A Mommy Influencer in Louisville, Kentucky, is hawking a cucumber face wipe on Instagram. She leans into the camera and presses a moist tissue to her chin. She tells her audience she swears by it. Later that day, she’s back online to conscript her blond toddler son into a sponsored post for a children’s book called Pete the Hungry Pig. Her name is Kaelin Armstrong Dunn, and she is 29 years old. She has five children, a husband, and pets. She shills relentlessly. Chex. Duracell. An invention that detects alcohol content in breast milk. At 46,500 followers, Dunn qualifies as a top-tier micro-influencer and is tantalizingly close to the sponcon big leagues. ¶ Ninety-nine percent of the time, Dunn stays on brand. Except in early November 2019, a few days after the face-wipe post, she publishes an uncharacteristic #ad for Kentucky
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andy Beshear. “A few reason [sic] I plan to vote for Andy Beshear is because he’s not Matt Bevin, he’s a democrat and he wants to fix the pension plan for [sic] ALL teachers and not just SOME!,” she writes. In the photo, she is holding a child. “He also wants to get rid of right to work, he’s pro union, and my favorite he gets his kids their shots !”
Dunn may well support Beshear, who defeated the Republican incumbent, Matt Bevin, the next day by a mere 5,086 votes. But she plugged him online because a Manhattan-based tech entrepreneur named Curtis Hougland paid her $100 to. Hougland, 52, runs a 13-person start-up that hires social-media influencers to do cheerful propaganda for political clients—in this case, the Kentucky Democratic Party. Once their posts are out in the wild, his firm, Main Street One, plucks high-performing content and turns it into digital advertising. On Election Day, the party ran Facebook ads featuring Dunn’s Instagram post.
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