Young People Are Better At TikTok Than Anyone Else — And Now They're Using It To Run For Office
Joshua Collins is using TikTok to propel his political campaign — and it's working.
The 26-year-old from Tacoma, Washington, is several things: a truck driver with a penchant for lip syncing; a Socialist who supports Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders; plus a candidate for Washington’s 10th congressional district, which is centered on the state capital, Olympia, and includes portions of Thurston, Pierce, and Mason counties. He’s also big on TikTok, the video app most commonly known for viral lip sync videos and various visual jokes and pranks. And he’s one of a burgeoning variety of candidates who are
using the platform to talk about the issues that matter to them.
TikTok initially launched in April 2014 as Musical.Ly, an app that allowed users to lip sync along to an endless assortment of songs in a given library library. It was already mega-popular as soon as it was
acquired by the Chinese corporation ByteDance and rebranded as TikTok in 2017, soon after which its ubiquity exploded: It has been downloaded a whopping 1.5 billion times, outperforming even Instagram,
according to Corporation Insider.
While several people think of dog videos and memes any time while they hear the app’s name, the platform is seeing an increase in all content, including political videos. (A organization representative confirmed the boom to MTV News.) The
Washington Post’s Dave Jorgenson makes videos with presidential candidates and employees reporters, and any assortment of the #Trump2020 videos on the platform that have collectively garnered more than 786.2 million views. Yet not one of the leading 2020 presidential candidates has their own account,
according to USA Today, and few traditional congresspeople or senators are on the app, either. There’s also the matter of ads: In October 2019, the
social media giant joined Twitter in refusing to allow
paid political advertisements on the platform, citing a belief that TikTok is meant to be “a fun place to spend time.”
Collins and other activist-minded creators haven’t let that supposed binary stop them. In early January, he uploaded his own version of a video trend on the platform, in which users compare two things to the beat of “Griztronics,” the song by GRiz x Subtronics that starts, “Oh this shit be hittin’ different.” A fan-created remix of the song features the line “oh this shit be hitting the exact fucking same," allowing creators to make salient points about the homogeny in our everyday lives. In his video, Collins compared the political talking points justifying the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and the choice to strike and kill a Iranian general in 2020.
He made the video in his laundry room, with a total financial range of zero dollars. He also got the idea for the video from TikTok itself: “I was scrolling through my For You page [when] I saw the audio being used for something fully different, and then I was like, ‘oh, this is perfect,’” he told MTV News. Shortly immediately after he hit upload, his own clip was shared on TikTok’s landing page. It right now has over 45,000 views.
“It just blew up after,” he adds. “That's how my most viral videos have gone: I ran into ideas really suddenly, and so they were just sort of brilliant and everything fit.”
And Collins believes memes like that one are already helping his campaign. He uploaded his first video on October 10, 2019, and in total has
raised $42,640 in campaign donations, 80 percent of which came from small donors, according to Open Secrets. And right now, because the best Democrat in a
likely Democrat-held district, he’s the leading candidate in his race. (The incumbent who currently holds the seat, Democrat Denny Heck,
announced in December that he wouldn’t seek re-election.) Not every stroke of good luck or hard work can be attributed to his TikTok, certainly, nevertheless Collins believes the platform has uniquely affected his try to get other young people involved in his campaign.
“Recently, I had five young people [offer to volunteer and] specifically said my TikTok,” he mentioned. “And all of those mentioned the same thing — that they weren't segment of any Democratic party corporation or [the Democratic Socialists of America]. None of those were politically mobile, nevertheless they had seen my stuff and had received politically engaged because of it.”
A recent YouGov/MTV News poll noticed that young folks are more likely than any other age sort to view candidates appearing on TikTok as pandering: 55 percent of Gen Z and 42 percent of millenials are wary of the digital tour stop. However because the world wide web keeps it up and continues to democratize politics, increasingly candidates are finding ways to proliferate the web right back, in an easy-to-understand way. And using TikTok to elevate a candidate’s profile among platform’s users, most of them of whom are
millennials and gen z, is an easy and cost-efficient alternative — especially if the people running are young themselves.
“When I determined to run for office, I realized [I needed] to be creative,” Solomon Rajput, a 27-year-old medical student running for Congress in Michigan’s 12th congressional district, told MTV News. “You need to be innovative, as the establishment runs campaigns in a very specific sort of way that takes tons and tons of money.” TikTok, he mentioned, offered a possibility to talk about issues that were crucial to him and voters in his area in low-lift way.
His most-viewed video features audio of someone counting from 2001 to 2020 playing over a screen split into two sides: “Years U.S. At war” on the left and “Years U.S. Not at war” on the correct. Rajput stands on the left side throughout the full video.
“We aspire to end the forever wars in this country,” Rajput mentioned,
echoing statistics that shows most young people view the U.S. Invasion of Afghanistan was “definitely” a mistake. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is a really good way to create this same point, nevertheless using a TikTok format.’ Because if you're able to prepare a point in a new, innovative way, it will catch people's attention, and people will begin talking about it.”
It’s impossible to overstate the power of social media on today’s elections — for better or for worse.
Twitter factored heavily into the opening election immediately after its conception in 2008 once then-candidate Barack Obama became known for his innovative campaigning on the platform;
Instagram, in its first election year of 2012, helped campaigns reach a whole new demographic of voters by virtually bringing fans along the campaign trail through pictures and, later, videos. Right now, it’s regular to be able to see Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez log onto Instagram Stories to take followers through a cooking session or her aesthetics routine. Some congresspeople have numerous Twitter accounts: often, one for official organization as representatives, another for personalized musings, as well as one third for their campaigns. Plus it could be unreasonable to talk about social media without mentioning the national roller coaster ride referred to as
President Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
According to Martín Diego Garcia, who trains politicians how to run digital and message-driven campaigns with the consulting firm
The Campaign Workshop, candidates need to use the platforms they’re already on to seem authentic — but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s prepared to propose every political hopeful download TikTok.
“The only way I would suggest a candidate use it is if they have some qualitative or quantitative information that insinuates there really are people within my district that are on there who need to turn out to vote, because if you're doing it just for the sake of doing it, I'm sure there really are better ways for you to spend your time,” Garcia told MTV News. “But, in the event you are doing it because it's tactical to raising cash, beginning a conversation in your community, getting votes, then absolutely a campaign can imagine it.”
There’s also the fact that TikTok’s platform isn’t inherently location-specific; the For You page tabulates popular videos from all over, and plenty of local candidates would prefer connecting with people in their districts directly over a national, or perhaps global, audience. Nevertheless young candidates are finding savvy workarounds: They hashtag their cities to drive voters in their specific areas to their videos, and so they are also using the platform to more broadly connect with other young people and encourage them to vote, period, no matter where they live.
Any time 19-year-old Skyler Johnson began hashtagging his videos with New York and Long Island, people started reaching out to him and asking how to get involved. “It's helping me be a segment of a larger conversation,” the Democrat running for New York State Senate mentioned. “We actually had a family member friend in New Jersey who'd no idea I was running [before they saw my videos].”
And while the gold star of TikTok visibility is building a viral video that TikTok features on its For You page, young candidates are also targeting folks who can become directly involved in their campaign. “I've gotten more volunteer sign up from TikTok that I have every other platform combined in the district,” Collins mentioned, adding that volunteers have pitched in from Olympia, Tacoma, and Seattle, just to name a few.
They’re in a unique position where they can both spread their message nationally and locally, an essential trait in today’s political economy, in which increase national attention even in local races can bring easier name recognition, more donations, as well as a higher class of ability to reach out directly to voters. “We are right now beginning to be segment of the conversation nationwide. “Spread some of our positive values across the country,” Core to
his campaign are pushes for prison reform, affordable housing, available education, and increased water quality; traits he
literally points to in one of his recent TikToks.
Rajput echoed Johnson’s point, adding that TikTok offers a unique avenue to “actually engage with people.”
“It permits [voters] to trust you and know you as a candidate and person, on a level that is deeper than just seeing an ad,” he mentioned. “They can interact with your content, and also you could interact back with them, and people really appreciate that.”
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