Hasan Piker Wants to Win

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

The theory behind this week’s podcasts is that I wanted to invite on different perspectives inside the Democratic coalition to explore how Democrats won power and how they should now wield it.

On Tuesday, we had on Adam Jentleson from the Searchlight Institute, a more centrist perspective. If you haven’t listened to that episode, I think you should.

Today, from the left, we have Hasan Piker. Piker is a streamer. He’s on Twitch under HasanAbi. His election night livestream topped out at 200,000 people.

But he has also become something of a major character in this election, stumping with D.S.A. and leftist candidates. He was both important and controversial in the Michigan Senate primary, where he was an ally of Abdul El-Sayed’s.

Then the Republicans tried to make him into the boogeyman of the election. He was often talked about on Fox News more than the Republican Senate candidates were.