No one is talking about RFK Jr.
No one is talking about RFK Jr.
The would-be spoiler candidate’s own TikTok account has huge numbers. But is anyone else actually paying attention?
Third-party spoiler candidate RFK Jr., despite lacking a path to the White House, sure seems to understand how to get earned media - for better or for worse. One week, it’s brain worms and another, it’s him admitting sexual assault. Most recently, it was for illegally dumping a bear carcass in New York’s Central Park and staging it to look like a bike accident.
People who follow the world of digital politics know that despite his many personal and political flaws, Kennedy’s campaign is extremely adept at using TikTok.
With over 1.7 million followers, they possess one of the largest audiences of any political campaign on the platform (with the exception of Teams Harris and Trump) and regularly push out over a dozen videos a week, racking up views in the millions.
But as it turns out, the only person really talking about RFK Jr. on TikTok is... RFK Jr.
According to social analytics platform Zelf, on any given week, there are only a few hundred new posts on TikTok mentioning RFK Jr., compared to *tens of thousands* for his presidential campaign rivals Harris and Trump. In terms of views on those posts, Harris and Trump-related content typically receive over 1 billion views in a 7-day period. Videos mentioning Kennedy, in aggregate, typically are seen just a few million times.
…and if you were wondering, some of @TeamKennedy2024’s biggest viral hits include RFK Jr’s own State of the Union address, a video of him doing a workout and “getting pumped,” and, of course, the candidate with his two pet ravens. He’s also received a “surprise endorsement” from Russell Brand (lol), responded to Harris “ripping” 18-24 year olds, and spoke about unity following the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
If you really want to get a sense of the Kennedy campaign’s approach to TikTok, watch that Russell Brand endorsement video in full. It starts weird (with Brand trying but failing to get people to support RFK), works its way into a silly gag about globalists and the CIA, and ends with a joke about Kennedy eating dogs (which Kennedy has since denied and said he actually ate a goat).
The whole thing is a wild ride with a lot of unexpected turns.
… Anyway, the fact that there may be less grassroots enthusiasm and interest in Kennedy on TikTok than previously thought has implications for how both campaigns should see the candidate. Overestimating Kennedy’s support on the platform could drive either campaign to address the gadfly candidate head-on, which has seemingly been Team Kennedy’s goal all along.
TikTok search becomes less transparent
This week, TikTok instituted a major change to how users, researchers, and journalists can search for top performing political content on the platform. For most words, hashtags, or phrases, anyone can use Tiktok’s search bar to find, and then filter videos by most-liked within a certain time period. That allows us to quickly identify which videos are going viral within the past week, and manually cross check our data that we’re receiving from our social analytics platform, Zelf.
However, this week, TikTok disabled the “filter” functionality on searches related to the presidential candidates. If you search for “Trump” or “Kamala” now, you will no longer be able to filter for the most impactful videos, and instead you’re served a random grouping of videos the platform has curated. That’s a major step backward for transparency - especially with less than 3 months to go to Election Day.
For our part, we’ll continue using workarounds to manually check our data - it’s just going to be much harder, and you may notice we miss a few pieces of content in the following “most-viewed” charts. Send us a reply to this email if you see a viral post that you think we should have included - it will help us improve our tracking in the future. 🙏
Top posts: Kamala Harris
This week, we’re having some data maintenance issues and don’t have total platform post data to include. We’ll be back with those numbers next week.
According to social analytics platform Zelf, 19% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative and 81% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:
The most-viewed Harris post on TikTok this week was from @nowthisimpact, talking about her favorite curse word. It’s a re-publishing of an old video interview clip from 2020 with then-Senator Kamala Harris. It’s been viewed over 26 million times in the past few days.
This video from @aka_virgil1 shows two yard signs, one that reads “I’m Voting For The Felon” next to one that says “Back The Badge” that also has a little ditty in the background just repeating the refrain “Republicans are fucking dumb,” got 5.5 million views and 1.1 million likes.
…and this @msnbc video of Governor Walz talking about his own family’s experience with IVF received 4.5 million views and almost half a million likes: “I’m not crying, you’re crying.”
Top posts: Donald Trump
87% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative and 13% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:
This is the second week in a row where most top videos about Trump on TikTok were pretty brutal
Here’s @13greeneggsandham sharing that Trump had endorsed Harris by stating that a criminal can’t be President (1.6 million views and 408,300 likes), @kingkashed counting the seconds while Trump froze on live TV (2 million views and 53,000 likes) and @ kingpanda.bb with… well, let’s just say you should watch this one in full.
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There weren’t a lot of positive videos for Trump in the top spots this week. Here’s a behind-the-scenes one of Trump meeting with a young Medal Of Honor Portrait Artist, and both assuming that if someone has a Medal Of Honor, they’re “in pretty rough shape” and asking if she can make him (Trump) look as good as the soldier in the painting. It was shared by @tophertownmusic and it has 1.5 million views and 206,700 likes.
On the issues…
Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week was Fitness to Serve/Age.
Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search.
All of the top spots in this issue category were hits against Trump’s fitness to serve this week.
The @davidpakmanshow covered Trump’s “glitch” (7.8 million views and almost a million likes), @dailymail showed him being confused about Harris’s last name (9.6 million views and over half a million likes), @thedailyshow decimated him for not remembering which Black politician he was almost in a helicopter crash with (4.1 million views and 555,200 likes) and @dailymail showed him lose his temper when asked about the size of Harris’s crowd (3.8 million views and 313,800 likes).
From the campaign trail…
Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:
This week, Harris’s combined accounts gained 142 million new views and posted 19 videos. Interestingly, the campaign only posted 3 times to @KamalaHarris, but @KamalaHQ posted 16 times.
The top-performing Harris campaign post of the week was Harris signing a book for a little girl while Governor Walz serves as her very excited wingman.
Remember that photo slideshow we shared last week that started with a photo of Donald Trump looking awkward at a laptop, and then showed his weird searches? Last week, that video was at 6.1 million views and 1.1 million likes. Today, it’s at 9.2 million views and 1.5 million likes. Don’t sleep on photo carousels on TikTok y’all!
Over on Team Trump, they gained 31.9 million new views this past week while posting no new videos. But here’s something of note about their content to date: they’ve only posted to the platform nine times total, and two of those videos have since been muted by TikTok. Donald Trump is notorious for playing music without permission at his rallies. Looks like he can’t do so on TikTok with impunity.
Creator Spotlight: @michaelsolakiewicz
If you want behind-the-scenes footage of the Trump campaign, Michael Solakiewicz has you covered.
Although it's unclear to us if he’s actually affiliated with the Trump campaign, his content sure makes it seem like he has special access. He regularly shares day-in-the-life content about Trump through his growing TikTok account.
He posts videos of former President Trump on the golf course, hanging with family, heading to rallies, and even talking to Elon Musk during his big Twitter Space event this week. Many of these videos are taken from the personal accounts of key Trump staffers, who accompany the former President pretty much everywhere.
Interestingly, Solakiewicz shares a lot of the same clips on Twitter to very little engagement. But folks on TikTok sure are into what he is sharing: He’s gained over 400,000 followers and 10 million likes to date on the platform.
News & platform updates
This is the week everyone on TikTok learned what the word “demure” means. Including this Jon Tester stan account.
According to the Washington Post, the Trump campaign is using TikTok to grow a less political and more entertainment-focused following, despite previously trying to ban the platform.
Political misinformation is coming from outside the house, and it’s all over TikTok.
Trump’s not just down in the polls, he’s also struggling in his once safe space - social media. And despite his best efforts, even Elon Musk isn’t helping.
It’s not just you – the vibe really is shifting. Influencers are flocking to be involved with the Harris campaign.
TikTok Shops were supposed to rival Amazon. But now, instead of competing, the two massive platforms are partnering.
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.