His most realistic projection is a tepid 52 Senate seats for the Democrats. He tells me he’s witnessed too much racism on the campaign trail to believe otherwise; that the rabid tenacity of MAGAdom can’t be discounted, and that its nativist lean remains a viable political force. He’s worried about James Talarico, and Texas as a whole. He fears that Sherrod Brown faces an uphill battle. He can’t even begin to conjure fantasies of a blue South Carolina. And frankly, after an election cycle in which Piker emerged as an unlikely main character—where his gaffes were immediately metabolized into national lightning rods, with the Murdoch estate covering his every move, when even Donald Trump knows his name—I wonder if he feels simply beaten down by a very strange year. After all, Piker ends 2026 more famous than he’s ever been before—which means he’s rarely been more hated.

“I’ve been introduced to a new demographic of people that had no idea who I was before, and they know me in the most negative terms possible,” he tells me. “Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in every state in the country calling me a jihadist. We like to call it Hasan Derangement Syndrome. People develop a negative impression of me and never let it go.”

He’s not wrong. Throughout the midterms, Republicans did everything they could to tie Piker’s name to Democratic hopefuls around the country. The hope was that Americans would find his rhetoric too dangerous, and his ideas too exotic—a physical manifestation of Democratic Socialists of America Jacobinism; a vessel for good old-fashioned liberal overreach, casting a pall over a potential blue wave. They pulled out all the stops: Fox News mentioned Piker’s name on 400 different occasions in the month of August alone. Stephen Miller can’t stop tweeting about him. His thirst-traps were given prominent placement at September’s Republican National Convention. Would it work? If Democrats underperformed—if, God forbid, they choked away the Senate, or even the House—the blame could be laid at the feet of this streamer, coiled under the lights of his studio in a sage-green suit, the clock ticking away toward judgment.

So yes, Piker has reasons to be nervous.

“Tonight, we find out if Hasan Piker Democrats are winning up and down the ballot,” he announces, somewhat sardonically, at the beginning of his stream. If they do? “I’m excited not to be called a terrorist every day.”