Donald Trump and Kamala Harris vie for younger voters

A seven-second TikTok video posted this month on the official Kamala Harris account shows Donald Trump mistakenly telling a crowd to get out and vote on January 5.

“Bro is running for president and doesn’t even know when Election Day is,” reads the caption, alongside a laughing emoji.

While the 2016 race for the White House was labelled the “Facebook election” as campaigns and voters flocked to the social media platform, this year TikTok is the app of choice for Harris and Trump’s online battle for younger voters.

“This election has been the TikTok election,” said Lara Cohen, head of creators at Linktree, which has worked on get-out-the-vote initiatives. The campaigns are “conscious that [Gen Z] is a demographic that they need to be hitting if they’re going to win — and that starts with generating enthusiasm online”.

The campaigns have been harnessing irreverent internet culture, memes and slang on TikTok, as Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has deliberately shifted its algorithm away from serving political content on Facebook and Elon Musk’s pro-Trump bent has alienated some users of his platform, X. 

TikTok’s algorithm — which feeds users an addictive stream of popular short videos — allows campaigns to get in front of new audiences who might not otherwise be searching for political content.

“The design of the app allows opposing filter bubbles to interact,” said Crystal Abidin, professor of internet studies at Curtin University in Perth. “It allows you to find things outside your palette.” 

Users have been wielding its popular features — such as “duetting” and live streaming debates with other accounts — to engage with politics. Some creators have also taken to making “fancam” videos, compilations of photos or videos of candidates edited with effects, which fans typically create to celebrate musical artists and actors. There is a trend of TikTok users filming themselves filling in their mailing ballots to music. 

To increase Harris’s reach when she became the Democratic candidate in July, her camp hired what deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty described as a pack of “feral 25-year-olds” to latch on to trending music and popular editing styles in real time.

They have generated their own viral videos on issues including abortion and climate change, alongside Trump bloopers. 

At the same time, the campaign openly courted creators on the platform, inviting them to glitzy White House events and to the Democratic National Convention, in the hope their messaging would spread organically to their own sizeable TikTok followings. 

Trump’s TikTok has presented a more sombre offering — videos set to menacing music, with dark predictions about the economy and soaring immigration under a Harris presidency, and pieces-to-camera by the former president warning of a “nation in decline”.

These are interspersed with clips of light-hearted meetups with young male creators, such as prankster Logan Paul and video game streamer Adin Ross, who are closely affiliated with the so-called manosphere, or online spaces focused on masculinity. 

Harris’s TikTok strategy is “aspirational for any brand, let alone a politician”, where Trump’s feels “less native” to TikTok and closer to traditional campaign material, according to Cohen.

Despite having 5mn followers, compared with Trump’s 12mn, Harris’s KamalaHQ account has attracted 1.5bn views, compared with the Republican candidate’s 1bn. 

But Harris mania has lost steam in recent weeks, both in the polls and on TikTok.

Data shared with the Financial Times by social media intelligence platform CredoIQ found that the amount of viral conservative content on TikTok surpassed viral progressive content in the wake of the vice-presidential debate between JD Vance, the Republican, and Tim Walz, the Democrat, at the beginning of October. 

Ben Darr, CredoIQ’s founder, noted that a rise in Trump-supporting creators pushing content criticising the current government’s relief efforts in hurricanes Helene and Milton might have contributed to the swing.

About 47 per cent of content viewed about the October storms was conservative, compared with 43 per cent that was progressive, according to CredoIQ.  

Harris’s digital operation, which is about 250 strong, has a rapid response team of about 15 young people. Well versed in internet speak, they trawl the web looking to latch on to trends just as they are gathering momentum, collaborating through Slack channels and messaging apps.  

The content goes through a light approval process, with an emphasis on trial and error. Some posts mock Trump for being “weird” and “out of it”, or feature clips of Democrats “dragging” or “clapping back” at his policies. In others, Harris is typically laughing or “sharing her love for Gen Z”. 

The goal, according to one person familiar with the campaign’s strategy, is to create “permission structures”, or make influencers feel comfortable enough to post positively about Harris, which means their followers feel able to do the same. 

“Only having Gen Z do that is authentic,” said April Eichmeier, assistant professor in the emerging media department at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota. “A tweet from the Clinton campaign used to take days. That’s not how you run a campaign in a world where something can go viral in 15 minutes.”

The success of Harris’s digital campaign has irked Trump, who has insisted on his Truth Social app that he has “the greatest social media program in history”. 

But experts note there are fewer Republican politicians on TikTok, partly because some have taken issue with its Chinese ownership and described the app as “digital fentanyl” designed to destroy the minds of young Americans. 

“Republicans by and large have missed an opportunity to be there,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist and executive director at the Center for Campaign Innovation. He added that the centre’s research found that one in five self-identified Maga Republicans used TikTok every day. 

But in an interview with Semafor, Alex Bruesewitz, senior Trump communications adviser, said TikTok had been “good for us this campaign cycle”, while in 2020 Facebook had engaged in “censorship”.

Bruesewitz added that the campaign had been “leveraging Trump as a person”, for example “through funny TikTok meetups with some of the biggest influencers in the world”. 

TikTok’s new role at the heart of politics has brought with it fresh concerns about misinformation on the platform. A report earlier this month by left-leaning group Media Matters found conspiracies and falsehoods on TikTok related to the recent hurricanes that had garnered millions of views.

With Trump and Harris running neck and neck as campaigning is in its final stretch, it is unclear whether the candidates’ TikTok followings will give them an edge at the ballot box.  

Jessica Siles, deputy press secretary of Gen Z political advocacy group Voters of Tomorrow, said there was a surge in volunteer sign-ups and recruitment when Harris was elevated to the top of her party’s ticket. “So much of that excitement came from the online buzz that immediately happened on TikTok,” she said. 

But Cohen cautioned that while “early indications of voter registration have been really positive in terms of activating young people . . . the proof is going to be in the pudding”. 

Additional reporting by Anna Nicolaou in New York and Peter Andringa in London