbs to 80 percent.

This shift, in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s brutal war in Gaza in response, has increasingly challenged elected officials from both parties. Democrats, in particular, seem to be more openly questioning the party’s position when it comes to things like arming Israel with offensive weapons.

But, beyond policy, the Democrats’ new conundrum on Israel also comes down to a question of tone. What is legitimate criticism of the Israeli government? What drifts into antisemitism? And who are the voices that should determine what’s acceptable within that debate?

Third Way, the Democratic organization that promotes moderate candidates and centrist policy proposals, recently weighed in with its thoughts on the subject. In March, the organization’s president, Jonathan Cowan, co-wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Democrats Are Too Cozy With Hasan Piker,” taking aim at the leftist Twitch streamer whose pro-Palestinian views have made him extremely popular — and a lightning rod.

“No Democrat should engage with him,” Cowan and his co-author, Lily Cohen, argued. “All should seek to push him to the fringe, where he belongs.”

In this episode of America, Actually, I talked with Cowan about his anti-Piker argument and interrogated how much of Third Way’s opposition is about the streamer personally versus a broader shift in the Democratic electorate, specific to questions about Israel. I also talked to Piker himself about his political goals, streaming culture, and whether he’ll apologize for past controversial statements.

Here are three things I learned from those conversations:

Cowan’s central argument is electoral: that cozying up to Piker makes Democrats “more extreme than mainstream” and kneecaps the party’s ability to win red and purple seats. “We don’t need two extremist parties in this country,” he told me.

As proof, he kept returning to the scoreboard. Since 2018, he argued, moderate-backed candidates have flipped roughly 50 red House seats blue, while left-wing groups he associates with Piker — Our Revolution and Justice Democrats — have, by his count, “flipped literally zero.”

But, that framing ignores Piker’s bigger goals. His popularity grew out of problems the Democratic Party will have to deal with, whether or not he exists: how to win attention in a new internet economy, how to reach young men, how to speak to a base that is increasingly disaffected by the party’s foreign policy. As I put it to Cowan, there is “clearly an audience for Hasan Piker’s political message,” and the polling on Israel shows that the audience is now most of the Democratic base, not a fringe.

What’s clear after both interviews: Piker isn’t trying to elect most Democrats. He’s trying to elect specific ones and to drag the party’s center of gravity with them — the same way MAGA reshaped the GOP through primaries, rather than by flipping swing seats.

“Changing the Democratic Party isn’t a silly vanity project,” Piker told me. “Changing the Democratic Party to make sure that we have some real fighters…will actually create longstanding change in this country.” Even by his own account, the goal isn’t to pick winners in the traditional red-to-blue sense; it’s to channel more money, attention, and leverage to the candidates and politics he favors. Measuring him by Cowan’s flipped-seats yardstick misses what he’s actually doing.

Still, Third Way’s complaints aren’t pure invention. Some of what Piker has said is genuinely icky — and he knows it. Confronted with a years-old clip in which he degraded Miley Cyrus, Piker admitted he’d misstepped: “It’s so cringe. … Of course I’ve apologized for it. It obviously doesn’t reflect my current values.”

But that contrition clearly has limits. On calling ultra-Orthodox Jews “inbred,” he offered no apology, recasting it as a pejorative he aims at “ethnonationalists” and “far-right settlers.” On the “pig dog” slur Third Way flagged as antisemitic, he claimed not to have known the phrase’s history — and then doubted his critics’ sincerity. And on the line that draws the most heat — “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time” — he didn’t retreat at all. “I’m about to quadruple down,” he said, having already tripled down on it elsewhere.

That’s the tell. Piker described the Hamas line not as a slip but as “agitative propaganda” — a Marxist term he insists is neutral — designed “to cause you to second-guess.” “It is intentionally provocative,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s inappropriate.” Whatever you make of the politics, the provocation is a strategy, not an accident.

Another thing I took from both conversations is that the gatekeeping Third Way is attempting may no longer work, and it might even backfire. In a streaming economy that runs on controversy, an establishment campaign to make Piker radioactive functions less like a quarantine and more like free advertising.

“Your boos mean nothing when I’ve seen what makes you cheer,” Piker said of his Democratic critics. “If they want to position themselves on the 10 percent side of a 90-10 issue, that’s going to be great for me.”

He has a point about the underlying numbers. Polling increasingly describes an electorate that has moved closer to him — not further. And when Third Way tries to police the boundary of acceptable criticism of Israel, it is drawing that line well to the right of where its own party’s voters already stand. “It was a lot lonelier on October 8, 2023, saying the exact same things that I’m saying right now,” Piker told me. “It doesn’t feel so lonely anymore.”

That’s the bind for the party’s centrist guardians: The very offense Third Way takes at Piker — the thing that makes them want him gone — is, increasingly, the reason he keeps blowing up.

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