There’s also something ineffable about Twitter’s influence, especially as it pertains to politics, around movement building and fandoms. Honest, sustained social media momentum behind candidates does seem to translate into something, even if it’s not clear how much to trust it. Take Andrew Yang. Though his campaign sputtered out last week, he outlasted multiple high-profile governors and senators. His staying power was linked in part to a movement he built across platforms like Twitter. Establishment pundits and politicos shocked by his longevity might have felt different had they engaged with or even observed #YangGang faithful on Twitter.

A better example might be Senator Bernie Sanders, arguably now the Democratic front-runner. The Sanders movement has been criticized for its intensity on Twitter, which infrequently but occasionally veers into toxic territory. And while analysts dissect the particulars of the Sanders online movement, what’s unquestionable is that it exists and is a stand-in for something very real: enthusiasm.

As we’ve seen so far in the Democratic primary, enthusiasm matters. The gap between hypothetical polling, months out before the first primary contests and the genuine, fandom-like enthusiasm that might motivate voters to caucus, canvas or brave the cold to cast their ballots can collapse quickly.

Indeed, as New York magazine’s Eric Levitz pointed out last year, while Twitter may not be real life, neither is what shapes most electoral politics. “Major parties’ governing agendas aren’t set by their rank-and-file voters in popular referenda,” he wrote. “Rather, each party’s priorities are shaped primarily by its political elites — which is to say, by its most influential elected officials, activists, donors, policy intellectuals, and interest-group leaders. Such partisan elites have never been representative of their ‘normie’ allies.”

Vox’s Ezra Klein recently put it similarly. “Political elites have an outsized effect on what actually happens in politics, and they’re constantly on Twitter,” he said. “And they (we!) create a politics that looks more like Twitter even if that’s not what the country wants.”

One way to read my “Twitter is real life” argument, then, is that elites’ opinions aren’t in step with America, but it doesn’t matter because they’re more influential. That Twitter is dominated by political and media elites who have outsize power and that the narratives they write 280 characters at a time dictate our political reality. There’s a slice of that argument that’s true. The conversation that takes place on Twitter often programs the media; that commandeering of broad voter attention sets political agendas and grants certain candidates outsize power.

But the effect on elites is not more influence. Thanks to places like Twitter, I’d argue that the elites’ power to create political narratives and champion specific political movements has waned. Politicians who build organic online movements and flood the zone with content that’s both proactive and reactive don’t need to woo the media’s or politicos’ attention; they command it at will. Donald Trump and the pro-Trump media have used this to their advantage, while left-leaning politicians like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez use a similar attention-commandeering tactics (although to different ends). Mike Bloomberg — a candidate who has yet to appear on the ballot in early primaries — is largely using Twitter to appear like a top-tier contender for the Democratic nomination.