What It Was Like to Watch Hasan Piker “Lib the F*ck Out” on Midterms Night

Politics “I’m Libbing the F*ck Out” What it was like to watch the midterms with Hasan Piker after his big year. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Luke Winkie? Nov 04, 202612:07 PM Photo illustration by Slate. Screenshot via HasanAbi/Twitch. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In the beginning, just like the rest of us, Hasan Piker was nervous. “We need booze,” the 35-year-old hollers from his plush computer chair, obscured behind a phalanx of webcams—all pointed at his face. Piker is going to be sitting here for the next 12 hours, watching the results of the midterms trickle in, alongside the thousands of people who will tune into his Twitch stream. He will usher them through the chaos of the evening; sifting through datapoints, overreacting to turnout data, monitoring bellwether counties. And if his wildest dreams come true—if Donald Trump’s GOP is firmly rejected, and if Piker’s endorsed candidates cruise to victory—then, well, Piker wants to celebrate. Perhaps, for a brief moment, his newfound pariah status in the Democratic Party will dissipate. “Johnnie Walker Black Label. And something Japanese,” he dictates to one of the two assistants scurrying around his palatial open-plan home in L.A.’s Beverly Grove. “Get something expensive. Like $200.” It is 10:30 in the morning, and Piker is not scheduled to start his long day on Twitch for another half-hour. But he’s just too antsy. He wants to go live as soon as possible. Anything to cut the anxiety. Because, like the rest of us, Piker can’t wrap his head around the polls. He thinks they’re too good to be true. His most realistic projection is a tepid 52 Senate seats for the Democrats. He tells me he’s witnessed too much racism on the campaign trail to believe otherwise; that the rabid tenacity of MAGAdom can’t be discounted, and that its nativist lean remains a viable political force. He’s worried about James Talarico, and Texas as a whole. He fears that Sherrod Brown faces an uphill battle. He can’t even begin to conjure fantasies of a blue South Carolina. And frankly, after an election cycle in which Piker emerged as an unlikely main character—where his gaffes were immediately metabolized into national lightning rods, with the Murdoch estate covering his every move, when even Donald Trump knows his name—I wonder if he feels simply beaten down by a very strange year. After all, Piker ends 2026 more famous than he’s ever been before—which means he’s rarely been more hated. “I’ve been introduced to a new demographic of people that had no idea who I was before, and they know me in the most negative terms possible,” he tells me. “Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in every state in the country calling me a jihadist. We like to call it Hasan Derangement Syndrome. People develop a negative impression of me and never let it go.” He’s not wrong. Throughout the midterms, Republicans did everything they could to tie Piker’s name to Democratic hopefuls around the country. The hope was that Americans would find his rhetoric too dangerous, and his ideas too exotic—a physical manifestation of Democratic Socialists of America Jacobinism; a vessel for good old-fashioned liberal overreach, casting a pall over a potential blue wave. They pulled out all the stops: Fox News mentioned Piker’s name on 400 different occasions in the month of August alone. Stephen Miller can’t stop tweeting about him. His thirst-traps were given prominent placement at September’s Republican National Convention. Would it work? If Democrats underperformed—if, God forbid, they choked away the Senate, or even the House—the blame could be laid at the feet of this streamer, coiled under the lights of his studio in a sage-green suit, the clock ticking away toward judgment. So yes, Piker has reasons to be nervous. “Tonight, we find out if Hasan Piker Democrats are winning up and down the ballot,” he announces, somewhat sardonically, at the beginning of his stream. If they do? “I’m excited not to be called a terrorist every day.” Luke Winkie You’re likely familiar with Piker’s story, but just in case: Hasan Piker came to notoriety in 2016 when he was making YouTube videos for the Young Turks, the digital media brand founded by his uncle Cenk Uygur. Piker was fiery, good-looking, and a proud booster of Bernie Sanders–style socialism. After four years of this, Piker left the flock and quickly positioned himself as, perhaps, the most prominent pundit on the American left. A swath of disaffected progressives started tuning in to his daily marathon livestreams, where Piker riffs on the latest batch of headlines with a trademark off-the-cuff panache. It is that flippancy that has minted Piker an ardent following, and also gotten him into trouble. Piker infamously declared, in 2019, that the United States “deserved” 9/11; he joked about streets running with the blood of capitalists; and he is also a relentless critic of the long-standing bipartisan Israel accord, often going to eyebrow-raising lengths to express that opposition. (For instance: Piker is fond of saying that Hamas is “a thousand times better than Israel.”) In proper context, those quotes are less bombastic than they might sound. For instance: Piker arrived at his conclusion about Israel’s thousandfold moral deficiency due to the country’s “blockade, embargo, and apartheid state” in Gaza—I mean, fair enough. Still, these have never been the policy stances that get one invited into the Democratic Party’s inner sanctum. But after the wipeout of 2024, the consensus was reset. All the old rules were thrown out the window. How could the Democrats solve their crisis with young men? Where were our lovable dirtbags? Who might be anointed the liberal Joe Rogan? Piker fit the bill perfectly. Mainstream credibility opened up to him. Piker was interviewed by Vox, by the New York Times, by NPR. The milquetoast Pod Save America boys made him a recurring guest; California Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed to drop by the stream. Ever so briefly, Piker’s baggage was set aside. His supposed oracular fluency in lefty masculinity had too much currency. Democratic officials had no choice but to look the other way. And so Piker took advantage. He campaigned with Zohran Mamdani during his whirlwind trip to Gracie Mansion. He backed a bevy of insurgent primary bids by DSA-aligned candidates like New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier and Colorado’s Melat Kiros—both of whom would go on to win. By the summer of 2026, Piker was at the peak of his influence, canvassing Michigan with leftist Senate contender Abdul El-Sayed—by far his biggest bounty yet. If El-Sayed was elected, he would immediately become one of the nation’s most progressive lawmakers. And that’s when the worm began to turn. When El-Sayed won a close primary against the now disgraced Haley Stevens, Republican nominee Mike Rogers responded by issuing a political ad that starred Piker, front and center, and his 9/11 quote was given special emphasis. The GOP intended to frame this race around El-Sayed’s association with this socialist Twitch streamer—and some movers and shakers around the Democratic establishment thought this was a serious vulnerability. (“Republicans are attacking Hasan Piker and candidates that campaign with him because he alienates swing voters,” offered Neera Tanden, the veteran Democratic strategist and one of the more incessant Piker critics online, who—it must be acknowledged—backed Stevens in the primary.“Don’t blame the people who warned you.”) All at once, the game plan unfurled, as El-Sayed heeded those warnings. The Michigan hopeful put considerable distance between himself and Piker during the homestretch of the campaign. The two never rallied together again. (CNN reported that the El-Sayed campaign informed Piker of this decision personally. It’s the one topic the streamer doesn’t want to expand on with me. “I keep correspondence with candidates private,” he said. “There are a lot of people out there who want to manufacture controversy.”) But for what it’s worth, Piker claims he saw all of this coming. The honeymoon with platform liberalism had an expiration date. He’s a socialist at the end of the day; he knows how this stuff works. Why did the Democratic Party fall out of love with Hasan Piker? “It’s because we’ve been successful. We’re establishing political legitimacy piece by piece, every day,” he said. Because the DSA candidates are winning. Democrats “are more worried about our electoral prowess,” Piker said. “They’re more worried about us winning, and our potential success. We’re going to have 20-plus elected tonight. The candidates in virtually every race that we have won, or that are ongoing, are going to come on the broadcast. That says something. People who are a part of this movement see value in this community.” But for what it’s worth, Piker speaks about himself like a reluctant team player—more so than you, or I, or Tanden might give him credit for. I ask him if there are any Democrats he is rooting against; only one comes to mind: The dogmatically pro-Israel Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz who—you guessed it—has condemned Piker on multiple occasions. Even then, the streamer attaches some pragmatic caveats to his disdain. “If the House majority hinged on Moskowitz’s election,” then he wouldn’t want him to lose. “You gotta do what you gotta do,” he said. Compare that sentiment to that of the congressman, who recently said he “can’t coexist” with the likes of Piker in any political formation whatsoever. In that respect, the streamer appears more committed to the principles of the Big Tent than the old guard—so long as they let him in first. Luke Winkie Piker knows that the thing that could balm these divisions is a wave election, a wave strong enough to render all the existential soul-searching—the dominant flavor of Democratic politics for the past 10 years and counting—a moot point. As we wait for the polls to close, it is also the one thing that feels the least likely. In the meantime, we wait. Hours pass over. The sun mellows into a smolder. Piker’s mother arrives—they greet each other in Turkish—and she whips up a charcuterie plate that will be picked at all night long. A torturous apprehension hovers in the air. Piker’s concurrent viewership grows to 70,000, then 100,000, and shortly before the first polls close, to a whopping 200,000. The gravity of circumstances seem to crystallize in his mind. Is he about to toast the end of Trumpism with his fellow revolutionaries, or spend an agonizing evening analyzing a decisive El-Sayed downfall, perhaps while watching a CNN panel ready to blame him? All Piker can do now is keep the faith. He cranks up a voting-themed choral cover of “Golden,” from KPop Demon Hunters, that has attained meme status in lefty corners. Usually it’s deployed to chide liberals for their idealistic trust in the power of mass politics. But right now, I get the sense that Piker is in search of that transcendent optimism himself. The chat box messages zip by with lightning speed. He’ll end up with the second most popular livestream of the midterms, beaten out only by NBC’s Steve Kornacki—the stakes are high. You tend to know early with routs, and when the first parcels drop in Indiana—sucker punching Republicans with a devastating 20-point shift leftward—Piker is ebullient. “This is the bluepocalypse! A blueclear bomb!” he exclaims. Georgia gets called early. It’s a bloodbath in the rurals. Talarico is up by a gazillion points. Hinojosa isn’t far behind. “I love participating in a bourgeois democracy!” The stream continues, with special guests. California Rep. Ro Khanna passes by; Piker asks him a pointed question about how, if Democrats had focused less on disciplining him and more on, say, the tight margins in Florida, the party could have run up the score even further. As promised, giddy DSA candidates beam in, toasting the momentous night. “We should have run socialists up and down every ballot!” marvels Piker, as the electoral environment proves to be downright inhospitable to Republicans. “We should have had straight fucking communists!” At last, Piker is no longer nervous. The Japanese whisky is uncorked. Victory is assured. A film crew—working on a documentary about the streamer—stalks around the studio, soaking up the triumph. Piker’s mother unwinds on a recliner in the living room, watching her son’s stream on a wall-filling television, when El-Sayed’s race is certified. (“He reminds me of Cenk, he loves America,” she tells me.) What does she think the future will bring for her son, now that Trumpism has been banished? “A lot of people are going to eat some crow.” Meanwhile Piker—still glued to his computer chair—is settling scores. Donald Trump? “He’s going to prison.” Same with the reactionary streamer, and frequent Piker foil, Asmongold. “Comedy is illegal again,” he jokes, inverting a hugely annoying comment made by Elon Musk in the early days of Trump’s second term. “We’re skipping Woke 2 and going to Woke 3.” If Democrats beat their highest estimations and wind up with 56 Senate seats? “I’ll whip it out right now, I’ll show meat right on the stream. Fuck it. I’ll get banned. Who cares.” (He does not do this.) More of Piker’s friends arrive at the door, all equally dazed by the overwhelming margins. Kaya, his enormous Tibetan mastiff, joins us on the couch. We all watch together as the Senate gets called, and the country changes in ways we always thought possible, but never plausible. I can tell that Piker is genuinely thrilled. But more than that, he is relieved. Toward the end of the night he monologues toward his cameras with a noticeable quiver in his voice. “Many of you have been with me this entire time, you know the metric ton of shit I had to eat over the last year and a half,” he said. “They thought they could make me a central figure of the Republican Party midterm strategy. It was a spectacular failure. It was only going to burn my reputation. Non-fucking-stop. I never thought it would be electorally sound. But to think it is one thing, seeing it in action is another.” The vindication is at hand. Piker has survived his first hellish election cycle as a main character. The establishment can’t pin their failures on him; the experiment didn’t work. Frankly, we should all be so lucky if Republicans continue to run on Hasan Piker. On nights like these you’re obliged to savor the unity. How, with one big win, the factional tension dissipates from the map. Hasan Piker, Jon Ossoff, hell, even Jared Moskovitz—they’re all Democrats, if only for the night. “I’m libbing the fuck out,” said Piker. “But tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow we get back to work.” Democrats Elections Internet Culture Media Politics 2026 Midterms