TikTok campaign styles: Harris remixed, Trump filtered

WASHINGTON - Earlier in October, Ms Kamala Harris appeared on “60 Minutes”. Mr Bill Whitaker asked her what kind of gun she owns. “I have a Glock,” she replied. When he asked if she had fired it, she laughed and said: “Of course I have.”

The next day, Ms Harris reposted a clip of the exchange to her personal TikTok account, @kamalaharris. Then the Harris campaign posted a remix of the moment to its own TikTok account, @KamalaHQ. That version recast the clip in the style of a fan edit: Ms Harris’ answers were spliced with flickering images of her appearing cool and unbothered throughout her career, to the soundtrack of rapper Key Glock’s Ambition for Cash.

Ms Harris’ campaign releases content on TikTok from these two accounts: @kamalaharris, the buttoned-up personal account, and @KamalaHQ, the looser campaign operation. While the personal account churns out safe, presidential images of Ms Harris – clips from her rallies and mainstream media interviews, footage from her meetings with firefighters and friendly Republicans – the campaign account filters her raw materials through the eye of a zealous online supporter.

The Trump camp, too, manages dual TikTok accounts: the personal account, @realdonaldtrump, and the campaign account, @teamtrump. The @teamtrump TikTok operation can be aesthetically indistinguishable from that of @KamalaHQ; it posts new Trump campaign ads with emergency-light emojis and promotes clips of Ms Harris’ interviews shaved down to contextless, humiliating micro-moments. Trump’s personal account, however, takes a different approach from Ms Harris’.

While the Harris account presents her largely as a media figure filmed from afar, with occasional behind-the-scenes glimpses shot in a vérité style, Trump assumes the posture of an online influencer, walking right up to the camera and addressing his audience directly. Even as Trump’s approach fits more snugly into the TikTok aesthetic, his rambling one-man show also feels forced into compliance here, producing uncannily boring offerings that nevertheless can rack up tens of millions of views.

Turning candidates into influencers and memes is both goofy and high-stakes: In an election so close, the scales could be tipped by turnout among younger Americans, many of whom get their news from TikTok.

Ms Harris’ presidential campaign kicked off in July with

a flurry of supporters’ memes about context and coconuts

, a brat-green content engine powered by the giddy tumult of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal and Ms Harris’ surprise ascent. That poppy online energy has slowed, but not at @KamalaHQ, which continues manufacturing daily vibes in the style of a monomaniacal supporter.

The Harris campaign itself has assumed the role of a Harris superfan – boosting its own messaging, layering it with meta-analysis and recasting it through the internet’s dominant cultural modes (fan edits, meme forms, fire emojis). Often, the account will repost a slice of a Harris speech or interview with a caption like “V-P Harris just COOKED Trump” or “Vice-President Harris came with the receipts,” throwing in a coy emoji for emphasis.

These comments rarely reveal much beyond a Harris staffer’s working proficiency with Gen Z slang. But when they are applied to the black spaces above a landscape-oriented television clip, they suggest that the moment is so compelling that it has been urgently scraped for TikTok and passed along. (On @kamalaharris, clips pulled from television are typically edited to fit TikTok’s vertical orientation.) The effect suggests that Ms Harris’ campaign materials are always already leaping into viral status, even when the clips themselves are unexceptional.

In another typical @KamalaHQ offering, young staffers of Ms Harris pop up in front of the app’s green-screen effect, where they play the role of campaign influencers, lip-syncing to trending audio and monologuing about Trump’s latest rally or what they contend are

his campaign’s ties to Project 2025

. Much like the campaign surrogates who appear on the television news, these staffers repeat campaign talking points and radiate positive vibes; one difference is that on TikTok, the star staffers remain largely unidentified. They appear instead as a rotating cast of anonymous youthful faces, who exist to boost the image of the campaign as generally appealing to young people – so appealing that a group of them would plausibly spend their time on TikTok rhapsodising about Ms Harris’ hurricane response.

On the Trump campaign’s accounts, it is Trump himself who appears as the lone star, though supporting players like professional wrestlers occasionally appear. On @realdonaldtrump, we find Trump on a private plane, presenting a chart on US immigration as if anchoring a presidential infomercial. We see him evangelising on a factory floor, eulogising the “beautiful jobs” that he says Ms Harris has “destroyed”, then popping out of a vacant McDonald’s drive-thru window, dramatising his baseless claim that Ms Harris never worked at McDonald’s in her youth.

Like any dedicated content creator, he posts collaborations with other popular TikTokers; he has posed with Puerto Rican rapper Anuel AA (6.2 million TikTok followers) in front of his armoured car and fake sparred with influencer and boxer Jake Paul (18.1 million followers) at a cryptocurrency conference. And, like a prop comic, he brings accessories: a little boy’s birthday present wrapped in Maga-red ribbon, a pair of handcuffs signalling his plan to reform our “nation in decline”.

Trump’s personal account is the most popular of the campaign. Although @teamtrump has amassed only 2.8 million followers for its campaign meme operation (compared with the 4.8 million fans of @kamalahq), @realdonaldtrump is followed by 12.1 million (compared with the 6.1 million followers of @kamalaharris). There is a sense of intimacy – or a thirstiness – to Trump’s approach. He is starring in the kind of TikTok performances that lower-level staffers execute on Ms Harris’ behalf.

While the Harris campaign positions her as the polished professional who inspires meme creation from her dedicated fans, Trump himself represents online content’s chaotic appeal. The layers of artifice come prebaked in his persona, the self-referential discursiveness threaded into his conversation style.

And yet there is a torpidity to his actual performances, which feel clipped and canned. You get the sense that the staffer behind the camera is straining to keep him on message, talking about jobs and grocery bills. There is no time for him to drift into the unscripted digressions that are a feature of his hours-long rallies, during which he has praised “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” and remarked on the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis.

Ms Harris’ TikTok presence feels like one more platform her campaign can use to reveal her in her best light. Trump’s TikTok presence feels instead like a perfunctory offering, a stake in the ground around which a TikTok following can converge, projecting its pre-existing feelings and ideologies onto the content.

This is all a bid for younger voters, it seems safe to say. The Pew Research Centre reported in September that 39 per cent of adults younger than 30 regularly get their news from TikTok.

Following a presidential candidate on TikTok is not exactly an endorsement of that politician. But in its own way, it signals a profound form of commitment. When you follow a campaign on TikTok, you are assenting to having your mindless social media scrolling interrupted by the campaign’s messaging. And this choice resounds across the app. Every account you follow signals to TikTok’s algorithm that you are interested in seeing more content like it.

A political TikTok follow, then, signals a comfort with your worldview being tuned in the candidate’s direction, your social media diet curated in accordance with their politics and style. Last week, Ms Harris sat down with Mr Bret Baier of Fox News, using the television network to extend her reach to conservative viewers. But after the interview aired, it was converted into pure content, fresh images that could be clipped and inscribed to appeal to either candidate’s base. On @teamtrump, Trump supporters could watch a clip of Ms Harris struggling to disarm Mr Baier; on @kamalahq, Ms Harris’ supporters could watch a clip of her handily owning Mr Baier. NYTIMES