By Christine Rosen
Thursday, October 24, 2024
If Barack Obama was America’s first Facebook
president, and Donald Trump its first Twitter president, then Kamala Harris,
should she win, is poised to become our first TikTok president, and not merely
because her campaign has proven more skillful than her opponent’s at utilizing
the platform.
TikTok perfectly suits Harris’s skills as a presidential
candidate: It’s appealing in small doses (the average TikTok video is about 35
seconds long) but unable to sustain a complex argument. It’s heavy on imagery
and light on substance; useful for promoting “vibes” rather than policies; and,
with its easy clip and stitch features to edit videos, an ideal conduit for
political propaganda. As one influencer who runs a pro-Harris TikTok account
called “Let’s Get Her Elected” told Big Issue magazine, “Kamala’s
messaging and ability to deliver that message appeals to people who are on
TikTok more than Trump’s incoherent ramblings or Biden’s incoherent speeches.
Kamala is much more clippable, which just makes for better content.”
That content is often more juvenile than presidential.
The KamalaHQ TikTok feed frequently mocks Donald Trump’s appearance and
features videos with up-talking young narrators and propulsive background
music. Other posts have reaction videos for things Trump has said, complete
with emojis and images of a stern-looking Harris with the caption, “I’m not
finished!” By contrast, although Trump’s official TikTok includes video
snippets of him with YouTuber Jake Paul and moments when he says that Harris
isn’t very smart, it’s far more staid and less heavily produced than Harris’s
account.
Like Harris’s public persona, her TikTok content is also
not entirely authentic. As Lee Fang and others reported, many of the
social-media influencers promoting Harris across various platforms are
pay-for-play. For example, “marketing agencies” funneled payments from
Democratic PACs to influencers and “content creators,” hundreds of whom
attended the Democratic convention this summer to boost Harris — with five
influencers even given speaking slots. None disclosed that their Harris
boosterism was paid advertising (currently a gray area in FCC reporting
requirements). As a correspondent for Slate complained,
traditional-media reporters were often denied seats and opportunities for
interviews at the convention, while influencers were given “yacht parties on
Lake Michigan” and, as Wired magazine reported, were invited to “Hotties
for Harris” gatherings, complete with signature cocktails and “abortion access
Skee-Ball” stations. CBS News reported that the Harris people gave influencers
“messaging and campaign details,” and some of them scored interviews with the
candidate herself — even as she refused to sit down with a single TV, magazine,
or newspaper journalist.
TikTok videos of Harris hugging people on the campaign
trail turned out to be staged interactions. The Harris “fans” excited to meet
her at a Primanti Bros. restaurant in Pittsburgh, for instance, were later
revealed to have been supporters bused in for the event (after the restaurant
kicked out its regular patrons).
***
These stunts may be crafted for social-media consumption,
but they have drawn in viewers whom Harris hopes to turn into voters on
Election Day. As Axios reported, Harris’s TikTok “gained 2
million followers in the first 24 hours” after she became the Democratic
presidential nominee and now boasts 6 million followers. Her KamalaHQ account
has 4.8 million followers. (Trump’s TikTok account has 11.8 million followers
but lower engagement and fewer likes than Harris’s two accounts have.)
In today’s world, the traditional markers of presidential
campaigns matter far less than they used to. Recalling the infinite-scrolling
design of TikTok, Harris has scrolled through dozens of campaign slogans, none
of which has been especially memorable: “We Are Not Going Back!” “Freedom!”
“When We Fight, We Win!” “A New Way Forward!” But the lack of a slogan barely
matters in a world where increasing numbers of Americans get their news from
social-media platforms like TikTok. No wonder the Harris campaign assumed that
its candidate could coast on vibes and “joy” coming out of the convention.
And yet, even with the campaign calendar unusually
compressed after Democrats shoved Biden out of the race, Harris’s meme-ified
social-media campaign has worn thin.
TikTok’s personalization algorithm is fiendishly
effective at driving users to content that feeds their tastes and confirms
their views. In the real world, however, Harris has long struggled to
understand voters who don’t share her own deep-blue, California views. Her
disastrous showing in the 2019 Democratic primary is one example. In the
current campaign, her efforts to reach out to male voters by hiring actors to
pretend to be fathers and mechanics and cowboys in an advertisement where they
declared themselves “man enough” to vote for Harris drew well-deserved mockery.
Perhaps these lapses are why her favorability rating, which rose briefly after
the convention, got stuck at 45 percent.
Despite finally granting a few real interviews, Harris
has mostly opted for vapid and flattering interactions with people outside of
journalism. The 58-second clip of her laughing her way through an appearance on
Stephen Colbert’s show, where she sipped a Miller High Life (“It’s the
champagne of beers!”) and tried to seem relatable to Midwestern men, was the
least annoying part of the interview — and her campaign knew that clip was what
most people would see.
***
Perhaps this strategy will pay off for her. Since more
than half of American adults and higher percentages of younger voters,
according to Pew Research, get some of their news from social media now, many
voters might not realize how unusual the strategy is. They don’t care whether
she sat down with the editorial board of the Washington Post as long as
they can have brief and amusing video segments, carefully curated by KamalaHQ,
delivered like digital fentanyl (as former representative Mike Gallagher
memorably called TikTok content) straight into their veins.
In this sense her vacuousness is a feature, not a bug, of
her campaign. Anyone can seem competent for 35 seconds. Some of her weaknesses
as a candidate (her word salads, her nervous laughter) are easily hidden on
social media — along with her running mate’s over-the-top gesticulations and
mugging for the camera. Even her mediocre performance on Fox News could be
turned into TikTok gold: The snippets of the interview with Bret Baier that her
campaign posted on social media showed Harris refusing to answer substantive
questions and instead telling viewers to go to her website to see her policies.
She knows most TikTok users aren’t going to bother doing that.
After spending time on Harris’s TikTok feeds, though, one
is left with an unsettled feeling about her ability to do the job of president.
There is little evidence she can think strategically or creatively on her feet
when pressed about even the most basic policy issues, whether they concern the
economy, crime, or the border. Her strong debate performance against Trump
required a week of preparation, and even then, she won not because she was a
stellar debater but because Trump predictably succumbed to his own vanity when
she needled him. Most of her campaign has involved a careful effort to avoid
tough interviews in favor of coconut-tree memes and chats with gushing
celebrities. The Baier interview on Fox was notable in part because it was the
first one where she not only faced tough questions but where, unlike her
earlier appearance on 60 Minutes, the network did not heavily edit her
answers to make her seem more competent when the interview aired.
Critics of Trump have long indicted his supporters for
embracing his “cult of personality.” Harris is doing something different but no
less dangerous for our politics: By relying on social-media platforms, which
are near-perfect technologies for fostering parasocial relationships, she has
declined to take any firm positions at all (to say nothing of her refusal to
take responsibility for her record as vice president). Parasocial relationships
aren’t healthy; they’re one-sided. People invest their time and emotional
energy in someone they do not really know but with whom they feel they are
interacting. TikTok offers the delusion of familiarity in a way that can be
entirely misleading and easily manipulative. If Harris wins, the country won’t
just have voted for more of the same from a Democratic Party turning further to
the left. It will have chosen a way of doing politics that replaces virtue with
vacuousness and the tough job of testing a candidate in the real world with
clicking on what’s trending.
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