Digital communities have never been more powerful than they are today. At a moment’s notice, online groups are able to rally to achieve goals that would be impossible for a single person, whether it’s raising millions for charity, supporting a political cause, or finding new strategies to clear a video game in the shortest amount of time. Digital communities, especially gaming groups, have proven they can accomplish practically anything if they care enough and work together.

What do these community-wide efforts look like in practice? It can be difficult to visualize, especially for those who weren’t raised on the internet. A recent YouTube video from content creator Summoning Salt details precisely how one digital community came together to accomplish a seemingly impossible goal.

Back in 2017, a player posted a spreadsheet of levels created in Super Mario Maker, a version of the classic game that lets players create and publish their own Super Mario levels for others to play. The spreadsheet included every level that no one had beaten yet. When Nintendo announced plans to shut down the game’s online server later that year, effectively making the game unplayable, a small digital community, later named Team 0%, grew around the idea of beating every uncleared level as a way to give the game a proper sendoff.

As word spread, thousands of players and livestreamers from across the world dusted off their Wii U’s, flocked to the community, and got to work hoping to aid the efforts. The community kept in touch through Discord, an online platform that lets users create their own private or public chatrooms and communities. There, they were able to get up-to-the-minute updates on clear statuses, what new strategies have been working for others, and a live count of how many levels remained uncleared.

With just six months left to achieve their goal, some of the best Super Mario Maker players joined the effort to beat the more than 41,000 uncleared levels, including the most brutal levels. With one month before the servers shut down, Team 0% had built an army and saw incredible progress – only 178 levels remained. Fast forward to the last two weeks and only one level remained uncleared. The final level was a gauntlet of buzzsaws and obstacles designed to be almost impossible to beat. And with three days before the shutdown, community members beat the last and final level.

What’s remarkable about Team 0% is there was no official leadership, no hierarchy, and no rigid structure to the group. While some individuals felt empowered to share the level spreadsheet or create a Discord community, there were no official orders or monetary benefits. This effort was 100% fueled by grassroots passion for something people felt strongly about, in this case a farewell to a game that brought so much joy to so many people.

But what if this unbridled passion and teamwork could be applied to issues beyond gaming where groups of people find common cause? That’s central to At Dawn Campaigns and our theory of change.

The same fervor that united members of Team 0% around a tribute to a game they all loved can be a grassroots framework to support progressive issues and candidates.

By building trust and connections within these communities, we are able to gain their support and mobilize community members on issues they feel passionate about like protecting voter rights, supporting healthcare programs, and preserving reproductive rights.

We have seen that with organizations we founded and continue to support as partners. In 2024, Progressive Victory led a gaming media outreach targeting young male voters during the presidential election resulting in 27 million views, 1.6 million voters contacted, and 350,000 doors knocked in swing states.

Additionally, At Dawn Campaigns recently launched the first-of-its-kind streamer accelerator in partnership with Bridges Media and Project Bullhorn, to support small to mid-sized progressive content creators to help grow audiences and mobilize communities on issues they care about. Just as Team 0% needed skilled players to step up to beat levels, the progressive movement needs skilled content creators within digital communities where the next generation of voters already spend the majority of their time. Dozens of content creators in the accelerator program are collaborating on content, discussing issues important to them, and working together to mobilize their organic audiences when the time is right.

The story of Team 0% is more than a one-off fluke. It’s a blueprint. What that community proved is that when people share a deep, genuine investment in an outcome, organizational structure becomes secondary. No one needed to be paid or told what to do. They just showed up.

Political organizing has always struggled to manufacture that kind of intrinsic motivation, but the reality is it already exists in abundance across gaming and creator communities. Instead of starting from scratch, we should meet people where that passion already lives, and give it somewhere to go. The levels are already out there. We just need to help people pick up the controller.

It was also the boo foretold. Predictable, due to Trump’s unpopularity with New Yorkers. Expected, given the inconveniences inflicted on fans in attendance by presidential security protocols. And breathlessly anticipated, because so many of us wish for Trump to know how much he is reviled, and he is so seldom exposed to public sentiment beyond his control.

The fleeting nature of the moment could not save him. Nor could the solemnity that is customarily associated with the national anthem. The adulation he craves was not only denied, it was thoroughly rejected. It was a public humiliation.

Video clips from the broadcast immediately appeared on social media platforms. Cell phone videos posted by fans from various vantage points inside the arena quickly followed, the boos echoing from every corner of Madison Square Garden, drowning out any doubts or White House spin. After the Knicks went down in defeat, their first loss in 13 games and 46 days, news articles and social media posts blamed Trump for “cursing” his hometown team. If the Knicks don’t bounce back and win the series, he might never be able to set foot in New York City again.

I would argue that this was a defining political and cultural moment for the country, a shared experience that has become increasingly rare in American life. There are a lot of reasons why the moment was so powerful – it was at the intersection of politics and professional sports, in a championship series hosted by a team in the largest media market in the world (who haven’t been to the finals in almost 30 years), and during a national broadcast TV event with no subscription required.

All those things – and because it was live.

We live in an era of ubiquitous content. Audiences have more choices and viewing options than there are hours in the day. Short-form clips of professionally produced films and TV shows arrive in our feeds alongside AI slop.

Live video captures the most authentic moments – and the most compelling videos can now be distributed instantaneously on multiple platforms. Select live moments can cut through the proverbial noise, because they travel virally and organically across traditional media and internet platforms in ways other types of content simply don’t. More than scripted, paid ad placements. More than produced events, which are heavily choreographed and edited. More than the most skillfully landed earned media pitch.

Back to Trump. The most surprising part of Game 3’s live viral moment was that Trump was on the losing end and walked right into it. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump seemed to have an understanding of live content – and the unscripted, viral moments it can generate – that his opponents lacked.

Think of his stunt pretending to work a shift at a McDonald’s drive thru. Or his driving a garbage truck on a tarmac in Wisconsin. They appeared silly and unserious to many observers, but they worked at capturing eyeballs and reinforcing campaign messages – at minimal cost compared to traditional tactics.

In the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election cycles, live video content will continue to grow in importance. Unscripted interactions between candidates and voters on the campaign trail – good or bad – will shape perceptions. Live interviews with traditional news outlets and new media content creators will expose tensions that most sit-down, taped interviews do not.

The most interesting live moments will be clipped and shared by campaigns themselves, their opponents, supporters, critics, not to mention a growing army of full-time clippers.

The candidates and campaigns who figure out how to generate and capitalize on these live moments will rise above the rest.

Subscribe now

We were particularly struck by Flaherty’s analysis of the state of digital organizing. He has identified the core tension that’s existed in digital volunteer mobilization for decades now:

Community is no longer solely geographic. You had geographically based organizers trying to organize people’s online lives.

The tension between geographic organizing, quasi-geographic online organizing, and interest-based organizing is what we must untangle for 2028. What does it mean to have a neighborhood organizing team with strangers talking to strangers when people are on group chats with their friends all day? How many different workstreams can a single volunteer be a part of at once? How do we make the experience great for volunteers? How do we report on it? How do you do all of those things, or one of those things, or other things?

These are hugely important questions. But they will be invisible to campaigns not thinking about the way people are actually engaging in the community themselves in 2026.

These are the right questions. For years, we’ve watched campaigns launch slack channels, build new tooling infrastructure, and experiment with innovative ways to deploy volunteers from a distributed national model.

What’s been missing is the online-to-offline link. How do we deploy nationally-directed resources and scaled national infrastructure to support the most important geographically-bounded fights of our time?

We’re excited to say – we’re telling everyone who will listen! – that we now know how to solve this problem. In fact, large groups of volunteers are already assembling and mobilizing themselves as you read this piece.

Due to the decentralized nature of digital community spaces, trying to exert direct control over activist behavior is not a viable strategy.

However, for campaigns in 2026, 2028, and beyond, there’s a massive opportunity to build on the most promising emerging tactics. The most exciting thing about this moment is that the next generation of candidates won’t have to build their online organizing infrastructure from scratch.

To supercharge their growth and scale volunteer programs fast, they’ll be able to tap into a sea of hundreds of thousands of localized volunteer organizers.By aligning with these cultural hubs, candidates can leverage a vast network of grassroots communities to rapidly scale their organizational reach and volunteer capacity. New volunteer communities are popping up every day.

The healthiest organizations follow this model:

Video content creators ---> digital community ---> electoral organizing

Our Experiences Organizing Volunteer Communities

During the height of the pandemic in 2020, Erik pioneered an early model for activating online activists and engaging them to create immediate impact. Drawing from digital media promotion, he created an in-person canvassing program that delivered the state of Georgia for the Biden Campaign and helped put now-Senator Jon Ossoff into the pivotal runoff that flipped the Senate to the Democrats. Crooked Media sent out one tweet on the first day of the effort, that recruited 4,000 phonebankers who were trained within hours and then recruited hundreds of volunteers to knock on every cure target’s door in the state of Georgia within 48 hours.

The program used a “Virtual Field Office,” a Zoom video conference – staffed by volunteers across the country – to launch canvassers based in Georgia to ensure that voters with minor discrepancies in their mail in ballot had their vote counted. The campaign was built and executed in a week, and cured over 15,000 ballots in five days.

This decentralized, volunteer driven program, organized in a Slack channel, grew to become the organization VoPro Pros, which for the next four years became the backbone of democratic voter protection programs around the country. In 2024, the group helped train over 15,000 volunteers to execute ballot cure programs in every major battle ground state, helping secure victories in three house races and ensuring the victory in the North Carolina Supreme Court race that was decided by just 54 votes.

Due to the fact that we wanted to ensure the volunteers we recruited were not part of the campaign’s existing volunteer pool, more than 60% of the volunteers came from left of center content creator audiences. Many of these young people, mostly men, had never volunteered in a campaign before.

For Gen-Z, digital community is native. Today’s young people have grown up in digital community spaces such as Discord, which has enabled frictionless adoption at scale.

In 2022, Sam founded Progressive Victory (PV) as an experiment for the midterm elections. We wanted to answer the question: could we mobilize content creator audiences using digital community?

We quickly saw the potential. In partnership with the progressive political commentator and livestreamer Vaush, we made 290,000 voter contacts in just two months.

During those two months, activists inside our community started organizing themselves geographically, burrowing into their local political scenes in states all across the country.

We thought it an intriguing development, but it wasn’t until December 2022 that we realized just how powerful this model could become.

At that time, Glenn Youngkin was governor of Virginia, a Republican with presidential ambitions. To burnish his credentials with Evangelical Christians, he sought to pass an abortion ban through the legislature. But he had one problem: Republicans controlled the State Senate by a margin of only one seat, and there was an open seat that needed to be filled in a special election. Hoping to bury the election and keep turnout low, Youngkin called the special election over the Christmas holiday.

Youngkin’s strategy succeeded at first – national reproductive rights groups found themselves unable to engage with sufficient speed, and made only token digital ad buys.

The Democrat in the race, Aaron Rouse, was a millennial and digital native who was willing to make investments in new tactics to win. But he had no campaign and the election was only weeks away.

With its nimble digital mobilization model, Progressive Victory was poised to step up and mobilize quickly.

Local Virginia volunteers filled out his core team, and national Progressive Victory volunteers organized at scale. We helped him set up his digital dialer and mobilized to make 80,000 contacts in-district over two weeks. We made 1,141 positive supporter IDs for the Rouse campaign – in a race he won by only 348 votes.

Online-to-offline mobilization made a difference in this race – and for Virginians. Without our work, a 15-week abortion ban would likely have been enacted across the Commonwealth.

With this clutch win, we knew we had something real on our hands: Localized, self-initiated organizing pipelines with scaled, national umbrella support for priority initiatives.

We built up PV from there, and by working with multiple large content creator communities, we were able to reach 1.6 million voters in 2024.

Today, PV has over 20,000 active members, is led by a group of community leaders, runs an expanding political program funded by over 1,000 dues-paying members, and is working to support a slate of over a dozen progressive candidates in primaries across the country.

PV is not the only rising political force in the space – a new political organization sourced from the moderate-liberal livestreamer Destiny‘s most politically-active audience members have formed their own organization, Digital Ground Game. In their first large community fundraiser with their livestreamer patron, Digital Ground Game raised more than $250,000 to support their 2026 program, which will support Democrats in targeted races against MAGA Republicans.

Destiny was an early pioneer of online to offline organizing. His community regularly held canvassing events in support of Democratic candidates, with the most significant examples coming during the 2024 election.

In February 2024, Destiny and a number of associated streamers held a canvassing event in Cincinnati, OH, where over 300 fans showed up and knocked on 40,000 doors. Streamers also produced content around the event that racked up millions of views online. The success of the event led to the launch of canvassing houses in battleground states nationally, where fans lived and engaged in voter contact efforts through the election – knocking over 350,000 total doors for only $1 per knock (industry standard is $5-10).

The Larger Ecosystem

It’s not just the media figures we’ve worked with - new efforts are popping up everywhere.

After her close Congressional campaign loss, digital influencer and former candidate Kat Abughazaleh is turning her digital community infrastructure on Discord into a resource-sharing hub for localized support networks.

Building on the VotePro Pros 2020 campaign, Crooked Media has also developed its own robust political program, Vote Save America, that has played a significant role in the voter protection programs of every campaign since 2020. Vote Save America volunteers made hundreds of thousands of calls in 2024 to voters tossed off the voter rolls in pivotal battleground states.

Meanwhile, the largest and most high-profile political livestreamer, Hasan Piker, is rallying with leftist candidates across the country and pushing his massive audience into the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). While some Democrats have expressed alarm at Piker’s rise due to past controversial statements, publishing concerned op-eds does nothing to blunt the power of the “digital media —> audience mobilization” model we’ve come to know so well.

These efforts all represent different communities and ideological corners of America’s most politically active young people. But here’s what they have in common:

1. The most effective volunteer organizing efforts are being built around popular cultural hubs and media figures, most notably prominent Twitch and YouTube livestreamers.

2. They are run not by political campaign professionals but instead by well-networked individuals who emerge from those content creator audiences – and are loyal to the niche values that define their community cultures.

3. Candidates who align themselves with those community cultures can tap into the massive power they represent.

Why Should We Care?

Digital community organizations are responsible for many of the most exciting political victories of the last several years, most notably Zorhan Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City, which was backed by Hasan Piker and the powerhouse New York DSA. There’s also socialist organizer Katie Wilson, backed by Vaush and PV, who unseated a sitting Democratic mayor in Seattle last year. Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El Sayed is currently hitting the campaign trail with Piker and surging in the polls.

What makes these efforts effective: the ability to build organizing infrastructure that lasts beyond a single election cycle, and sustains itself due to internal group cohesion and community trust.

So what are we up to now at At Dawn Campaigns? We’re continuing to mentor and support community leaders as they grow their communities and refine their infrastructure and organizing models. We’re experimenting with relational organizing to see if we can revolutionize online-to-online strategies as well.

Though not as trendy or flashy as the latest AI tool or clever ad campaign, these digital communities are the most promising development in politics we see today, because they’re self-sustaining financially, growing massively, and able to effectively localize the power of content creators with national audiences.

The 2028 primaries will be a massive opportunity for innovation and growth – candidates auditioning in front of content creators to win the support of the massively powerful, political organizations staffed by their audience members.

If you want to work with creators engaging in this exciting space, please get in touch!