In case you haven’t heard, 2024 was the year of the influencer election — and whether you go by the social media feeds or the ballot counts, right-wingers emerged victorious. The night of Donald Trump‘s re-election also delivered record-high traffic for the internet’s community of conservative pundits.
The right wing retained the digital spotlight during 2025, but a startup is trying to turn the tables ahead of the 2026 election. AND Media is launching to support left-wing political creators by providing them with new content opportunities, financial support, and other services.
The Hollywood Reporter describes AND Media as a “venture studio” that will provide production assistance and funding for liberal creators as they pursue serialized projects. The startup is launching with an initial slate that features author Hunter Prosper and comedian Matt Buechele. Prosper will adapt his TikTok format Stories From a Stranger for YouTube, while Buechele will launch a new video podcast.
These creators are just as popular as the right-wing influencers who supported Trump during his 2024 campaign; now, they’ll have the chance to speak louder. In a sense, AND Media looks to answer a hypothetical question: What would happen if the digital strategies of the Biden White House were divorced from that administration’s policies?
It’s an interesting thought, because Biden reinvented the playbook for collabs between creators and the executive branch. His White House creator summit was a landmark moment that paved the way for Trump’s influencer-filled press corps. Biden also embraced memes on TikTok before that strategy received a MAGA twist.
The problem was that Biden — and, by extension, his Vice President Kamala Harris — could not separate their novel ideas about digital media from their political positions. A planned collab between Harris and Subway Takes host Kareem Rahma failed to materialize after the two parties failed to see eye-to-eye on Gaza. As for TikTok, Biden’s use of the platform made his attempts to ban it seem hypocritical.
Two years later, the political landscape has shifted. The biggest celebrity of the 2025 election cycle was Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, who used a robust social media strategy to become New York City’s next mayor. Mamdani showed that the left could use YouTube and TikTok as effectively as the right.
Christian Tom is looking to capitalize on that momentum. Biden’s White House Director of Digital Strategy is the CEO of AND Media, and he has a unique vantage point somewhere in between creator content and politics. He was a keynote speaker at VidCon Baltimore and a driving force behind the effort to bring lefty creators to Washington D.C.
“We believe that the value in digital media, cultural, monetary and otherwise lies in the scalable formats, stories, franchises, IP born from creator-led brands,” Tom said. “And we think that is the tectonic shift that is happening in culture today and, in our assessment, is increasingly shaped by digital creators, as opposed to kind of traditional institutions, and that’s kind of the foundational thesis for the company itself.”
Tom’s venture studio is taking on an ambitious moment during a pivotal moment in U.S. politics. If AND Media wants to reshape digital discourse during the 2026 midterms, it’s off to a good start.
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