Young Democratic social media star, frustrated by campaigns, sees ano…

  

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When Olivia Julianna first entered the political arena, it was from her teenage bedroom in rural Texas.

Social media became her bridge to the limelight of the Democratic Party. She met then-President Joe Biden, spoke at the Democratic National Convention and quickly became an online target for Republicans.

When the 22-year-old Democratic social media star started working in Texas campaigns, however, she says she saw deep-rooted problems with how Democratic campaigns are run in the state and with her own ideas about how to be successful in politics.

“It is one of the most heartbreaking and difficult lessons you have to learn when you’re working in this space, especially as a young person, is that people are inherently imperfect,” Julianna said in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “Sometimes that imperfection means doing selfish or mean-spirited things with the intention of making positive change.”

She says problems included nepotism, a push for rigid agreement on a set of standard policies, and internal Democratic Party squabbles over strategy. Julianna also says she recognized that she needed to move beyond her political bubble.

Now, Julianna says she is stepping back from campaign work in hopes that speaking out in her newsletter and social media posts can help fix the problems and enable Democrats to eventually flip Texas blue.

Picking up her phone

In the summer of 2020, Julianna was a 17-year-old stuck during COVID-19 lockdowns in a farmhouse in Needville — a small town southwest of Houston. She wanted to go into the city for Black Lives Matter protests but she was a minor, immunocompromised and her dad was against the idea. So, she started posting.

“I took to social media because that’s what I could do,” Julianna said.

She began creating political content on TikTok, X and Instagram in July 2020. Optimistic that she could enact real change, she posted videos that answered questions about the government, speculated on who Joe Biden would pick as his running mate and gave details of her positions on top issues.

Within a few months, Julianna joined TikTok for Biden, a group of young content creators active in the 2020 presidential campaign.

When she returned to school in the fall for her senior year, there were rude comments from students and parents. But even in her conservative hometown, she found support from teachers and other community members who were proud of her success — she was even voted prom queen.

She moved to Houston after her high school graduation, and said she never looked back. TikTok for Biden became a nonprofit called Gen-Z for Change with Julianna as the political director.

“She’s so natural at it, and she just uses her emotions to really convey and relate to that message,” said Sam Schmir, a 25-year-old who worked at the nonprofit with Julianna. “You can just really tell that she deeply cares about the issues she talks about, especially reproductive rights.”

Her accounts gained more traction in 2021 when she encouraged followers to flood a Texas Right to Life tip line, made for reporting violations of Texas’ abortion laws. The website crashed.

In 2022, a series of tweets between Julianna and then-Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz went viral after Gaetz insulted Julianna in a spat about abortion and body image. She ended up raising $2 million for abortion funds across the country.

She has gone toe-to-toe with other big names, and has had to learn to cope with the hate that infiltrates her social media comments — from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Partisan critics come with the political spotlight, but Julianna also gets attention from Democrats saying she was too supportive of Biden and that she has sacrificed some of her original progressive positions in order to fit in with the mainstream party.

While Julianna still describes herself as having progressive views, her positions are nuanced. She thinks that there should be a secure border but also that the government should expand pathways to citizenship, add more immigration judges and protect DACA recipients. Some people have criticized her for that stance, arguing that it is more aligned with Republican positions.

She acknowledged that her messaging has changed since her public political debut, but she says that’s a natural result of meeting people, knocking on doors and leaving her small town.

“Taking in all these perspectives from people in all these different groups,” Julianna said, “made me realize that this very angry, outraged portion of the internet that I had been so entrenched in wasn’t real life.”

Julianna now has over 1 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and X, formerly Twitter. On X, she says she averages 1 million to 10 million views per day.

When she leaves her house, Julianna said she almost always gets recognized. Sometimes it’s moms Facetiming their daughters who are fans or others sharing that they have been inspired by her openness to talk about difficult subjects.

“I don’t just have an obligation to myself to be strong and to not let people bully me,” Julianna said. “I also have an obligation to the people who have chosen to follow me.”

She says that when she reflects on her role, she fears that if she left, someone without her life experiences would take her spot.

“I understand truly what it means to be a working-class young woman living in a state like this,” Julianna said. “Not a lot of people who have that experience and perspective do what it is that I do. I think my voice is needed.”

On the campaign trail

Julianna says she has learned the truth of the advice to never meet your heroes.

When she entered Democratic politics, she saw the fight as a noble cause, but soon she said she met people in politics who were there to protect their own ego and power, not to make change.

Her first introduction to what she calls the “political aristocracy,” in the state was when she volunteered for the 2023 Houston mayoral campaign of Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee.

Candidates and their team, Julianna said, feel like they need to appease certain Democratic groups and leaders in order to win over their own party. They are often swayed, she said, by donations and attention.

“When you start mixing mission-driven outreach and mission-driven and community engagement, and you mix that with politics, I feel like it leads to a lot of cronyism and nepotism and corruption,” Julianna said.

She watched as Jackson Lee’s opponent, then-state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, collected endorsements from groups she believed were ideologically opposed to his views. She was a vocal critic of Whitmire, saying that he wasn’t enough of a Democrat and pointing out his willingness to work with Republicans.

After Whitmire won, Julianna said she recognized that her view of how Democrats should campaign was wrong.

“I was so caught up in this Democrat versus Republican mindset that it hadn’t occurred to me at that point that the reason Whitmire was going to win is because he was able to build a winning coalition,” Julianna said.

She said she realized that campaigning required not writing someone off and instead finding common values with people.

Soon after, she joined then-Rep. Colin Allred’s campaign for the U.S. Senate doing digital consulting and serving as the co-chair of Young Texans for Allred.

His campaign, Julianna said, faced negative backlash from some Texas Democrats for not being progressive enough and for not doing enough to appease Democratic organization leaders in the state.

Before the primary, Julianna received messages from people in her party calling her names over her support of Allred, she wrote on Substack this month.

“There’s always an expectation, there’s always a demand,” Julianna said about Texan Democratic candidates. “They get put on a pedestal, and it’s like all these people around them are just constantly trying to knock them off of it.”

While Julianna says Texas Republicans have never been more divided, she added that they know how to unify when they need to. The same, she said, can not be said for Texas Democrats.

There are also not enough resources for organizing at the county and precinct level, Julianna said, which hurts campaigns, especially in rural areas.

During the Allred campaign, Joshua Martin — Julianna’s co-chair of Young Texans for Allred — said Julianna was working from “sunup to sundown.”

She spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, wearing an Allred pin, and the day after the convention she flew to Dallas for a campaign event before going home to Houston.

“She was very tired after the DNC and then, but she still was like, I need to be here,” Martin, a 22-year-old University of Houston student, said. “She truly means everything that she says … she’s very authentic.”

But it took a Zoom call for Julianna to start to realize that she couldn’t continue working inside Texas campaigns. She was sent as a campaign surrogate to talk to a Democrat-adjacent organization about the Allred campaign.

About six people yelled at Julianna, she said, for an hour straight – complaining that Allred wasn’t an adequate candidate and that their organization was not receiving enough attention.

“It was genuinely one of the worst experiences I have had in my entire life,” Julianna said. “When the meeting was over, I closed my computer and I burst into tears.”

Even now, Julianna feels a pressure not to say the name of the organization involved. It’s still ingrained from her time on campaigns, where everything she did she knew would reflect on the candidate.

This Zoom call, other frustration on the campaign trail and witnessing some party leaders celebrate when Allred lost to Sen. Ted Cruz, led her to write a Substack post in February where she said she could not work in organized Texas politics again, at least for now taking a step back from campaigns.

“I knew that working as a staff member meant dealing with these people and pretending like they were legitimate parts of the grander mission to turn Texas blue,” Julianna wrote. “When in reality they are a reason Democrats and the Texas Democratic Party continues to lose.”

Flipping Texas blue

Even with all her problems with the Democratic establishment in Texas and the hate she receives every day, Julianna says doesn’t think she will ever leave the state or politics.

She remains optimistic that Texas will side with Democrats statewide — and soon — if changes are made to how campaigns operate.

Julianna doesn’t want to work at a job where she feels a pressure to censure her speech.

“I want to put myself in a position where I can tell the truth and not be threatened or face any kind of professional repercussions because of it,” Julianna said.

Her great-grandparents were farmers who immigrated to Texas in 1920, and Julianna feels she can’t leave Texas until it becomes what her great grandparents believed it would be — a place of opportunity and success — for every Texan.

Realizing the problems from inside campaigns made Julianna more passionate and eager to speak out.

“Not a lot of people have the platform that I do,” Julianna said. “If I’m going to have it, and I’m not going to use it to speak out against these things, what’s the point?”

Julianna has published a series of posts on her Substack, A New Perspective, arguing for ways Democrats can improve on messaging, reaching young people and campaigning.

She plans to continue consulting with nonprofits, posting on her social media accounts and working with fellow content creators. In rural communities, Julianna said she is working to provide digital tools and resources to help underfunded local party organizations.

While she believes the political aristocracy in Texas — and across Democratic politics — will never fully go away, she said the problems can be addressed when candidates and elected officials understand that they don’t have to abide by the current system.

“It is the voters who matter,” Julianna said. “It is the people who matter, and if we lose touch with where people are because we spend time in our political bubbles, we will continue to lose elections.”

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