Democrats have done some deep soul-searching and a lot of finger-pointing in the wake of the vice president Kamala Harris‘ decisive election loss.

Some liberals have suggested that the key to the 2024 election is building the left’s version of Joe Rogan. There were several things that contributed Donald Trump’s massive victory among young men, but none was discussed with as much fury and fervor as his appearances one-podcasts and live streams hosted by Rogan, Theo Von, Adin Ross and the Nelk Boys.

On the left, there is exactly one influencer who commands such a large number of followers.

Hasan Piker, a progressive Twitch streamer with 2.8 million followers, drew 313,413 viewers to his Election Night live stream. He was the third most popular streamer, and also the only non-conservative streamer, to break into the top 10 live streamers that night. So Piker knows a few things about existing in the so-called “bridge” space.

Unfortunately for Harris and the democrats“You can’t talk your way out of this problem,” Piker said Newsweek on Friday.

The 33-year-old influencer said it would Democratic Party kind of good to just flood the podcast market with eight other versions of the popular one Pod Save America show, a liberal political podcast featuring a crew of former Obama aides.

“That’s not the problem,” said Piker, who would be slightly to the left of Pod Save boys. “People like me exist. I had one of the biggest election night coverages around.”

The real issue facing Democrats is the ideological divide between its base and the rest of the party. For Piker, the aphorism that Republicans fear their base and Democrats hate their base has never been truer.

“Republicans can get away with taking advantage of that space,” he said, noting that there are billionaire GOP mega-donors who share interests with right-leaning influencers, leading to “cross-pollination.”

“But the same ecosystem doesn’t exist on the left. It barely exists too Pod Save America. CNN and MSNBC barely even cross-fertilize,” Piker continued. “The liberal and, I guess, ‘progressive’ outlets have completely shut down the independent media that comes into their sphere of influence. And beyond that, there is a deep ideological divide.”

For months, Piker has warned Harris’ campaign that its failure to represent the voters who would cast their ballots for the Democratic candidate would lead to its collapse. He stressed that Democrats need to move more to the left and stop trying to woo moderate Republicans and middle-of-the-road voters, who proved again on Tuesday that they would not budge on Harris.

Exit polls show 94 percent of Republicans still voted for Trump, while independents only broke for Harris by 3 percent. Year 2020, Joe Biden won independently with a whopping 13 percent.

“The Democratic Party has actively chastised and alienated many people who would normally vote for them, and they have continuously done this cycle after cycle,” Piker said. And finally “the bottom fell out”.

It was not just large numbers of young men who moved to the right.

This year, Trump won a fifth of black men and nearly half of Latino men, doubling his standing among the first group and moving Hispanic-majority counties an average of 10 percentage points to the right. In Dearborn, Michigan, a majority Arab community that helped Biden win in 2020, Trump won 42 percent of the vote to Harris’ 36 percent.

And none of that should have been a surprise, according to Piker. He argued that by sending pro-Israel Democrats, such as Rep. Richie Torres and former Pres Bill Clintonto Michigan, Harris’ campaign “openly communicated that they didn’t want anyone who cared about Palestine to go out and vote for them.”

“They actively sidelined these people with the hope that they could win the suburbs, win over these conservative voters, and it was a failure,” he said.

The biggest mistake Harris made, in Piker’s view, was not addressing voters’ concerns about the economy with direct policy proposals that separated her from Biden.

Throughout Harris’ campaign, poll after poll showed the economy was a key voting issue for the nation. Exit polls showed that deep dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s handling of the economy ultimately drove Americans to Trump. National polls revealed that 45 percent of people said they have gotten worse under the current administration, making it the highest percentage of voters ever to say as much — even higher than the 42 percent who agreed with that sentiment in 2008 , in a global financial meltdown that cratered the economy.

Piker said that if the Democratic Party wants to regain the attention of the voters it won in 2020, it must abandon what he calls the “vibe session” narrative, in which campaigns chalk economic worries to the fact that Americans don’t understand the problem and that eventually they will to feel it when their wages catch up with inflation.

“(Most Americans) don’t care about civility. They don’t care about these institutions. They have no ideological fear. They just want to stop the damage,” Piker said. “If Kamala Harris had come out and said, ‘I’m going to literally imprison the Walton family,’ people would have been like, ‘Okay… as long as you promise it’s going to lower the price of groceries, I don’t give a s —.”

“They’re on board with deporting 20 million immigrants because that’s what Trump is saying. ‘I’m going to deport 20 million immigrants and it’s actually going to bring everything down … it’s going to be the solution to the housing crisis,’ he said. “It’s a crazy thing to say. It’s genuinely Hitlerian, but people are like, “Okay, well, I guess it’ll work. Who knows? We’ll see.” And they’re taking a shot in the dark.”

“You can’t actively act like things are perfectly fine when things haven’t been great for Americans for quite some time.”

Asked about early data showing more than 90 percent of counties swinging in favor of Trump — suggesting that Democrats’ late turn toward moderation may not have been the problem — Piker isn’t convinced it’s because Americans love Republican policy.

He still believes in a Democratic candidate who can deliver the senator Bernie SandersAn economic populist message could seriously deliver huge results in a general election. He argues that there are many low- and medium-propensity progressive voters who don’t always show up in primaries, but who could catapult the Democratic Party to great success if activated — much like the GOP has just experienced with its version on the right.

Piker used Missouri as an example. A deep red state, Missouri went for Trump with over 58 percent support and was re-elected senator Josh Hawleya populist Republican, with more than 55 percent support. And yet the state voted for two progressive ballots. On Tuesday, Missouri voted not only to create a constitutional right to abortion, but also to raise the minimum wage and require paid sick leave.

And again, Piker said, it was Harris’ loyalty to Biden that kept her from taking in the politics at stake.

“(Liberal policies) that aren’t tied to a Democratic politician are great. They’re so popular around the Rust Belt, around the Midwest, in the Sun Belt, everywhere,” Piker said. “People like progressive politics and progressive politics. They don’t like the Democratic Party, and they especially didn’t like Biden.”

“They rejected Biden tremendously, and they also rejected Kamala Harris, in part because she had a very short opportunity and she used that short opportunity to rush against Biden,” he said.