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The role TikTok is playing on the campaign trail

TikTok has 170 million users in the U.S., and nearly half of users between 18 and 29 years old go to the platform for politics and news.

As the social media landscape has changed since the last presidential election, candidates are turning to TikTok to reach younger voters. (Scripps News)

By: Stephanie Liebergen

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Reaching out to voters used to require door-knocking, sending mailers, or doing key TV interviews. But to reach voters today, candidates have to go where the voters are, and that’s online.

Dave Karpf is an associate professor at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs. He says the social media landscape has changed a lot since the last presidential election. Legacy sites like Facebook and Instagram are downplaying political content, and X doesn’t quite fill the void Twitter did. A platform that is playing a role this cycle is TikTok.

“The campaigns are going to go to TikTok because that’s where the young people are, and also they’re going to go to TikTok because that’s where people are scooping up video for the other platforms,” Karpf said.

Karpf equates today’s popular TikTok accounts to top bloggers from 20 years ago. They serve to connect politicians with an audience who might not otherwise see them. Thinking back to the Obama administration, Karpf recalls that he would go on ESPN every year to reveal his March Madness bracket. “And that was smart, because that’s where he could reach people who aren’t tuning in for political news,” he said.

TikTok has 170 million users in the U.S., and nearly half of users between 18 and 29 years old go to the platform for politics and news, according to Pew Research.

Former President Donald Trump joined in June, launching his account with a 13-second video that has amassed over 175 million views in three months. But other Republicans have stayed away from the platform, likely due to the national security concerns created by TikTok’s links to China.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign team has been on TikTok since February, but she created an individual account on July 25, just four days after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her. The Democratic National Committee has been on the platform much longer. That account was created in March 2022.

According to Zelf, a company analyzing and tracking TikTok posts, videos about the two campaigns are generating a similar number of views and posts. Their analytics show that videos about Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz are overwhelmingly positive, while videos about Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance are mostly negative. But Pew Research shows nearly a quarter of TikTok users say they see mostly liberal content.

The social media team for Harris is nearly identical to the team President Biden used, but Karpf says they quickly adjusted their style in an “astonishingly effective” way. “There was this earnest enthusiasm, people playing around with [TikTok]... or Charli XCX announcing that Kamala was a brat, and then they were able to riff on that and play with it without going too far,” he explained.

So what is Karpf’s biggest piece of advice for candidates? Don’t force it.

“The thing for candidates to avoid is trying too hard to make themselves fit into a space where they don’t belong. Because then people can tell you don’t belong here, and this is cringe in a way that we’re going to make fun of it,” he said.

While candidates and campaigns hope for millions of views and likes, Karpf notes that online activity might not have a big impact on how people vote.

“Advertisements in general, comms in general, tends to shape what the campaign is about, and can build up our institutions or undercut our institutions... there’s very little evidence that TikTok or any other social media actually moves a lot of votes,” he said.