For a long time, elites acted as gatekeepers in political systems. At various points they alone could vote, decide who could run, and determine what political options were even on the table.

As systems became more democratic, elites’ formal influence shrank, but they retained significant informal power through experts, journalists, and institutional networks. This wasn't entirely a bad thing: gatekeepers filtered out the most dangerous actors, which was arguably necessary in post-WWII Europe.

But that era began to fade. The rise of mass media shifted power decisively toward broadcasters and newspapers. Then came social media, which disrupted even that: for the first time, parties and politicians could speak directly to voters without any intermediary.

What has happened in recent years goes further still. Even parties and organizational structures themselves have lost their function as gatekeepers. 

There's nothing left between a politician and a voter except a phone screen.

This is a whole new category of politics, where money no longer means significant political advantage. Neither does infrastructure, existing activist networks, trade union ties, or a long list of prestigious endorsements. Though these still exist, the real political battle is decided elsewhere: only the politician and a phone screen is needed to upend a race. The politicians who can create a bond of loyalty between themselves and voters, and bypass every intermediary, will outperform those who rely on the old ways. 

In the United States, Donald Trump demonstrated this with startling clarity. Bypassing the Republican Party's institutional machinery and its establishment elite, he connected directly with voters and built a relationship of extraordinary intensity. He was compelling, impossible to ignore, magnetic. He was authentic (or at least performed authenticity convincingly). And he used Twitter with instinctive skill. He even skipped Republican primary debates in 2024, and still won. That is extraordinary: the debate stage had been one of the GOP’s most reliable tools for managing its own candidates. Trump simply opted out, and it cost him nothing – probably even won him some votes. 

In Hungary, a parallel story unfolded recently. Péter Magyar stepped over the entire architecture of the old opposition — its parties, its structures, its media connections — and built what was essentially a one-person political movement, powered entirely by the attention he commanded. He picked fights with the old opposition, with the press, with the establishment broadly. None of it mattered: he reached voters directly. What journalists thought of him was largely irrelevant.

Authenticity is the new political currency — or at least the credible appearance of it. Only those who are something — distinctly, consistently, recognizably something that fits who they actually are and can't easily be dismissed as a performance — can win. 

Not manufactured, not focus-grouped, not polished into smoothness. This is more democratic in some ways. But it is also more dangerous: the same dynamics that elevate authentic politicians can equally produce demagogues. 

The politicians who are best at navigating this moment — Trump on the right, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left — understand it instinctively. It's no accident that both prioritize YouTube and Twitch channels over traditional television interviews. Legacy media and their adversarial questioning became an annoying side-effect of campaigns, so they look for ways to reach voters without any real criticism. 

How should campaigns adapt? 

Campaign teams have to accept that they are not in control of the message anymore. The candidate’s authenticity is the only real asset in a race. 

So what campaigns can do is create the conditions for the candidate's authenticity to reach as many people as possible. 

That means spending less on paid advertising and activist logistics, and more on the people who are already trusted by the audiences you need.

Those people are creators. Influencers with a few hundred followers, and influencers with a few million. In a way, they are the perfect politicians for the modern age: they built their followings by being themselves on camera, many times in a messy way, without any real script. That messiness is part of what makes them believable. Audiences have learned to smell polish, and they don't trust it. Rightly so. 

So the smart move for a politician is to actually build relationships with creators. Not just hire them for a video or two, but find the ones who genuinely believe in the same values and let them talk about it in their own way, to their own people. That carries more weight than any ad buy.

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