The Next Generation of Political Leaders Reshaping U.S. Politics After Trump’s Second Term
Donald Trump’s second presidential term has kicked off an entirely new era of American politics: louder, harsher, more hyper-connected to digital culture, and undeniably more dystopian than what came before. For years, Democrats and even establishment Republicans have struggled to break through Trump’s total stranglehold on the national attention economy. But all political leaders are mortal—yes, even Trump—and none will hold the spotlight forever.
A new cohort of rising political talent is already elbowing its way onto the national stage, armed with fresh tactics for connecting with voters and bold, original visions for the future of the country. Below, we profile the candidates, digital influencers, and behind-the-scenes power players from both the left and right that you will be hearing far more from in the coming years. You may even be able to say you spotted the next U.S. president right here in this WIRED roundup.
After the shock of the 2024 presidential election loss, many Democrats concluded the party needed a “liberal Joe Rogan”—a voice that could win over the podcast-focused young male demographic that helped deliver Trump a second term. But a new wave of progressive operatives and candidates have already mastered online audience mobilization, and they know exactly where the party’s old communication playbook went wrong.
Left Rising: Digital Progressives
Melted Solids
Production Agency | Brooklyn, New York
If you followed the flood of content during New York City’s recent mayoral primary, you have almost certainly seen work from Melted Solids, the production shop that partnered with underdog candidate Zohran Mamdani early in his campaign. Cofounders Anthony DiMieri and Debbie Saslaw cut their teeth in advertising and content creation, not traditional political consulting, and they bring a documentary-driven approach that centers ordinary voters rather than politicians. “It’s about listening, not lecturing,” Saslaw explains.
One of their most viral Mamdani collaborations followed the candidate as he spoke directly to Trump voters and non-voters across Queens and the Bronx, letting their unfiltered voices lead the conversation. Not every campaign can replicate what makes Melted Solids’ work work: former Governor Andrew Cuomo tried to copy Mamdani’s people-first formula, but his version focused entirely on him schmoozing voters, while the voters themselves got no space to speak. Thanks to Mamdani’s upset primary win in June, you can expect DiMieri and Saslaw’s approach to shape political messaging across the country for years to come.
Chi Ossé
New York City Council Member | New York City
“Before I am an elected official, before I am a son, before I am a brother, I am a shitposter—that’s who I’ve always been,” Ossé says. “If there’s a second language I speak fluently, it’s the language of the internet.” At 27, Ossé is the creator of multiple Instagram videos that have racked up millions of views, most notably his series Why Shit Not Working?, which breaks down New York City’s intractable bureaucratic dysfunction in plain, relatable language.
Ossé regularly leverages his online following to shift public opinion—and even pass policy. In 2023, one social media callout drew more than 1,000 constituents to a rent guidelines board meeting to protest a proposed double-digit rent hike for the city’s stabilized apartments. Today, other rising New York politicians copy his playbook—including Mamdani, who Ossé says he had to remind to post his campaign launch video to TikTok.
Deja Foxx
Digital Strategist | Arizona
Foxx’s rise to political prominence started almost overnight in 2017, when the then-16-year-old’s viral public exchange with then-U.S. Senator Jeff Flake over his vote to cut Planned Parenthood funding catapulted her into the national spotlight. The activist and content creator parlayed that moment into a full-time political career, serving as a digital strategist for Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign before speaking as a featured guest at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
This year, the 25-year-old launched her own congressional campaign for the late Raúl Grijalva’s open Arizona House seat in a special election. In a viral July TikTok she filmed with her family, she recalled filing her campaign paperwork online alone from her bedroom: “with no staff, no donor list.” The rest of her social media follows that same earnest, direct formula: front-facing camera videos that tie her progressive policy priorities to her own lived experience. Foxx was raised by a single mom, experienced homelessness, and relied on federal public assistance programs like Section 8 housing and Title X reproductive health care.
Though Foxx ultimately lost the primary to Adelita Grijalva, Raúl’s daughter, her unorthodox digital strategy built unexpected grassroots momentum in the final weeks of the race. She gained 300,000 TikTok followers and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from small individual donations. Even with her loss, Foxx has already caught the eye of rising young progressive House members, who say they are eager to see what she does next in politics.
Manny Rutinel
Colorado State Representative | Colorado
At 30, Rutinel may have invented an entirely new playbook for online campaigning: heartfelt Instagram photo montages set to pop music, sometimes featuring vocals from the candidate himself. He’s now bringing this unique style to his 2025 race to unseat Republican incumbent Gabe Evans in Colorado’s 8th Congressional District, one of the most competitive midterm House races in the country this cycle.
Rutinel’s posts are intentionally playful and over-the-top—he once did a deadpan Christopher Walken impression to announce a new bill he introduced in the Colorado state legislature. They also consistently center his core message: he’s an advocate for working people, rooted in his own working-class upbringing. (Rutinel declined to comment for this story.)
In the first half of 2025 alone, Rutinel raised more than $1.6 million for his congressional bid, with roughly half coming from small-dollar donations. In the crowded field of Democratic candidates running against Evans, he’s the only one who has matched the Republican’s fundraising pace. As the race draws more national attention, Rutinel’s one-of-a-kind online approach is likely to spawn dozens of copycats in future cycles.
Right Rising: The New MAGA Guard
On the right, the youngest members of the Trump movement have updated Trump’s original playbook, blending traditional media and cutting-edge digital tactics to reach the GOP base and capture national attention.
Anna Paulina Luna
U.S. Representative | Florida
The 36-year-old Air Force veteran is the gold standard for the GOP’s modern digital strategy: the first national right-wing influencer to win a seat in Congress. Paulina Luna won her seat by having an innate understanding of what resonates with online audiences—and what falls flat.
“If you want to be effective in the future of politics, whether you’re running for president or a state-level office, you have to have a social media presence,” she told WIRED. “But it can’t be a shit presence. It has to be a legit presence, because people can see right through it.” Paulina Luna shares clips of her Fox News appearances, but she says her followers would far rather watch 45 seconds of her speaking off-the-cuff directly into her iPhone about any topic, from UFOs to the latest culture war battle. House GOP leadership has already taken note of her success: her communications director was invited to train GOP members on how to create effective vertical video content for social platforms.
Brett Cooper
Media Personality | Nashville, Tennessee
After building a massive audience with her popular Daily Wire show The Comments Section, 23-year-old Cooper struck out as an independent creator earlier this year. Within six months of launching The Brett Cooper Show on YouTube in early 2025, the channel gained more than 1.5 million subscribers, with every episode racking up hundreds of thousands of views.
Cooper sticks to the politics-meets-pop-culture formula that made her Daily Wire show a hit, but she’s traded overtly partisan rhetoric for more subtle, coded cultural commentary that resonates with young women. She picks topics that trend with young female audiences, offering a light conservative take on everything from Blake Lively’s high-profile lawsuit against Justin Baldoni to viral celebrity drama. “I never want my content to be a time suck,” Cooper says. “I never want it to be like mindless fluff.”
Natalie Winters
Political Commentator | Washington, D.C.
The 24-year-old White House correspondent for Real America’s Voice knows how to command the national spotlight. She’s part of the new, young, unapologetically right-wing press corps covering the second Trump White House, and even her casual work outfits generated weeks of national news coverage early in the administration, after the Daily Mail compiled viral social media criticism of her less formal on-camera style. Winters leaned into the drama, mocked her critics, and used the negative attention to grow her personal brand even faster.
Winters, who avoids both alcohol and tap water as part of her wellness regimen, told WIRED she sees the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement as the new “gateway drug” that draws young people into the GOP. She also co-hosts War Room on Real America’s Voice with her mentor Steve Bannon, and has a direct line to the core MAGA base heading into the 2028 presidential election.
Expanding the GOP Base
The multiracial, young, college-educated coalition that twice elected Barack Obama cracked in 2016 and fractured completely in 2024. Now a new slate of right-wing candidates are working to prove that Trump isn’t the only one who can expand the Republican Party’s voter base.
Mayra Flores
Congressional Candidate | South Texas
In 2022, 39-year-old Flores made history as the first Mexican-born woman to win a seat in Congress, flipping Texas’ 34th Congressional District in a special election. After losing two subsequent races for that seat, redistricting has made the district far more favorable to Republicans, and she’s running once again to win it back.
Flores’ candidacy directly pushes back against the idea that demographics guarantee Democratic control of South Texas. “As I grew up, I began to question why so many Hispanics consider themselves Democrats, since the majority of us have been raised with strong conservative values,” she says in one of her earliest campaign videos. “The Hispanic community is pro-God, pro-life, pro-family, pro-America.” (Flores declined to comment for this story.)
Amir Hassan
Political Candidate | Michigan
A Navy veteran running to flip Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, Hassan bills himself as a “proud Muslim” who supports Israel and the America First agenda. If he wins, he would represent his hometown of Flint, the site of a decades-long water crisis that has destroyed residents’ trust in government.
The district currently leans Democratic, but Genesee County—where Flint is located—shifted more than 5 points toward Trump in 2024, and Hassan sees a path to victory. “Where I’m from, we’re raised to think Democrats are the good guys. We’ve been held culturally hostage for over half a century,” the 39-year-old says in a campaign video. “But look around. Flint is what happens when your vote is taken for granted.” (Hassan’s campaign also declined an interview request for this story.)
Democratic Rebels Remaking Their Party
A growing group of Democratic politicians at every level of government are pushing back against their own party’s perceived inaction on intractable issues like public safety and the cost of living. The most ambitious among them are aiming to completely reshape Congress and the Democratic Party from the inside out.
Saikat Chakrabarti
Political Adviser & Congressional Candidate | Bay Area, California
The 39-year-old Chakrabarti co-founded Brand New Congress, an organization aligned with the Justice Democrats, the group that first recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He managed Ocasio-Cortez’s historic 2018 primary win before serving as her chief of staff in Washington, where he helped draft the original Green New Deal.
Chakrabarti says he decided to run for the seat held by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after watching Democratic leaders in the aftermath of Trump’s 2024 win, when he said they seemed “helpless to really change anything.” He has a detailed policy platform for California’s 11th District, headlined by the sweeping Mission for America plan to transform the U.S. economy through large-scale public investment and mobilization around green technology. The country needs ambition of that scale, he says, to pull it out of its current state of political and economic chaos. He also hopes his run inspires other progressives to run for office and take over the Democratic Party. “It’s got to be whole new people with new ideas, who are clear on what they stand for and what they’re fighting for, taking over the party,” he says.
Omar Fateh
Minnesota State Senator | Minnesota
Fateh has been called the “Mamdani of Minneapolis”—a comparison that’s partially because he’s also a state legislator challenging an incumbent mayor on a platform focused on affordability and pushing back against Trump. But the comparison has also been used in transparently racist attacks: before his death, conservative commentator Charlie Kirk baselessly fearmongered about the 35-year-old’s Islamic faith.
Fateh argues that current Minneapolis Democratic mayor Jacob Frey has failed to end homelessness and reform public safety in a city still grappling with the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. His top priority is tackling the city’s soaring cost of living, with proposals to raise the minimum wage, speed up affordable housing construction, and implement citywide rent stabilization. The race has already become a high-profile battle between the Democratic Party’s democratic socialist wing and its moderate progressive faction, with dueling op-eds filling the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “Who does our city trust to lead in the time of crisis?” Fateh says. “Do we want leadership that’s rooted in justice and compassion, or do we want more performative politics?”
Brandon Scott
Mayor | Baltimore, Maryland
While Trump and the right fixate on fictional crime waves in blue-state cities, they often ignore the real progress Scott has delivered in Baltimore. The 41-year-old was elected in 2020, after a string of corruption scandals took down previous Democratic mayors. Five years and one re-election later, Baltimore has seen homicides drop to their lowest level in a decade, driven in large part by Scott’s detailed, targeted plan to reduce gun violence.
It used to be a predictable path to climb the Democratic Party ranks: serve a few terms on the backbench of Congress or a state legislature, build seniority, earn a leadership spot on a key committee, and eventually work your way up to higher office. Today, a new generation of Democrats who grew up online have turned viral online fame into sustainable fundraising and organizing power, cutting straight to the top of the ticket.
Mallory McMorrow
Michigan State Senate Majority Whip | Michigan
The 39-year-old state senator became a minor celebrity among political observers in 2022, after a Republican colleague gave a floor speech claiming “children are under attack” by LGBTQ-inclusive school policies. McMorrow walked out in protest, and days later the same Republican sent out a fundraising email with a baseless claim that McMorrow wanted to “groom and sexualize kindergartners.” McMorrow delivered a viral floor speech in response, saying: “I am the biggest threat to your hollow, hateful scheme … Hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen.” The clip of the speech spread like wildfire across social media.
McMorrow could have been a flash in the pan, but she parlayed that viral moment into a national profile, becoming one of the most sought-after campaign surrogates and featured speakers at Democratic fundraising events around the country. Now she’s running for U.S. Senate in one of the most competitive races of the 2025 midterms. McMorrow told WIRED her approach to digital politics was shaped by her early career working at Gawker. “You can talk about policy, you can talk about powerful people, you can talk about something fun, and you can mix and match these things,” she says. “That’s what I do in my digital presence sometimes: I’m talking about being a mom, and a funny thing my daughter said on Instagram last night.”
Zach Wahls
Iowa State Senator | Iowa
Wahls had his own viral defining moment back in 2011, when the then-19-year-old spoke at an Iowa legislative public hearing about growing up with two moms, arguing his family was no different than any other Iowa family. After his speech went viral, Wahls built a national organization for children of same-sex couples, and won a seat in the Iowa State Senate in 2019.
“I had no idea the impact that speech would have on my life,” the 34-year-old tells WIRED. But it revealed something key to him: authenticity has a way of cutting through all the noise of modern politics. Now he’s running for U.S. Senate against incumbent Republican Joni Ernst.
Wahls also understands the core frustration younger voters have with the current U.S. economic and political system. “It feels like the ladder is being pulled up,” the Democrat says. “So many people can’t become homeowners, can’t start a career, can’t start a family … those issues affect people in the most personal and intimate parts of their lives.” With his focus on economic populism, including campaign promises to break up monopolies and raise the minimum wage, Wahls is charting a potential path for young Democratic hopefuls in redder states.
The Fight For Texas’s Political Future
Texas sits at the crossroads of America’s changing political landscape. Over the past few years, a new generation of unapologetically progressive Democrats have chipped away at the GOP’s decades-long grasp on state politics, threatening to shift the once deep-red state blue. That fight exploded into full view at the Texas statehouse this summer, when Republicans tried to ram through a partisan gerrymandering plan to lock in more deep-red congressional districts.
Isaiah Martin
U.S. House Candidate | Houston, Texas
Martin got his start in politics as a voting rights organizer at the University of Houston, but the 27-year-old had his national breakthrough earlier this year during the Republican gerrymandering push. In an act of civil disobedience that went viral online, Martin was arrested and forced out of a public hearing for protesting the plan. All charges against him were later dropped.
“I do see a blue Texas on the horizon,” says Martin, who is running in a special election for the 18th District this November. But to get there, he says, Democrats need to fight