Will Content Creators Save Us?
CNN’s Harris-Walz interview is highly watched on TikTok.
Kamala Harris’s candidacy is unprecedented in modern times. She didn’t go through a primary but rather emerged as the candidate just weeks before accepting her party’s nomination. Coming out of the DNC, she had been criticized for not prioritizing mainstream media interviews, and last week she gave the press corps what they wanted via a sit-down with CNN’s Dana Bash.
Clips of the interview were viewed quite a bit on TikTok. Harris’ deft response to a question about Trump’s racist criticism of her was shared by @CNN and @dailymail and received millions of views. Other popular moments from the interview were a question about President Biden’s phone call to Harris about dropping out and a CNN analyst attacking Harris for “drastically changing her views.”
Some popular content creators on TikTok were critical of the interview, however. @underthedesknews reported on the interview to their more than 3 million followers, which included summing up the interview quickly and making it clear how disappointing it was. They then shared footage of a roundtable discussion that VP Harris hosted back in February which covered reproductive freedom, IVF, and maternal mortality, saying “Since we didn’t get [anything substantive] from CNN tonight, hopefully, I can give it to you here.” The video currently has 250,000+ views and 43.4K likes.
Another Harris-related political trend caught our eye this week: You may have heard that Kamala Harris is proposing to tax unrealized capital gains. The right-wing outrage machine has become so angry about this, that it’s become a meme on Twitter.
But if the policy rollout is a bit confusing to you, the headlines will unfortunately not be much help. But don’t worry – TikTok creator @alexisanddean has you covered. This TikTok account is run by Alexis who “asks her husband [Dean] questions.” The duo has almost 1 million followers and 8 million likes. In this specific video, Alexis asks Dean if we should be worried about the proposed capital gains tax by Kamala Harris.
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Dean helpfully explains that this proposed change only applies to folks worth at least $100 million dollars. So for most of us, this is not something to stress about. The video has 3 million views and 250,000+ likes.
Pew recently released a new report sharing that around half of TikTok users under 30 say they use the platform to keep up with politics and news. And looking at content like this raises the key question: why should people tune into CNN to watch Kamala Harris be asked (not even for the first time) to respond to Donald Trump questioning her race when they can tune in to accounts like Under the Desk News to hear VP Harris talk about actual policy?
Top posts: Kamala Harris
According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 21,900 posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 383.2 million views.
39% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 4% were neutral, and 57% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:
On the other hand, two of the top posts were clips from @cnn taken from her recent interview with them, and both showed the VP in a positive light.
Finally, this top video, also from @dailymail, reminded us that Tim Walz is very good at retail politics, as he spun a hit against him for having a defined benefit pension plan into a chance to express that he wants every American to have a defined benefit pension plan.
Top posts: Donald Trump
According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 36,100 posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 601 million views.
69% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 3% were neutral, and 28% were positive. These were some of the most-viewed:
This clip from @thegoodliars, which was viewed over 11 million times and had over 1 million likes, showed man-on-the-street style interviews with Trump fans. Spoilers: It did not go well for the Trump fans.
Meanwhile, another clip from @msnbc received over 9 million views and almost 600K likes and shows Donald Trump responding to the controversy that he used Arlington National Cemetery as a campaign prop. In the clip, he questions whether he was set up by some of the Gold Star families he was filming with. Also on the topic of Trump’s struggles to answer to the public in any real way: @cbsnews and @nbcnews both had high-performing videos of him talking about IVF, while @dailymail showed him struggling with an abortion answer.
Finally, @kamalahq shared what might be the best ad of the entire cycle so far. This one is a must-see.
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.
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.
The DNC briefly took center stage last week, but Fitness to Serve (or lack thereof) roared back to the top spot this week, significantly outpacing every other one of our tracked topics. However, there is a lot of overlap between the top posts in the category with content we’ve already shared above. So this week, we’re picking a different top category to get a peek at what’s happening.
We chose SCOTUS – content about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is EVERYWHERE, in large part due to her book tour. Here she is on @colbertlateshow making the ultimate ruling on whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich. Here’s a clip of her on @cbsmornings talking about her scene pairing with Matt Damon and another from that same interview talking about her experience testifying during her confirmation hearings.
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’ combined TikTok accounts gained 66.5 million new views and posted 32 videos.
Their top post of the week was that banger ad about bodily autonomy and choice we shared above. It’s got 3.5 million views and 586.6K likes. If you didn’t watch it above, watch it now. It’s really good content.
Their second top post was of Tim Walz getting really excited about a sweet treat with NC Governor Roy Cooper, which received 3 million views and 485.8K likes.
Over on Team Trump, they gained 18.5 million new views and posted just one new video.
It’s a direct-to-camera video clip of Trump pushing early voting in NC. To date, it has 195.6K views and 32.3K likes.
Creator Spotlight: @votesamwiles
There are a lot of folks on TikTok “doing” JD Vance these days. (We shared several in last week’s issue.) But Sam here (@votesamwiles) is doing it really well.
Prior to August 2024, Sam had posted to this account only three times — two were weird gags and one was a clip of him doing standup.
But since August 7th, he’s been pumping out the content. And just about all of it is him doing a JD Vance impression. Bearded and in eyeliner, he’s looking at the camera and talking about his policy agenda.
Here’s a video where he shares that he wants to bring back McCarthyism, outlaw thongs, and burn books and another one where he responds to liberals calling him weird. Here’s one where he warns that if Kamala Harris wins, it’ll become curtains for guys doing guy stuff.
Three weeks into the bit, he’s already at 41.7K followers and has 1.5 million likes.
News & platform updates
The influencers are influencing… but at what cost?
Team Harris is crushing it on social media in case you couldn’t already tell.
Can internet hype lead to actual votes? Democrats are trying to make it happen.
As mentioned above, half of TikTok users under 30 use the app to keep up with politics. That’s a mind-boggling number – and it highlights how much campaigns and causes must have a strategy to reach these audiences.
Teens are literally making thousands of dollars by debating Trump vs. Harris on TikTok.
How do you measure success for an influencer campaign? Well, it’s safe to say that the 400 million impressions amassed by the content creators who attended the DNC count as a success, right?
Speaking of, Taylor Lorenz had a great essay on the role of those content creators at the DNC.
TikTok is expanding its “How to Vote” resources heading into the election, with a focus on how elections work and media literacy.
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.
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