Star Trek

After Emily Sundberg reported in her daily business newsletter, Feed Me, that the Working Families Party is looking to hire a “fandom organizing coordinator,” she got a bunch of emails from readers scoffing at the idea of such a position. It is silly, for example, to imagine organizing devotees of J.R.R. Tolkien via social media for political action. What’s next, “Orcs for Biden”?

But despite the good-natured skepticism, Sundberg said she understands and respects what the Working Families Party is trying to do. The job listing explains that the role is meant to help the party “better navigate and set up systems for utilizing the power of fandoms to expand W.F.P.’s base and profile.” And Sundberg thinks that political parties gaining entree into fan communities has the potential to be effective if done properly, particularly when it comes to reaching younger voters who are savvy about social media marketing and can be appropriately cynical about the effectiveness of our current political system.

I agree. Social media is where many young voters live — about a third of adults under 30 regularly get news from TikTok, according to Pew Research. And turning out young voters who are otherwise not particularly politically engaged will be key to winning elections up and down the ballot in November. The left-leaning Working Families Party isn’t exactly a threat to take the White House in 2024, but it is on to a new way of reaching Gen Z voters at a time when the old ways are increasingly useless.

As Marcela Valdes explained this week for The New York Times Magazine, young voters tend to have low turnout rates. “No one is more ambivalent about participating in elections than young people,” she wrote. (It’s worth noting, though, that turnout among Americans ages 18 to 29 was historically high in 2018, 2020 and 2022, according to C.I.R.C.L.E., the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.)

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There’s no getting around the fact that Donald Trump and President Biden are senior citizens and therefore may have trouble convincing young voters that they’re attuned to their concerns. “Young people are more engaged with people that look like them and share their lived experiences,” said Ashley Aylward, a senior researcher at HIT Strategies, a public opinion research firm that focuses primarily on younger voters and underrepresented communities. And, she says, because young voters are good at detecting slick and phony marketing, campaigns “kind of have to take this backdoor approach of reaching them through where their interests already are and through any of the messengers that they already trust.”

Enter fandoms, which are subcultures organized around devotion to specific cultural passions, from Beyoncé to sneakers to cult classic TV shows.

Tapping into fandoms for political purposes isn’t new. Ryan Broderick, who writes the Garbage Day newsletter about the internet, reminded me that Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House adviser, was one of the first people to see the potential of organizing fan communities, recognizing that gamers could be harnessed for his pet causes. There have been other episodes in which political activism has taken root in fandoms, like this one in 2020:

TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign’s official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show. But galvanizing fandoms for internet noise and/or chaos is a different project than getting them to vote en masse for a particular candidate or cause. Among the challenges involved in organizing fandoms, Broderick said, is the reality that “the internet is inherently borderless,” so it’s difficult “to target a fandom and then try to get the people in it that are of voting age, and then also in the areas you need them, to vote.”

I asked Nelini Stamp, the director of strategy for the Working Families Party, who is leading the fandom coordinator search, what her hopes for the role are. She said that she sees fandom coordinating as a logical next step in a long history of marshaling popular culture to get young people politically involved. She mentioned Bill Clinton and Madonna appearing on MTV in the 1990s and said that this is just the latest way “to meet people where they’re at.”

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Part of the party’s outreach in the past has revolved around Bravo TV fandom (something near and dear to my own heart). In addition to using hashtags across social media platforms to join existing fan conversations about Bravo shows, the W.F.P. also hosts watch parties that sometimes involve voter registration efforts. It wants to hire someone for the fandom coordinator job who can engage in these fan conversations in an authentic way, she said.

Although measuring the success of these initiatives isn’t easy, since it’s hard to know if someone who engages with a meme or follows a page is actually taking that next step toward political action, there is some evidence that it can be worth the effort to reach young voters via fandom. Perhaps the most high-profile recent example occurred this past September when Taylor Swift posted a voter registration link in her Instagram Stories for National Voter Registration Day and, according to NPR, “Vote.org reported a 1,226 percent jump in participation in the hour after the post.”

As Stamp notes, Swifties have also taken on Ticketmaster. And it’s clear that Trump recognizes the power of Swift’s fan base — doing his best to dissuade her from endorsing Biden, complaining that it would be “disloyal” after he, Trump, “made her so much money.”

The presidential election is shaping up to be a tight one. And according to a C.I.R.C.L.E. poll of 18- to 34-year-olds released in November, “only 35 percent of youth feel supported to act on their political concerns, and less than 1 in 5 have heard from a political party or a community organization this year.” Instead of laughing at the idea of Orcs for Biden, maybe every political party needs to hire people who can transparently engage fan communities. The Trekkies are already on it, boldly going where some men have gone before.