BALANCE OF POWER — When Kamala Harris opened her own personal TikTok account in late July, separate from her existing campaign account, within days she received millions of likes and hundreds of thousands of supportive comments welcoming her to the app. The same can’t be said for JD Vance. The Republican vice presidential nominee’s account, which he opened last Friday, isn’t sparking much hype at all. Vance’s entrance onto the app was something of a disaster, and now his account is barely breathing. It’s emblematic of a recent turn of events in the campaign social media wars — with Harris replacing Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, it’s overturned the balance of power on apps like TikTok. Prior to Harris’ ascension, Trump dominated Biden in the social media space. When Trump joined TikTok in June, he outpaced the Biden campaign’s total follower count within mere hours. But Harris changed the equation. When she joined TikTok, enthusiastic Gen Z users were already mobilizing in her support – meming her distinct laugh, creating audio edits of her funny phrases, and compiling videos of her best roasts of Trump. That receptive environment made it easier for her account to gain the traction needed for lift off. She alluded to the organic support in a brief debut video on July 25: “I’ve heard that recently I’ve been on the ‘For You Page’, so I thought I’d get on here myself,” she said directly into the camera. TikTok users loved it. The acknowledgement — and winking appreciation — of the existing content served as encouragement for the people creating it. And the video’s simplicity — it was just a few seconds long — avoided the sheen of inauthenticity. As of today, the post has amassed 31.9 million views, 4.7 million likes and 140,300 comments. The top comments are overwhelmingly positive. Harris has taken full advantage of this momentum in her personal account, creating 16 videos in 14 days and amassing 24.5 million likes in total. Her campaign account, Kamala HQ, has posted 64 times – over three times per day – since Harris moved to the top of the presidential ticket, and the account boasts 65.5 million likes in total. That momentum has carried over to her new running mate, Tim Walz. The Minnesota governor doesn’t have a TikTok account as yet, but he has caused a stir on the social media platform in the 24 hours since he was tapped, with memes circulating of him at the state fair with his daughter and various compilations of the Minnesota governor calling the Trump/Vance ticket ‘weird.’ The Harris campaign’s proliferation of TikTok content stands in stark contrast with the Republican ticket. Trump, too, has a large following on TikTok — 9.7 million followers — and he has amassed 30.5 million likes. But he is not very active: he has posted 9 times in total since creating it on June 1. One of his videos remains up even though there is no sound accompanying the text on the post. Trump has yet to post a single time with Vance. By comparison, Harris has posted content with Walz in it three times in the last 24 hours. Without getting any lift from Trump, Vance’s account has floundered, despite a debut video that seemed poised to go viral. Vance had partnered with the Nelkboys, a Canadian-American YouTube channel and entertainment company that are a Trump family favorite. Donald Trump Jr. was one of their first podcast guests in 2021. Trump himself has worked with the Nelkboys several times, and even personally praised them at a rally in Nevada. The Vance/Nelkboys collaboration was part of a new initiative called Send the Vote, a $20-million voter registration and turnout program aimed at courting the kind of crowd attracted to Nelk's content — young men. "Yo JD, we want to welcome you to TikTok," Kyle Forgeard, a founder of the Nelkboys, says in the TikTok video as he hands Vance a box of Happy Dad, a brand of hard seltzers founded by Nelk in 2021. But, despite what seemed to be a high budget operation, the video itself was average at best. While the full interview posted on YouTube is well edited, the TikTok appeared to be an afterthought — nothing more than a series of shoddily spliced clips of Vance posing for photos with the Nelkboys and sitting for an interview with them. Now, it stagnates at 187,400 likes and 9,041 comments – an unusually high number of them ridiculing Vance. Worse, every single top-liked comment alluded to a false rumor started on X that Vance wrote about having sex with an "inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions" in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Some users expressed surprise at how poorly Vance’s debut post went: “Imagine your job is running jd vance’s tik tok account and dude asks ‘how’s the video doing on tiktok,’” one comment reads. Vance has not released another TikTok since. Some chalk up the unflattering rollout to a numbers game – they say young people are statistically more likely to support Democrats, so naturally Harris supporters flooded Vance’s comment section. While it does appear that the majority of comments under Vance’s post are written by Democrats, it’s also true that Trump has 5.5 million more followers than Harris and an organic army of smaller MAGA content creators, and these people have not jumped to Vance’s rescue. Nor have they followed Vance’s account, which sits at only 121,500 followers. The fact that Vance’s team hasn’t deleted the multitude of couch comments is another sign of its failure to launch. Unlike other social media platforms, TikTok provides users the option to delete comments, which many people take advantage of. Before Vance created his TikTok, Mary Morgan, 23-year-old Trump-supporter and influencer who runs a YouTube channel called Pop Culture Crisis, told POLITICO that Republicans have shown a consistent disregard for the importance of energizing their base on social media in this election cycle. “Trump had this thing called meme magic on his side in 2016,” Morgan said, speaking about how 4chan created a space for young conservatives to rally behind Trump. “And now, the tables have kind of turned even though the pattern stays the same. Trump is running against a woman again. The tables have turned because now the right wing doesn't understand TikTok.” Morgan worries that the party’s inability to move its young base on social media could cost the party the 2024 election. “All of these sound bites that are being shared around from Kamala – ‘do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree,’ or Venn diagrams, or whatever stupid sound bite it may be,” Morgan said “Trump had moments like that non-stop when he ran for the first time. And that really energized young voters, specifically young male voters, if we're being honest. And now the opposite effect is happening for young female voters.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at amathur@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @AnushaMathur4.
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