Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took questions while cooking mac and cheese. Elizabeth Warren chatted about her presidential bid while sipping a cold one. And on Thursday morning, Beto O’Rourke alked a out or-er olicy while si-ing in a en-is air.

That’s “talked about border policy while sitting in a dentist’s chair”, for those of you unfamiliar with linguistic challenges of carrying on a conversation with a dental hygienist’s hands in your mouth.

Two years after Twitter dominated a US presidential election, Instagram appears poised to become the go-to platform for politicians seeking to connect with voters.

Beto is Instagramming his dental cleaning pic.twitter.com/BWyncSW3OK — andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) January 10, 2019

Where Twitter offers politicians a deep well of outrage just waiting to be tapped, Instagram’s milieu is the illusion of intimacy. That accessibility (“Elected representatives, they’re just like us”) has clearly worked for digital natives such as Ocasio-Cortez and O’Rourke.

And with the slate of candidates to challenge Donald Trump in 2020 just beginning to take shape, it may only be a matter of time before we are subjected to Insta-stories of Cory Booker taking out the trash, Kamala Harris tackling her laundry, and Bernie Sanders clipping his toenails.

um alexandria ocasio-cortez is literally making instant pot mac n cheese on instagram live and talking about politics and listening to janelle monae on a friday night. this is the representation i am here for!!!!!!! @ocasio2018 never change pic.twitter.com/A3AcrXbTC3 — eel notyep (@peyIRL) November 10, 2018

It may pose a problem for Instagram, however, which has a reputation as a respite from the fake news and partisan bickering that dominates the news feeds of its parent company, Facebook. The recent departure of Instagram’s founders has only increased anticipation that Facebook will now, finally, actually ruin Instagram.

The platform’s political potency was certainly apparent to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Russian troll farm charged with interfering in the 2016 election. Analyses of its online propaganda campaign released by the US Senate intelligence committee in December revealed that propaganda posts on Instagram received more than twice as many engagements as IRA posts on Facebook.

“Instagram was perhaps the most effective platform for the Internet Research Agency,” stated the report by New Knowledge, an American cybersecurity firm.

Democrats appear to have learned their lesson: if you ant eat em, oin em.