Move over, kissing babies and shaking hands; Instant Pot cooking sessions on Instagram Live are the new town hall. And as the race for 2020 gets underway, we can probably expect a lot more of a look into the kitchens of the Democratic Party’s contenders.
Shortly after Election Day, newly elected Democratic rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to the livestream, answering questions while preparing mac and cheese and listening of Janelle Monae. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke built a national following, in part by being a savvy social media influencer, including bipartisan road trips with Republican Will Hurd, his Texas delegation colleague, and livestreams of him cooking dinner.
But like anything “the kids these days” are doing, eventually everyone else wants to get in on the action. And on New Year’s Eve, the day she announced she would explore a bid for president, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., set up shop in her kitchen, drinking a beer and talking to supporters. (Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., stuck with a photo and a recipe for her berry cobbler.)
“Now we’re going to be inundated with candidates going live from their kitchens,” tweeted former Bush administration spokesman Tony Fratto. “If you’re going to do it we want to see real kitchen skills, not just opening a beer. Anyone can drink a beer. Make this the Iron Chef election.” HGTV and Food Network have democratized the “Bobos in Paradise” approach of aspiring to lavish kitchens and cooking as a leisure activity, and we have got to be just months away from O’Rourke popping up on First We Feast’s hit web show “Hot Ones,” where celebrities are interviewed while eating a series of progressively spicy hot wings.
Politics and food have long gone together. Albert Einstein said, “An empty stomach is a poor political advisor,” after all. Ann Romney published the family cookbook in 2013, and before that supporters of former Presidents Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy could have turned to campaign cookbooks to learn how Jackie Kennedy makes waffles. (Even Warren herself has taken heat in recent years for a recipe she once contributed to a book called Pow Wow Chow.)
So no, when Gillibrand tweets her cobbler recipe, she is not really breaking new ground in American politics. What, then, makes “AOC” (as Ocasio-Cortez is now named in her Twitter handle) and O’Rourke so different?
“Authenticity” is an oft-abused buzzword, but … yes, authenticity has a lot to do with it. I have no doubt that Warren enjoys hanging out in her kitchen with her golden retriever while having a beer because that’s a genuinely great way to spend an evening. But those who succeed at building a following on social media do so because they engage with their followers like they’d engage with a friend. Even if it’s a performance, it doesn’t feel performative.
As I wrote in The Selfie Vote four years ago, “Nowadays people are eager to weightlessly, casually share their lives, feelings, and opinions with the world. Young Americans in particular are living their lives on their phones. They don’t need things to be formal and highly produced and retouched. (Exhibit A: selfies.) They just want things to be personal and available. Campaigns should be sure to meet them there.” Many of those who have built up the biggest followings on social media, from model Chrissy Teigen to, yes, our current president, did so by using social media in an unfiltered way, typos and injuries and all. When Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Warren hang out in the kitchen for the express purpose of fielding questions via livestream, it easily feels like a performance; when “AOC” answers questions while making mac and cheese, it feels like she’s just trying to multitask.
So yes, welcome to the Iron Chef election. We are very likely to see the inside of all of the Democratic 2020 contenders’ kitchens via livestream because once a tactic works for one person, everyone else wants to jump in and give it a try too. There’s a nonzero probability that some candidate over the next 18 months has a cooking disaster on a livestream that goes viral, and they get a 2 percent name-ID bump in the polls out of it. This is the world we live in now.
And so if that’s the case, I echo Tony Fratto’s call for candidates to at least make it interesting. Up the degree of difficulty! Whoever takes the plunge and livestreams an effort to make hot sauce or pepper jam, I admit it: I’ll be right there watching.
