Stephen Yang
There’s a new battleground in the election: TikTok.
Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have sought to boost their presence on to the platform in a bid to reach young voters, but the former president is making a much bigger splash.
The vice president has only 6.2 million followers, almost exactly half of Trump’s 12.5 million, even though both only started their accounts this summer.
Plus, there are roughly three quarters of a million posts under the hashtag #kamalaharris, compared with 1.6 million on Trump’s hashtag.
Trump has no problem having fun online and has long been surrounded by a team who know memes and how to make things go viral.
Since joining the platform in June, Trump has savvily posted videos with Gen Z streamer Adin Ross and influencer and wrestler Logan Paul, both of whom have followings in the millions.
His feed is filled with TikTok edits of his rallies, videos shot inside his private plane, and allusions to his catchphrase “You’re fired!” from “The Apprentice.”
In a sense, it’s unsurprising Trump’s image took to TikTok memeification so naturally. After all, he was a meme in his own right even before the internet.
In his pre-presidential days, Trump’s name became analogous with success and bravado. Between his iconic “you’re fired” catchphrase and cameos in commercials and popular television shows, he was everywhere. He was even name dropped by Rick Ross nine times in songs between 2008 and 2015.
Not to mention, the guy is a walking soundbite machine. It feels like every other sentence at a rally has viral potential.
The former president seems quite pleased with his rise to TikTok fame, and has said he credits his 18-year-old son Barron for helping him identify popular influencers to collaborate with.
“You know, I’m on TikTok now,” Trump told Joe Rogan in his Friday podcast appearance. “And I’ve done really well… Have you seen the numbers? I’ve had like billions, like billions of hits. It’s crazy.”
Harris has comparatively less engagement. Most of her feed consists of campaign trail footage and produced clips from her speeches. She also posted clips of her appearance on the “Call Her Daddy Podcast,” popular among young women.
While the Harris campaign came out of the gate hot with their “Kamala is brat” meme that took the internet by a storm in the summer, their lead in the social media game seems to have fizzled since.
Since Harris launched her campaign in July, she has largely avoided public engagement,especially when not in front of an arena or crowd. Her TikTok videos are more highly produced, and in the rare glimpses where she is in normal situations she appears stiff.
Take, for example, a video of her and running mate Tim Walz buying bags of chips at a Pennsylvania gas station in August. During the clearly stage-managed event the Vice President doesn’t appear comfortable, looking lost in a snack aisle as Walz hands her Doritos.
It’s perhaps worth noting, too, that Kamala’s appearance on “Call Her Daddy” two weeks ago has just over 700,000 views on YouTube, while Trump’s Friday show with Rogan has over 30 million.
Despite his advantage online, Trump is still trailing behind Harris with young voters overall. But, more revealingly, he’s closed the gap considerably since running against Joe Biden in 2020.
According to polling from NBC, half of young voters plan to back Harris and a third Trump. Broken down by gender, Trump has been gaining considerable ground with young men, while Kamala has outpaced Biden among young women.
Of course, there’s an irony in both candidates leaning into TikTok, which is a Chinese-owned company facing bipartisan opposition.
Harris has previously admitted to having “national security concerns about the owner of TikTok.” Trump signed a 2020 executive order that would have effectively banned the app but was ultimately blocked in court. He later opposed a Congressional effort to ban the app this year.
However, like it or not, 4 in 10 young adults now get their news regularly from the app, making it by far the fastest growing social media news platform in recent years.
Daniel Idfresne, a 20-year-old Syracuse student from Brooklyn, told The Post it’s the perfect place to reach young people who may not even be keyed into the presidential race in the first place.
“I hear from my friends who aren’t necessarily into politics that these clips [of Trump on podcasts] naturally pop up on their feeds,” he said. “I think the Trump campaign has been really successful in reaching out to young men, whether they’re politically in tune or not.”
For Trump, TikTok might just prove to be the perfect way to circumvent the mainstream media intermediary and to get in front of young faces directly.