GOTV on TikTok

A wrap-up of the campaigns' closing days on the viral video app

Josh Klemons 💪💙💪

Kyle Tharp

, and

Lucy Ritzmann

Oct 31, 2024

We’re just a few short days out from Election Day, and the campaigns are sprinting to the finish. Both sides are hosting mega rallies, running round-the-clock canvassing efforts, and rolling out celebrity endorsements online and off. On TikTok, we’re continuing to see some of the same trends that we’ve been watching for months. Here’s what you need to know this week:

Getting Out The Vote on TikTok

Both campaigns are in full Get Out The Vote mode - the phase of the race where they focus on mobilizing their supporters to get to the polls or return their ballots. We’ve been working with our friends at Zelf to try to get a better sense of what the final days look like for each campaign’s mobilization efforts on TikTok.

Here are some of the top (and most viral) moments: @timwalz gave a little football halftime speech to rev up a crowd of supporters in Michigan to put in extra effort and reach their friends and neighbors. That clip racked up over 1.5 million views. @thecharliekirkshow shared a “special message from President Trump” with YMCA BLARING in the background as the camera panned and former President Trump spoke directly to the camera imploring people to vote – the video is up to over 1 million views.

Notably, @sashrosekhatami, a 24-year-old digital marketing coordinator and Kamala stan, has been crushing the GOTV game this week. Over the last few weeks, she’s done 8 GOTV posts, racking up 604.5K views and over 100K engagements, pushing her viewers to head to the polls. Here are two fun ones, each of which has amassed a ton of likes and views, where she danced and lip-synced to the audio of CasaDi’s remix of “Kamala Did You Vote Are You Gonna Vote For Me.” That trending audio has been used in around 3,000 videos.

Garbage in Madison Square Garden

Donald Trump took his circus to Madison Square Garden on Sunday, hosting a wild rally all afternoon that was compared to a Nazi rally that took place in the same venue in the 1930s. The entire event featured a bunch of racist, misogynistic weirdos… which, to be fair, isn’t really new for a Trump rally. One particular joke made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe early in the night exploded across social media and the news cycle, in which he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

With just days to go before Election Day, the Trump camp spent time scrambling with the fallout… especially since a whole lot of Puerto Ricans vote in key swing states.

There’s been a lot of reporting on prominent Puerto Ricans like rapper and superstar Bad Bunny using this opportunity to endorse Kamala Harris.

By our count, at least a dozen videos about the incident each received over a million views. For example, this post of the joke itself from @kamalahq was seen 7.9 million times and this post comparing the Trump and Harris campaigns’ stances on Puerto Rico from them got 3.2 million views. @dailymail had two posts about the incident cross the million view threshold. This video of Gov Tim Walz and Rep AOC’s response to the joke received 3.7 million views, and they also shared a clip of Hinchcliffe making another racist joke about Latinos as a whole at the Trump rally, which received 1.9 million views.

Whether or not this moment will matter on November 5 remains to be seen. But it’s undeniably something that the Trump campaign would rather not be dealing with in the campaign’s final stretch.

Beyonce, Rogan, and Eminem

Campaigns are also relying on celebrity endorsements and big media appearances to steal the media spotlight in the election’s final stretch. Last weekend we saw Trump go on Rogan, Beyonce endorse Harris, and Eminem introduce Barack Obama. On Monday, we sent out a quick roundup of how those moments performed on TikTok - you can read that analysis right here.

Trump continues to lead on mentions

Each week, we’ve shared how many total videos and posts on TikTok are mentioning either candidate. Week after week, we’ve continued to see there are tens of thousands more posts about Donald Trump than Kamala Harris. That trend continues into the campaign’s closing days:

While Trump has far more total mentions, much more of the top-performing content about him on TikTok has been negative or unfavorable to his candidacy.

We’ve been using social analytics platform Zelf to measure the overall sentiment of thousands of top-performing posts that are favorable or unfavorable to Harris and Trump. The TL;DR is that Zelf uses a mix of AI scraping and sentiment analysis and manual crosschecks to determine which posts are considered positive, negative, or neutral for the two candidates.

Here’s what that looks like over time:

Last week, the sentiment of posts mentioning Harris was overwhelmingly positive, while Trump was back underwater.

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

And here’s how many views the campaigns have received on their owned content week over week:

This week, Harris’s combined TikTok accounts gained 312 million new views and posted 113 videos.

The top two posts from Team Kamala were both about the racism on full display at Trump’s MSG rally. This one got 14.7 million views and this one another 10.6 million views.

The next three most popular posts all included an Obama, either Michelle or Barack. You can see those here, here, and here.

They also racked up some big numbers with this “new Kamala ad” making fun of Trump for being old and incoherent.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign gained 327 million new views across their accounts and posted 51 new videos.

Team Trump’s biggest video is Donald telling Rogan he wants to get rid of income taxes.

Three of the next four biggest posts are short clips of Harris intended to make her look stupid to the same old problematic tune of “New Kamala accent just dropped,” “Lol what a mess,” and “She is not ok.”

And finally, here’s a clip from Team Trump of Trump walking out at MSG. For some reason, they felt the need to bring Beyonce (sic - their misspelling) into the caption.

Creator Spotlight: @tegreacts

Tega Orhorhoro, aka @tegreacts, is a popular TikTok creator who mixes humor with current events. She’s amassed 3.7 million followers and 209 million likes.

Tega focuses on making news accessible and relatable to younger audiences, often using comedy sketches and reactions to highlight the stories of the day.

Here she is responding to Donald Trump saying he’s not involved with Project 2025, here she is responding to some rampant sexism, and here she is pushing the importance of voting.

She keeps it light but definitely isn’t afraid to weigh in on heavier subjects.

News & platform updates

Was that endorsement video a sign of organic support or paid sponsorship? We’ll never know!
TikTok’s founder just became the richest man in China. Maybe this platform has legs after all.
Want to feel old? This new trend has Gen Z listening to Trump’s Access Hollywood tape that made big waves in 2016 on TikTok… for the first time!
The lawsuits keep stacking up against TikTok for not protecting minors.
The Washington Post was told not to endorse in this year’s presidential election. But it would seem Jeff Bezos has no idea what WaPo’s team is doing on TikTok.

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads?

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The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform.