Donald Trump and Kamala Harris duke it out on social media
Donald Trump had lots of momentum on social media a month ago. Now, he is facing a candidate who is drumming up momentum of her own.
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Donald Trump had lots of momentum on social media a month ago. Now, he is facing a candidate who is drumming up momentum of her own.
Both Vice President Kamala Harris’s and Trump’s camps are competing fiercely for young and online voters by courting social-media influencers, trading jabs online and trying out digital-first strategies.
Trump is a veteran social-media combatant. He has cultivated a large following after years of using online platforms to promote his message and attack opponents, and is trying to capitalise on his ability to reach people directly and unscripted.
The 78-year-old has courted internet personalities including the 23-year-old lifestreamer Adin Ross, whom Trump danced next to in a recent TikTok post that got nearly 50 million views. Trump posed in another post in a fighting stance with the YouTuber and boxer Jake Paul, netting more than 13 million views, and joined brother Logan Paul’s podcast called “Impaulsive,” which has more than 4.7 million subscribers on YouTube.
The Harris camp’s strategy entails quickly spinning up new accounts and rebranding others, latching on to memes and presenting the 59-year-old as a fresher face.
A recent TikTok post shared by one of the Harris team’s accounts draws on a viral reality-show audio clip saying “and now I want to sit back and relax and enjoy my evening, when all of a sudden, I hear this agitating, grating voice.” While that is played, the video pans from Harris on the tarmac smiling and shaking hands with children to – as ominous background music begins – a plane in the distance labelled “Trump Vance.” The cheeky, 10-second post has tallied 23 million views.
One advantage for Harris is the shift of social-media platforms in recent years toward relying more on algorithmic recommendations and viral content, said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
“Followers are less important than they used to be,” Calkins said. “Now if you’ve got super engaging content, you can get broad viewership on that.” Harris’s team on Friday created a TikTok account for her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. His first video had a dad joke vibe, quipping that he and his dog call the platform TimTok. Two weeks earlier, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, posted his first TikTok, showing him with a group of YouTubers.
Harris took over the 175-person digital team from President Biden’s campaign, her campaign said. She has a team of strategists – all 25 and under – running her TikTok account, @KamalaHQ.
Supporters of Harris have also been hosting virtual events with groups to raise money, including one led by Black women and another called Dead Heads for Kamala for fans of the Grateful Dead. A White Women for Harris call on Zoom had so many participants trying to join that the meeting kept crashing.
Trump’s efforts to own the social-media spotlight have gained help from Elon Musk. The former president joined his vocal new ally for a two-hour-long conversation last week that was heard by more than 1 million listeners at times during the event. While Trump has continued posting on his own platform, Truth Social, he also started posting on X again over the past week and joined TikTok in June.
Researchers have debated the impact that social-media campaigning has on elections, and it is difficult to gauge in real time how effective such efforts are in translating online enthusiasm into votes. For now, both sides say they are seeing evidence that their strategies are working.
Recent polls have shown Harris essentially tied with Trump among voters, with the election less than three months away. Democrats are set to gather at the party’s national convention in Chicago, where they have invited content creators to document the event and plan to build a creator platform on the convention floor. Republicans likewise invited creators to their convention last month and gave them dedicated space.
Elizabeth Booker Houston, a 34-year-old political content creator, said she previously turned down some paid offers from advocacy groups to post videos supporting Biden because she wasn’t that excited about him. But she has been more willing to make videos in support of Harris.
“There’s so much desire to organically talk about it because people got more excited for her,” said Houston, who has more than 500,000 followers across her TikTok and Instagram accounts.
Harris’s campaign pointed to a 10-fold increase in donations from Gen Z in July, the month she entered the race, compared with donations that Biden’s campaign received from Gen Z in June. The campaign didn’t share specific figures.
Harris’s team sold roughly $3 million of camo hats after a meme comparing Walz to the pop star Chappell Roan – whose website also sells camo hats – went viral, according to the campaign.
Harris’s TikTok account, created in late July, gained two million followers in the first 24 hours and now has around 4.5 million followers. The team’s @KamalaHQ TikTok account has grown more than eightfold since being rebranded from @BidenHQ, her campaign said.
Over the week ended Friday, Trump’s TikTok account posted three videos earning more than 35 million combined views. Harris’s TikTok account posted five videos that got nearly seven million views, and @KamalaHQ garnered 25 million-plus views across its 12 posts.
The Trump campaign has highlighted the June launch of the former president’s TikTok account, which gained some 2.7 million followers within its first 24 hours and now has more than 10 million followers. Platforms including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram as well as X have reinstated Trump, after previously kicking him off following the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. Those moves restored his reach to now roughly 150 million followers across those three platforms.
Supporters rallied behind Trump after the failed assassination attempt in July, posting photos and memes. Musk came out with an endorsement of Trump in a post on X to Musk’s almost 200 million followers.
More recently, the Trump campaign said it raised more than $1 million from a link created specifically for Musk’s interview of the former president on X.
The Republican National Committee, which is working closely with the Trump campaign, said the teams’ strategy includes having Trump posting from his accounts and going to live events to upload content from there. Trump posted his first TikTok about attending an Ultimate Fighting Championship event in June, for example.
Supporting accounts – such as the X account @RNCResearch, with around 630,000 followers – are also vital, said an RNC official who is working closely with the Trump campaign.
The account resurfaced a clip of Harris that was meant to be damaging, but the move might have backfired. In it, she is giving a speech and talks about how her mother used to say young people acted as though they fell out of a coconut tree, when in reality they exist in the context of everything that came before them.
Whimsical coconut memes popped up across the internet as a result, and the Harris campaign embraced them. The quote has largely become popular with her base.
Brilyn Hollyhand, an 18-year-old high-school senior in Alabama who has around 107,000 followers on Instagram and around 70,000 on TikTok, helps the RNC brainstorm ways to reach young people online and off. He said he told Trump at an event last year that the president should engage more on other platforms beyond Truth Social.
“You’re not reaching young people. We’re not on Truth Social,” he recalled saying. Since then, he has been happy to see the former president posting more on such sites as TikTok.
Both parties are making bets about how to court young voters when most Americans have made up their minds about whom to vote for, and young men and women are splintering in their political beliefs. Polls show young men favouring Trump.
“The Harris campaign is doing a good job in moving very quickly, rapid response. Their meme culture game is on point, and they’re doing a lot of grabbing and moving energy,” said Scott Goodstein, who led social-media strategy for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. “But now the question is, ‘Can they turn that excitement and enthusiasm into votes.’ ” Obama was the first presidential candidate to embrace many social-media platforms. Goodstein said he knew that the strategy was starting to work once people showed up to volunteer for the campaign and said they heard about it from the then-popular site MySpace.
Harris embraced memes after being endorsed by the U.K. pop star Charli XCX, who called her “brat,” a reference to her latest album that came out in June.
Democrats have also taken the fight against Trump into his own territory on Truth Social. Biden’s campaign created a Truth Social account, and Harris took it over.
When technical hiccups delayed Trump’s interview with Musk, Harris’s Truth Social account tried to turn some of Trump’s old comments against him. They reported an old post from Trump in which he made fun of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis for an event on X with Musk that also had technical glitches.
“Wow!” Trump’s old post said in part. “The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!” Dow Jones
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