The Trump campaign and its allies are struggling to gain traction with young voters on TikTok in the final weeks of the 2024 presidential election, an exclusive Newsweek review of data for the popular social media platform shows.
Over the past two months, former President Donald Trump’s campaign and conservative influencers have used TikTok to try to win over the growing number of young people who get their news from the short-form video sharing app.
But the outreach effort is being drowned out by the popularity of anti-Trump videos on the app, according to TikTok data compiled by the social analytics company Zelf and analyzed by FWIW, a website tracking digital trends in elections. The independent review of content on TikTok was shared with Newsweek and has not been previously reported.
At least 15,300 anti-Trump videos have appeared on TikTok in the past two months, and the clips received 2.6 billion views, the data shows. During the same time period, roughly 12,500 TikToks criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on TikTok and got 1 billion views.
The new data offers a detailed picture of the conversation around the election taking place on TikTok among young voters, a key demographic that both campaigns have targeted in the final stretch of the 2024 race for the White House.
“Trump has not ceded this space. He is doing his best to try to find an audience on TikTok,” said Josh Klemons, a Democratic digital strategist and contributor to FWIW, who helped conduct the data analysis. But Trump is failing to gain ground with younger voters on the platform, Klemons added.
TikToks criticizing Trump generated 270 million likes, shares or comments in the past 60 days — more than double the 102 million engagements around anti-Harris videos on the app, the Zelf data shows.
Zelf compiled the database of politics content using keywords, hashtags, mentions and other search tools on the app. The data is likely incomplete, but gives the best view yet into election content on TikTok. The social media platform, which is owned by a Chinese internet company, is not known for its transparency and does not provide an easy way to find user data.
A Newsweek review of the TikTok data and of dozens of the platform’s most-watched 2024 clips found that Trump and Harris’s presidential debate continues to dominate election content on the app. Roughly 40 percent of the top-performing anti-Trump videos on TikTok have to do with the debate, according to findings in a recent newsletter published by FWIW.
The presidential debate was the top trending 2024-related issue on the app according to TikTok data for the first half of October that was viewed by Newsweek. Clips about the debate received 198.1 million views. Videos on the topic of fitness to serve, the second-most popular election-related issue on the app, received 187.9 million views.
In contrast, clips about immigration, the economy, taxes and inflation — 2024 issues where Trump leads in the polls — received a combined 189.3 million views on the app in early October, according to the TikTok data.
“This data shows us what young people are feeling about the presidential candidates, and it looks very negative for Trump,” said Shannon McGregor, a journalism and media professor at the University of North, Chapel Hill.
A Trump campaign spokesperson said the former president has a “highly engaged” audience on TikTok.
“President Trump has attracted a highly engaged Tiktok community and audience. President Trump’s @realdonaldtrump account, our campaign’s @teamtrump account and associated hashtags have generated over 10 billion unique views on TikTok proving that President Trump has infinite aura,” Caroline Sunshine, the campaign’s deputy communications director, said in a statement to Newsweek.
Newsweek reached out for comment to the Harris campaign. Newsweek also contacted TikTok to request comment for this article.
Age Factor
Harris’ apparent advantage over Trump on TikTok is in part a reflection of the age and political leaning of the app’s users. While TikTok does not publicize much information on its users, studies show the platform’s following is younger and more liberal than the overall U.S. electorate.
Today 40 percent of young adults under the age of 30 regularly get their news from TikTok, up from just 9 percent in 2020, according to a Pew Research Center study published last month. Around 55 percent of TikTok’s users identify as Democrats, compared to 39 percent who identify as Republicans, according to Elisa Shearer, a senior researcher at Pew.
“The news-engaged TikTok user base is a group that skews fairly liberal,” Shearer said.
Public polls also show a majority of young voters disapprove of Trump’s conservative positions on issues like abortion and immigration. The policy divide is evident on TikTok, which is awash with videos criticizing Trump and his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance for proposals to deport undocumented immigrants and restrict access to abortion.
“A lot of young people [are] turned off” by Trump’s views on immigration and abortion, said Milan Singh, a junior at Yale University and the founder of the Yale Youth Poll. Harris led Trump 56 to 35 percent among registered voters aged 18 to 29 in a new poll by the group that came out this week.
The higher level of user engagement around critical Trump content also isn’t unique to TikTok. Negative posts across social media platforms typically have more engagement than positive content. Younger voters also turn out at lower rates than older Americans, and if the trend holds in 2024 it could lessen the impact of a potential drop in support for Trump among the TikTok set.
Still, Harris’ popularity on TikTok is an important indicator of her standing with young voters. It also reflects her campaign’s use of the platform since Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, party strategists, social media experts and others said.
The Harris campaign streamlined the approval process for posting content on the app, allowing the social media team to share videos criticizing Trump’s latest comments within minutes of his events. The campaign trolls Trump as “weird” and “unhinged” in a regular diet of short, punchy, real-time clips on TikTok that are amplified by thousands of Harris supporters.
“Campaigns that are successful on a particular social media platform understand that platform’s audience and its genre of communication,” McGregor said. Harris has “people on the campaign who really understand TikTok.”
While the Harris campaign went all-in on TikTok right away, the Trump campaign got off to a slower start on the platform and has been catching up in recent weeks.
The Trump campaign shared its first post on the app on July 27. Over the next month, a critical stretch around the Democratic convention when Harris was building a loyal TikTok audience, the Trump campaign posted only 6 more times, a review of its activity on the app shows: on Aug. 5, 16, 17, 20, 28, and Aug. 29.
Since then, the official accounts associated with Trump have ramped up activity on the platform significantly, in an effort to match the output from the Harris campaign and its allies. Pro-Trump videos on TikTok from the campaign, conservative media organizations and individual content creators are now widely shared on the app.
But with less than three weeks left before Election Day, Trump is losing the battle with Harris for young voters on TikTok, said Klemons, the Democratic digital strategist who writes about TikTok trends for the #FYP newsletter.
“Team Trump is trying to replicate Team Harris’s success” on the app, Klemons said, but “the fact that he’s struggling so much on TikTok is a bad sign for Trump.”
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