Twitter isn’t real life” is something people say a lot on X, the social-media platform owned by Elon Musk that many of us still prefer to call Twitter. The journalists we see posting most often on Twitter aren’t necessarily the ones with the most power in the industry, the politicians with the largest Twitter followings aren’t necessarily the ones who win elections, and the conventional wisdom that congeals on Twitter is not what the vast majority of people regard as conventional wisdom. But it’s easy to forget all that when you’re one of the site’s “power users” — those with sizable followings who spend a large chunk of every day tweeting, scrolling through other people’s tweets, and getting into it with other power users and assorted randos. For them, Twitter can feel realer than reality; there’s a cocainelike rush that comes from being the center of attention in an online space.
And who’s to say they’re wrong? Sure, Twitter isn’t a representative sample of any electorate, but does that make the people who use it any less real? And if they’re real, do they not matter? That’s a proposition currently being tested by one of Politics Twitter’s most inescapable power users, Will Stancil (@whstancil), who has over 80,000 followers, tweets frequently with high engagement rates, and in February announced his candidacy for an open seat in the Minnesota State House of Representatives. The 38-year-old Stancil has long described himself in his Twitter bio as a “Proud member of Do-Something Twitter,” and if he prevails in what looks to be a competitive Democratic primary scheduled for August (a caucus last month had him tied for first at 36 percent in a six-candidate field), he may end up getting to do more than any of his online antagonists ever expected.
To residents of House District 61A, which covers a western chunk of the city of Minneapolis including the fashionable Uptown neighborhood made famous by Prince, Stancil is a not particularly well-known young progressive attorney and urban-policy wonk who has spent years campaigning for more effective metropolitan regional governance, desegregation of public schools, and affordable housing. To residents of Twitter, well … here’s an unscientific sample of what some fellow power users have had to say about him:
“Will Stancil has been effective at moving the narrative on the economy because he is an enormous asshole who refuses to give in to leftoid peer pressure tactics.” — prolific left-baiting user SwannMarcus
“The way people talk about Will Stancil you think they’d never seen an annoying moron before.” — prolific left-wing user ettingermentum
“Will Stancil is incredibly annoying but i do enjoy watching him use his emotional problems to fuel endless internecine arguments with disingenuous left wing academics like Corey Robin.” — actor Richard Dreyfuss’s son
“I don’t like Stancil but I can almost respect how he makes people lose their minds because he’s so annoying: that’s power and he is beginning to understand it and wield it.” — John Ganz, author of the forthcoming book When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
All of the above tweets (and many more like them) are from a single month: December 2023, when Stancil dominated a swath of Twitter’s attention by fervently insisting that the U.S. economy was doing well under Joe Biden and that anyone arguing otherwise from the left was mendacious. By most conventional metrics, Stancil was right — compared to any time in our generation’s adult memory, unemployment has been down, labor’s bargaining power has been up, and as a result, workers have felt more empowered to demand raises or to quit bad jobs and find better ones. It’s true the Biden years have been marked by steep inflation, though more recently this has been reined in. It’s also true housing has become prohibitively expensive everywhere, but Stancil is basically aligned with the YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) movement, which has a ready-made answer to that: build more housing (in fact, Minneapolis is leading the way on that, having implemented a series of pioneering land-use reforms over the past 15 years).
Stancil was hardly the only person on Twitter making Pollyannaish arguments about Bidenomics this past year, but he distinguished himself both by his tone and by his stubborn refusal to back down against his many, many critics. By my rough count, Stancil tweeted about the economy around 150 times in December alone, or about five times a day. “Hilarious watching leftists producing these long threads of graphs to try to explain why the economy is bad, actually. They are acutely ideologically and psychologically dependent on the idea that things are terrible, must be terrible, must always be terrible,” he tweeted on December 1. “Also, again: ECONOMIC SENTIMENT IS NOT A DIRECT REFLECTION OF LIVED EXPERIENCE. Everyone assumes that people think the economy is bad because THEY’RE miserable. But it’s because they’re hearing OTHER PEOPLE are miserable! It’s a belief, contingent on information and persuasion,” he tweeted on December 5. My personal favorite, on December 13: “For the crime of pointing out the economy looks very strong, I was already getting pummeled by cosplay Twitter communists. Thanks to Nate Silver’s entry into the debate, I’m now being swarmed by the right-wing anti-vax types who love him. This must be how Poland felt in 1939.” I could go on, but these give a sense of how Stancil uses Twitter: persistently, repetitively, hyperbolically, and sometimes in all caps.
The thing is, posting this way is effective, and Stancil knows it. “Repetition works. Being annoying works,” he told me during a FaceTime interview. Stancil may be annoying, but he is not an asshole; face-to-face, he’s disarmingly affable and earnest. At first, he was a little cagey about being profiled, especially when I said I would be focused on the social-media angle — after all, I pointed out, national media interest in a primary in a safely blue Minnesota state legislative district would normally be limited — but soon enough, he warmed up and was happy to talk about his background, his policy platform, and his online persona.
The son of a local lawyer and an English teacher, Stancil grew up in Belmont, North Carolina — a town of 10,000 people outside Charlotte with the delightfully dated nickname “City of Diversified Textiles,” where Donald Trump beat Joe Biden by around a 20-point margin. Most people Stancil knew growing up were and remain Republicans; as a teenager, he initially was too, and he still has his “Sore-Loserman 2000” T-shirt to prove it. But the Iraq War was radicalizing for Stancil, and since 2003 he has been a die-hard liberal Democrat.
After graduating from nearby Wake Forest University in 2007 and earning a master’s in history at Queen’s University Belfast in 2008, Stancil had the paradigmatic millennial experience of running a field office for Barack Obama in North Carolina (Obama narrowly won the state) and then discovering he was unable to find a job in the wake of the financial crisis. He was even turned down by an ice cream shop. Sensibly, he decided to apply for law school and got a free ride at the University of Minnesota in 2009, and he’s lived in Minneapolis ever since, working at a metropolitan governance think tank affiliated with the university.
Both on his campaign website (which is here, and is not to be confused with the parody campaign site a group of white supremacists set up after Stancil picked a fight with them on Twitter) and in conversation, Stancil comes across as a classic progressive wonk, eager to get into the policy weeds. In 2020, he was among Twitter’s most dogged champions of Elizabeth Warren’s unsuccessful presidential campaign, and he still cites Warren as a good indicator of his basic political outlook.
Stancil is a big supporter of public schools and is categorically against vouchers and charters; he wants to revitalize street-level businesses in his neighborhood, which still haven’t recovered from the pandemic and from the George Floyd protests; he intends to reform public services and for his state government to funnel less money through the NGO sector; and he is particularly concerned about protecting the civil rights of Minneapolis’s East African, Hmong, Hispanic, and LGBT minorities, especially if Trump returns to power. As he freely acknowledges, he and his primary opponents are in broad agreement about most issues in their very liberal district; he hopes to distinguish himself on policy experience and on his specific priorities.
This is a somewhat different range of issues than Stancil’s Twitter audience might associate him with, though not inconsistent. I asked Stancil, for instance, how he would respond to a person in his district insisting that they’re not doing well economically under Biden, given how forcefully he pushed back against that perception online. “Politicians are a little too squeamish about the idea that you can never tell a voter that they’re wrong,” he said. “I wouldn’t recommend sitting down with someone and saying, ‘You’re wrong,’ and pointing a finger at them. But there are narratives people hear all the time that are just completely contrary to the truth.” In Stancil’s view, such narratives tend to germinate in national media conversations, from which they become conventional wisdom to be disseminated among voters, and the supposedly grim state of the economy under Biden is just one of many false narratives the media is responsible for encouraging.
In addition to Warren boosterism, Bidenomics boosterism, and fights with far-right racists, the Twitter version of Stancil has notable fixations. For instance, for much of 2022 he was among the most vocal critics of an informal social circle of liberal wonks who had gathered at the intersection of David Shor’s “popularist” politics, Sam Bankman-Fried’s sham crypto empire, the effective-altruism movement, and Matt Yglesias’s Substack. During Biden’s first two years in office, this loosely defined group rapidly gained influence in Beltway circles and often seemed to have the West Wing’s ear. To Stancil, their disdain for much of the party’s progressive wing and insistence on tailoring policy to appeal to the median voter was ripe for criticism. “When Yglesias, Shor, et al. say absurd things like ‘GOP operatives are closer to the mainstream than Dem operatives,’ what they’re doing is engaging in an elaborate positioning game to make themselves, as moderate white men, seem like the correct leaders of the Democratic Party,” Stancil — who is also white, male, and, some would argue, moderate — tweeted on November 8, 2022, three days before Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy.
With Bankman-Fried’s downfall came the implosion of his philanthropies and the humbling of anyone in political media circles who had associated with him, to Stancil’s palpable delight. In a December 2022 article in this magazine, David Freedlander cited Stancil and his frequent left-Twitter nemesis who goes by the name Carl Beijer as having each independently discovered that one member of that circle, the pollster Sean McElwee, had “given tens of thousands of dollars to SBF’s favored candidates” in a series of Democratic primaries in what looked like a possible straw-donor scheme. (To date, McElwee has not been charged with any crime; Bankman-Fried was recently sentenced to 25 years in prison on multiple counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering, but the campaign finance charges against him were dropped last summer because they weren’t covered under the terms of his extradition from the Bahamas.)
“Did he do it independently? He kinda did it after me,” Stancil said of Beijer’s role in bringing the alleged straw donor scheme to light. “Carl has a tendency to steal stuff.”
“My specific scoop was that SBF donated almost the exact same amount that McElwee donated to candidates and PACs who *also* received donations from SBF,” Beijer told me in response. “Will did some OpenSecrets screencapping, but he did not add up the amounts or make that connection. I have no idea if he tweeted that out before me and honestly don’t care.”
In the summer of 2023, Stancil clashed with more irony-poisoned elements of the left who were joking, in his view distastefully, about the wealthy tourists who died during the Titan submersible implosion. And for a period after the October 7 Hamas attacks, Stancil went hard after left-wing critics of Israel, myself included — though he hasn’t tweeted about the conflict at all since a few weeks before he announced his candidacy. “I kinda don’t think the organized left in America is going to survive this,” he tweeted on October 11. During our discussion, Israel was the only major topic Stancil wanted to go off the record for; on record, he simply said, “My position on the war in Gaza is that it’s horrible, and I want it to end as soon as possible.”
Stancil’s online behavior makes sense when you understand how he sees media: as an insular, elite space in which consequential ideas are discussed and into which a determined and previously unknown figure can break. “If there was a forum in your city where all of the most important people hung out all day, every day, I don’t think it’d be controversial to say that what happened in that place matters,” Stancil said. “That’s what Twitter is for a large portion of the country and for a large portion of politics; it gives you access to people who are influential. I’ve made relationships on Twitter with people who by no means should be talking to me, including high elected officials.”
I pushed him for some examples, and when he declined to name any, I suggested Senator Brian Schatz, the Hawaii Democrat who is very active on Twitter and was recently seen publicly thanking Stancil for “fixing the economy.” “I do know Brian, but there’s actually a few others you wouldn’t guess,” he acknowledged. In any case, Stancil certainly talks with his share of prominent Beltway journalists, Hill staffers, and other political movers and shakers, and there’s no reason to doubt that he is able to influence debates that matter to such people primarily through his knack for posting. Twitter may not be real life, but the narratives debated and shaped there inevitably affect people who participate in real-life politics.
Brian Beutler, a longtime progressive journalist in Washington who befriended Stancil in 2018 via Twitter, said Stancil’s name comes up often in conversations with policy-makers, campaign operatives, and elected officials. “With Democrats who have raised his name to me, I would guess something like two-to-one of them wish he had less of an impact on liberal thinking than he does. And then the other third are grateful that he’s out there,” said Beutler. “It flows naturally from the fact that he is engaged in critique. It’s not that the ideas are two-to-one bad.” Beutler credits Stancil with getting into people’s heads both because of his substantive policy chops and because of the nature of his chosen medium. “He’s not just some articulate crank who’s faking it or phoning it in. He’s got a unique mix of being a persuasive writer and an actual working policy professional, and it helps people in Washington politics take him seriously.”
Beijer, one of the more outspoken socialist power users on Twitter, takes a cynical view of Stancil, though he notes their disagreements are primarily ideological. “The man has absolutely convinced himself that he is somehow controlling political discourse at a national level. He really thinks that his tweets set off a chain of events that ended in the population of the United States deciding that Bidenomics are working,” Beijer said. “It’s delusional, but it also betrays a staggering level of Messianic arrogance and condescension towards all the people who he thinks he’s manipulating.”
Despite the many ways Elon Musk has degraded Twitter since late 2022, it remains a surprisingly robust platform, and Stancil believes he never could have achieved the same level of influence on its imitators like Mastodon or Bluesky. “One thing that has been pretty corrosive is not just Elon Musk doing what he’s done, but the people who have reacted by taking refuge in places like Bluesky that are totally invisible,” Stancil said. “That’s done more to transform the vibe on Twitter than the actual changes Musk has made. We’ve lost so many prominent liberals in particular.” He added, “I’ve said this on Bluesky, and I just got absolutely hammered for it.” Indeed, for better or worse, it’s hard to imagine the next Will Stancil taking off on Bluesky.
In New York, Twitter power users aren’t exactly unusual; they might find each other at the same events or even run into strangers who follow and recognize them. A similar dynamic obtains in Washington, which if anything has an even denser concentration of political media types. But most places aren’t like that; off the top of my head, I struggle to think of another Twin Cities–based figure with Stancil’s level of Twitter clout. He couldn’t name one either, and told me that in Minneapolis he doesn’t normally find himself meeting people who know him by his online persona. “I was at a bar in New York for the Super Bowl this year, and I was still there at 1 a.m. because it’s New York and the bars are open late, which is a novelty,” Stancil said. “I started talking to the bartender, and he said, ‘I’m a Twitter guy, I know who you are,’ and then he gave me free beers until six in the morning.”
Running for office isn’t something Stancil has been preparing for his whole life; if it were, he probably never would have become such a prominent Twitter personality. One thing that’s at stake in his election is whether born posters like him have a shot at real political power — whether the accumulation of unfiltered hot takes over many years ends up becoming more of an asset or a liability on the campaign trail. Beutler, for his part, hopes he never logs off: “Half the time, I hope he loses his race so that he can remain a stalwart critic on Twitter, where I feel like his influence is at least as great as a state legislator’s.”
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