Primaries Show Candidates Can Win on TikTok But Lose at the Polls
Katie Porter’s US Senate run in California was supposed to show the political benefits of the app, but it may have illustrated its shortcomings instead.
Representative Katie Porter (second from right) poses for a selfie after the National Union of Healthcare Workers Senate Candidate Forum in Los Angeles on Oct. 8, 2023.
Photographer: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images
Much of Katie Porter’s campaign for a US Senate seat in California played out on TikTok. In one of her first videos for the race, the 50-year-old Democratic congresswoman, who represents a district in Orange County, wore a scarf with the word “vote” printed all over it while sitting behind the wheel of her minivan, which she’d decorated with blue ribbons. “Get in, loser, we’re going voting,” she shouted into the camera, a play on a famous quote from oft-memed teen movie Mean Girls. The 10-second video was watched 760,000 times and attracted 86,000 likes and 2,100 comments.
Every election cycle, politicians take to social media to try to win over young voters, so much so that it’s become something of a cliché to name each election after the hottest platform of the moment. There’s a strong case to be made that 2024 should be the TikTok Election. More than 170 million Americans log on to the app monthly. According to the Pew Research Center, about 43% of TikTok users say they regularly get their news there, twice the rate from three years ago, as do about one-third of all US adults younger than 30. Meanwhile, news consumption on Facebook and X is declining, and Meta Platforms Inc. has said it’s reducing the prominence of news on its platform.