Heroic music blares as Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White announces Donald Trump’s arrival on TikTok. President Joe Biden grins to the camera as he grabs a bite at Waffle House and “daps up” a customer. TikTok users declare that Vice President Harris is “brat.”
This presidential election season, candidates are using TikTok as a political battleground.
Scrolling through election-related videos on TikTok reveals just how important the platform is in shaping public perception of candidates and their confidence in their campaigns. The app’s short-form content caters to its disproportionately young user base and their low attention span. And, as TikTok continues to be flooded with political content, it’s becoming the key tool for Gen Z to decide which candidates they want to laud, shame, or vote for.
Why TikTok matters
In the past, social media has allowed candidates to communicate with voters and score charisma points. This year the platform of choice is, perhaps surprisingly, TikTok.
Biden, Trump, and Harris have each embraced the app as a public relations tool, and data suggests this strategy is sound. Only 3.9 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 watched the first presidential debate live. Nearly half of TikTok’s users and 32% of Americans aged 18 to 29 regularly receive news from the app, which is up from 9% in 2020, a higher percentage than any other social media platform except X. This is particularly salient given that members of Gen Z in the U.S. are more likely to be independent and, on average, spend 80 minutes a day on TikTok.
Biden’s rough run with TikTok
After the June debate between Biden and Trump, the consensus among young voters on TikTok was that Biden’s debate performance was more disastrous than Trump’s. Clips of the president’s freezes and stumbles and Trump’s snide comments about Biden’s age went viral. One post — which garnered 3.8 million likes — shows Twitch streamer willstunna reacting to Trump roasting Biden, with the caption “Why was Trump frying Biden like this.” Another user posted a compilation of Biden’s fumbles and Trump’s comebacks with the caption “trump is too funny.”
Negative Biden videos on TikTok, in total, got more than 50 million views, triple the 15 million views that negative Trump videos received.
Biden’s TikTok strategy did little to help his case. His campaign account, then called @BidenHQ, posted two to three videos a day, mostly clips of the president explaining his stances, endorsements from Gen Z Democrats, and videos pointing out Trump’s flaws. The sheer number of posts Biden was posting conveyed his social media team’s and his party’s desperation, and the low view count showed the weakness of his voter base. The disparity between candidates was especially pronounced considering Trump’s campaign account had a total of nine posts, which were getting far more views — receiving anywhere from 8 million to 171 million views.
Biden’s strategy appeared to be compensating for a poor debate performance and party members’ lack of confidence in Biden as their frontman. Despite his public statements that he was going nowhere, Biden’s TikTok strategy failed to alleviate voters’ concerns about his viability as a candidate and foreshadowed his ultimate decision to step aside.
There was significant discourse around whether it was political elites — the suits on and around Capitol Hill — who pushed Biden out. But it actually appears that voters on social media significantly influenced the party’s decision.
Democratic voters used TikTok as a platform to call for Biden to step aside. Some cited his perceived failures, especially regarding the conflict in Gaza, as reason enough to not vote for him. Others said, no matter how competent he was as a leader, Biden was making a mistake by refusing to admit he was too old to be electable.
It is hard to believe the group flooding Biden’s page with negative content is the same demographic that carried Biden over the finish line in 2020. The youngest cohort of voters has grown disenchanted with Biden. A March Reuters poll showed Americans aged 18-29 preferred Biden over Trump by just three percentage points — 29% to 26% — with the rest favoring another candidate or remaining unsure of their vote.
This all could have been avoided, Ronald Reagan-style, if Biden’s approach, both in the debate and on social media, focused more on his persona than his policies. Reagan’s humorous quip, “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience,” dispelled all doubts of his competency back in 1984. By contrast, Biden’s efforts to defend his age by harkening back to his time as a Senator only reminded voters of exactly how long ago that was. It is evident, then, that their poor handling of social media, especially TikTok, compounded existing concerns about Biden and sealed his campaign’s fate.
Assessing the success of Trump’s TikTok “aura campaign”
By contrast, Trump’s TikTok has seen runaway success, and boosted an initially strong showing at the polls. When Biden was in the race, Trump’s approval rating was at par with him and one percentage point higher than Harris.
Trump’s TikTok strategy projects more confidence than Biden’s ever did. While his account’s page is sparse, he seems to have tapped into his former role as a showman in his approach toward the app. For instance, when Biden was still in the race, Trump used TikTok to show his comparative youthfulness and relatability through collaborations with influencers and streamers.
Trump’s flashy videos are ideal for TikTok’s “entertainment-first” algorithm. They’re also a power play, showing that he can get recognizable faces like influencers Logan and Jake Paul to back him and showing Gen Z voters he still is relevant.
Trump’s collaborations, alternatively, with the UFC and the Paul brothers helped him brand himself as a fighter, which worked well against Biden’s perceived frailty. And in the days since Harris’ presidential bid, Trump’s “aura” — his coolness — on TikTok and the youthful energy around his campaign has been instrumental in keeping many Gen Z’ers in his corner.
VP Harris: the new meme queen on the block
Then, Vice President Kamala Harris entered the presidential race, and the game changed entirely.
Harris’ nascent campaign has already received a massive boost from TikTok, where her backers repost videos of her famous coconut speech, edits of her dancing, and memes referencing “brat summer”. Her campaign accounts on X and Instagram smartly capitalized off of the memes flooding the internet, reposting many, and, in some instances, even adding their own twists.
The campaign’s biggest move was changing the header image of its X account to a bright green panel with “kamala IS brat” written on it.
But of all the memes, why “brat summer”?
The phrase originates from the title of English singer Charli XCX’s June album “Brat,” which skyrocketed in popularity among Gen Z listeners. Throughout the summer, users on Instagram, TikTok, and X created edits of the bright green cover of “Brat,” and used the song for their short-form content.
In an interview on TikTok, Charli described a brat as “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes.” It’s the perfect descriptor for Harris, whose detractors, including Trump, have called her “drunk” or “crazy” after her speeches. By adopting the phase, Harris is expertly flipping what could be perceived as a weakness into a veritable strength.
Harris’ campaign team is the same as Biden’s, but yielded vastly different results, demonstrating that a candidate’s success can’t be entirely attributed to social media. It’s the candidate themself and the way in which their campaign team capitalizes off of their unique energy that makes the difference.
In Harris’ case, her bubbly, lively and very Gen Z energy are to credit for her record-breaking fundraising, an increase in public approval by 16 percentage points since the beginning of July at the point of writing this article, immense online adulation, and the Democratic Party’s newfound cohesion. It’s this energy that has her up by nine percentage points against Trump among Gen Zers according to an August New York Times/Siena poll. And it’s this energy that makes her campaign appear more sincere in its effort to connect with Gen Z.
Advice for Harris moving forward
Harris’ social media team has already jumped on the meme train, and done so in a way superior to any of Biden’s past attempts. Her engagement has shot up significantly since she announced her candidacy, from under 10 million views to over 60 million total per video.
If Harris is following Trump’s playbook — get “memed” as much as possible to stay in public discourse — this could work well. However, too many posts attempting to be relatable to Gen Z from her own account might lead voters to doubt her electability and seriousness about her campaign. And as Trump and his supporters begin to launch attacks at everything from her past romantic relationships to her border policy, it’s key for Harris to consider that her newly cultivated relatable and youthful image could be used against her as well by Republican politicians.
If Harris wants to maintain the volume and frequency of her posts, it is crucial for her to engage deeply with Gen Z, beyond pop culture references. Using her TikTok platform to solicit questions about her policies and answering them in short bytes is something that could augment her campaign’s connection with voters.
The “Kamala-nomenon” has just started. As Trump takes aim at Harris, a good media strategy could pave her path to a “brat girl presidency,” but only if she maintains the critical balance between content and cool factor.
