And the final presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Eva-Maria Vogel, who begins by noting the significant deficit in political influencer support which had been identified for the US Democrats ahead of the 2024 presidential election; they actively sought to attract more influencers to their cause ahead of the election in order to combat the impact of Republican influencers.
Why do audiences believe political influencers, though? Audience perceptions of expertise, trustworthiness, and benevolence may all play a significant role here; perceived politician authenticity is also critical, of course, and may manifest as apparent consistency, ordinariness, and immediacy. There is also some overlap between these categories, of course.
This project produced a codebook which was applied to influencer content; it established a human ground truth by coding some 400 posts manually, and then applied an LLM coding approach to a larger dataset of some 91,000 posts from 140 influencers across Xitter, Instagram, and TikTok in the eight weeks preceding the 2024 US presidential election.
Across a two-dimensional spectrum of political focus and partisanship intensity, most influencers were activists rating high on both measures; some were more educational (with lower levels of partisanship). Democrat influencers used benevolence and ordinariness framings much more, while Republicans rated higher on consistency. The balance was mostly neutral on expertise and immediacy. This is most pronounced for the most partisan influencers.
Republicans thus largely claimed to be trustworthy because they were brutally honest, while Democrats claimed credibility through their benevolence; claiming to be an expert worked against Republicans. Do such differences signal differences in audience demand, or reflect supply-side differences, though? At any rate, countering Republican influencers like for like does not seem like a sensible strategy.
