Logan Paul Won’t Actually Run for President, But a YouTuber Soon Will

The closest a Paul is getting to the White House is when younger brother Jake hid in the bathroom overnight — but as for others…

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Winklevi and Erik Drost, composite by Chris Stokel-Walker

Big news: Logan Paul is running for president of the United States. Except, not really.

The 24-year-old YouTuber, who has pivoted to podcasting and boxing after uploading a misjudged YouTube video showing a hanging body in a Japanese forest famous for being a place for people to kill themselves, tweeted "I’ll do it" in response to a video featuring comedian Tim Dillon (who was caught up in the recent boner pill scandal FFWD managed to help sort out) extolling the virtues of a Paul presidency to weed smoking YouTube sensation and podcast host Joe Rogan.

(Once again, YouTube is weird.)

Now, plenty of people say they’ll run for president and never do. As a nine-year-old, I watched professional wrestler Hulk Hogan announce his candidacy for U.S. president through a clip of Jay Leno’s talk show broadcast on WCW Monday Nitro, where Hogan was appearing as a major attraction at the time. (YouTube doesn’t have a monopoly on weird.)

Hogan “retired” from wrestling to run his presidential campaign. You don’t need to be a history major to know that he in fact, never ran for president, nor even made it close to the 2000 election — though it would have been fun to see if Hogan’s famed 24-inch pythons could have rectified the issue with hanging chads that blighted that election.

In fact, Hogan’s campaign lasted about a month — enough time for him to squeeze the publicity sponge dry, and to film some fun videos, which is likely the same playbook we could see for Logan Paul.

Outlandish statements are an easy way for YouTubers to fill the fallow period of content. Saying you’ll stand for president is an easy way to get clout on social media; that sound you hear is the clattering of a thousand keyboards as media outlets like this one figure out how best to leverage SEO traffic from the nakedly transparent attention grab.

Paul can film fake press conferences; he can devote an entire video to buying a suit; he can interview members of the public about what his policies should be; his weird Maverick brand logo is already 90% of the way to being a presidential campaign branding. It’s practically the bald eagle that epitomises the United States in the first place. And from a video perspective, it all adds up. It makes sense for a canny businessman coming off a fallow period for content after diverting most of his time to training for a boxing match he ended up losing to find something to hook his upcoming videos around.

But while Jake Paul, Logan’s younger brother, is likely to remain the sibling who got closest to the Oval Office by dint of an ill-advised stunt where he went AWOL on a visit to the White House and hid overnight in the public bathrooms, there is a serious message to be taken from this.

Though Logan Paul won’t be the first, and 2020 won’t be the campaign, we will likely see a YouTuber standing for election to the highest office in the land shortly. We’ve already seen a raft of YouTubers standing for office in various parts of the world: Carl Benjamin and Paul “PrisonPlanet” Watson both stood as candidates in the 2019 European parliamentary elections for the U.K. Independence Party — and failed. Rasmus Paladan, a far-right Danish YouTuber, stood for election in his home country — and failed.

But as having a YouTube (or a TikTok) account becomes as commonplace as a Facebook account, we’ll see people who have built up a following transferring over to politics within the next few years.

“Whilst Logan Paul is never really going to pose a serious political threat, it will be important to see whether more traditional candidates start to utilize famous YouTubers as surrogates to try and get people out to vote,” says Steven Buckley, associate lecturer at the University of the West of England. “Similarly it will be interesting if YouTubers are willing to dip their toe into political discussions with the fear of potentially alienating some of their fans.”

Some, as we’ve previously reported, have already taken a keen interest in politics. Brazilian YouTuber Felipe Neto has taken on the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, for his stance on LGBTQ+ rights. And German YouTuber Rezo caused ructions in Germany after speaking out against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats party.

It makes sense: politicians are increasingly looking to YouTube to try and get out the vote, and so YouTubers are seeing the power they wield and wondering if they couldn’t make a difference beyond the platform. (It’s part of the reason we have YouTuber MrBeast spearheading a campaign to plant 20 million trees.)

So who will be the first YouTube politician to reach a major position of power? Smart money would be on Cenk Uygur, creator of the progressive U.S. political YouTube channel The Young Turks. His video announcing he’d be running to replace Katie Hill in California’s 25th congressional district was seen by 200,000 people in 10 days.

“Cenk Uygur runs the largest and longest running YouTube news channel,” says Buckley. “People may disagree with his Bernie Sanders, progressive policies, but his character and authentic nature, coupled with a large established fan base will certainly be seen a positive in his race.”

If Uygur wins, it could open the floodgates for future YouTubers to dip their toe into political waters — and who knows what’ll happen then.