1 week Ago
In the last two weeks of the campaign, President-Elect Trump’s reach surged on TikTok, where views on his best-performing posts far outstripped those of Vice President Kamala Harris. In the final days of this month’s presidential election, pollsters and pundits insisted that the race was as tight as it could be — statistically tied. But on TikTok, the data told another story: former President Donald Trump had surpassed Vice President Kamala Harris in a dramatic shift of Americans’ online attention.
On October 22, then-candidate Trump showed up at a Philadelphia-area McDonald’s franchise (which was closed for the day) and filmed scenes of himself preparing food in the restaurant’s kitchen for a set of pre-screened customers. The stunt was pilloried by the press and dismissed by some fast food workers as “insulting cosplay.” On TikTok, though, official Team Trump accounts flooded viewers’ feeds with the McDonald’s scenes, and broke through to a larger TikTok audience than either candidate had yet seen in a single day.
Just one of Trump’s McDonald’s videos alone — with more than 63 million views and 7.3 million likes — received more engagement than VP Harris’s top five videos on the platform that day combined. According to data from the TikTok analytics firm, Zelf, Trump’s TikTok surge continued from the McDonald’s stunt through Election Day when his top-performing post received 151 million impressions, and her top-performing post received just 29.
6 million. Of the 10 highest performing TikTok posts by the candidates, eight would end up being Trump’s — five of them coming in the final week of the campaign. The Zelf data shows a substantial difference between the Harris and Trump campaigns’ strategies on TikTok, with Harris averaging between 20 and 30 posts each day in October, and Trump averaging only 10.
Between August 1 and Election Day, the candidates received nearly the same number of total views (3 billion for him, 2.9 billion for her), but Trump’s views came later in the cycle, and in bursts that reached larger total audiences. This may mean that while Harris was reaching a consistent audience more often, Trump was reaching a larger audience overall.
Cumulative Views of Trump and Harris Owned Content Over Time Kamala Harris and Donald Trump Best Performing Posts Data visualizations from Zelf. Today, TikTok has 170 million users in the United States, more than the total number of Americans who voted in the 2020 presidential election. (The total number of votes cast in 2024 hasn’t been finalized yet, but will almost certainly also come in under 170 million.
) The platform, which is owned and controlled by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance, for years downplayed its role as a place for political discourse in an effort to stem concerns about whether Chinese government control over the app might facilitate influence operations or data collection efforts from the Communist party. But that strategy changed last year, after Congress began seriously considering a bill that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese owner, or see it banned in the United States. If TikTok was going to face a ban bill, its role as a political platform could help its defense, because political discourse is one of the most protected forms of speech under the First Amendment.
In April, with overwhelming bipartisan support, the House and Senate passed a law that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban starting January 19: the day before inauguration day. ByteDance has insisted that TikTok is not for sale, and has challenged the law in court, where it hopes a judge will prevent it from going into effect. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
During the campaign, former president Trump, who first tried to ban TikTok in 2020, reversed his position on the app in a stunning flip-flop after meeting with Republican megadonor and ByteDance investor Jeffrey Yass earlier this year. In the days following his reelection, Trump’s staff has reiterated that he now hopes to stop the ban bill from taking effect, though repealing or amending the existing law would require an act of Congress. As Yass lobbyist and former Trump campaign official Kellyanne Conway told the Washington Post, one of Trump’s reasons for now favoring the platform is his own campaign’s success on it: “He appreciates the breadth and reach of TikTok, which he used masterfully along with podcasts and new media entrants to win,” she said earlier this week.
Jeremy S. Thompson, a digital strategist who worked on Harris’s 2020 campaign, said he wasn’t surprised that the McDonald’s moment worked so well for Trump. “It was unconventional — it’s an example of him doing what his audience loves best, and that’s trolling people.
” Thompson cautioned against reading too much into candidates’ social media presence, noting that it doesn’t always translate to voting. Many of the candidates’ social media fans, he noticed, were from foreign countries, and thus not eligible to vote in the U.S.
election. And of the people who could and would vote, most had made up their minds years in advance. As for Trump’s late October surge in TikTok views, Thompson said he might have just benefitted from people finally tuning into the election in the days before the vote.
“They might just have been curious. He’s a curiosity at this point; he’s an entertainer. He’s always been good at this.
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