PoliTikTok

Who will be TikTok's FDR?

Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC) went on Meet the Press and was asked why he doesn’t delete his TikTok account given the risk of Chinese surveillance. He responded with a paradigm-shattering statistic: nearly a third of his constituents follow him on TikTok, where he posts weekly videos explaining the nuts and bolts of Congress. A THIRD.

Contrast that with how most members of Congress still do constituent outreach. A couple of times a year a little pamphlet shows up in my mailbox from one of my legislators. Since I don’t need more boilerplate self-congratulation in my life, those mailers promptly find their way into my recycling. It’s political junkmail, all but worthless as an organizing tool in the digital age.

But via TikTok, Jeff Jackson can pump out one viral video after another. Of the eighteen videos he’s posted since December 2022, all but three have over a million views. His video on collapse of Silicon Valley Bank reached 28.4 million people, which is 10x as many people as watched Jackson’s appearance on Meet the Press.

TikTok has allowed Jackson, a first termer who was picking out his office just three months ago, to build a national platform capable of doing cable news show numbers every week like clockwork. That tells you something about the still underrated potential of TikTok as a political communications tool.

Jackson has the most followers on TikTok, but here’s the current congressional leaderboard.

Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC): 1.5 million
Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT): 1.4 million
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA): 502k
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY): 481k
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NY): 352k
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN): 247k
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA): 241k
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY): 195k
Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA): 141k

The lack of ‘R’s in that list is glaring. Democratic politicians have been early adopters, likely an artifact of Democratic preeminence among the Gen Z voters who are also the median users of TikTok. If you want to get folks to the polls, you’re going to want to reach out to the remarkable 77% of Gen Zers who voted Democratic in 2022.

Indeed, 2022 was the first, full election cycle since TikTok’s user count in the US exploded during the pandemic. It may not be an accident that 2022 broke midterm election records for youth turnout, coming in second only to 2018 (which is all the more impressive since 2018 was a cycle that favored turnout-boosting Democratic anger at the Trump administration).

Although we have to wait for some clever political scientist to prove it, it’s possible, even likely, that Democratic predominance on TikTok was a major factor in the party’s historic overperformance in what would normally be a down cycle for the party in power led by an unpopular president.

Notably, one of the discrete clusters of congresspeople on the leaderboard list is purple state moderates like Jackson. Jon Ossoff’s relatively moderate policy stances helped him add suburban Republicans to his 2020 winning coalition in the crucial swing state of Georgia. John Fetterman’s ability to woo independent voters in Pennsylvania via clever social media campaigning preserved Democratic control of the Senate. The need to eke out any marginal advantage in swing states drives moderates to experiment with new mass media forms.

But the other cluster of names on the list belong to some of the most radical members of Congress, including Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Jamaal Bowman. While democratic socialism might represent only a tiny faction within the Democratic Party, they dominate the TikTok congressional leaderboards!

This isn’t in and of itself surprising. Radicals often face institutional barriers and journalistic gatekeepers who feel their politics are too far beyond the pale. Novel mass media forms allow radicals to bypass such restrictions and directly reach the public.

For example, radical labor unionists and socialists were notable early adopters of radio technology in the 1920s and 1930s (until Herbert Hoover and the industry-captured Federal Radio Commission imposed ideological consensus on the airwaves). The same was true for Ronald Reagan—then considered to be radically conservative—who used his daily Viewpoint radio show to make himself a shadow president in the public imagination during the Carter administration. The same was true for political outsider Donald Trump, whose vitriolic thumbs might have been fashioned by a particularly cruel clique of gods for the partisan cacophony that is Twitter.

And, assuming that a ban on TikTok isn’t imposed or a sale forced, it’s only a matter of time before we have our first TikTok president, someone who harnesses the frustration of younger voters alienated by our nation’s political dysfunction.

Such a politician might use this new mass media to build parasocial relationships with their constituents, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous radio “fireside chats.” FDR’s use of the radio—which had only been a mass consumer technology for a few years at that point—was key to his landslide re-election victories because it allowed him to bypass anti-New Deal newspaper owners and speak directly to the public, which found his calm manner and accessible policy explanations appealing.

Do you happen to know what the subject of FDR’s first fireside chat was? On March 12, 1933, FDR took to the airwaves to soothe Americans worried about a month-long bank run, reaching an audience of sixty million.

90 years later—almost to the day—at 2am on March 13, 2023, Rep. Jeff Jackson took to TikTok to soothe Americans worried about the potential for a general bank run after the failure of SVB, reaching an audience of nearly thirty million.

At this point in the rise of algorithmic discovery-fueled, short-form video, it’s not obvious how the political ramifications will shake out over the medium and long term. It’s likely that Democratic predominance on TikTok will fade as savvy Republicans join the platform. The radical skew of political TikTok will revert towards the mean.

That may, over the very long term, increase public trust in the government by decreasing the metaphorical distance between congresspeople and their constituents. Alternately, by more effectively exposing political dysfunction and corruption—like that on display in the congressional TikTok hearing last month—the platform could further alienate Americans already jaded by older mass media forms like cable news and talk radio.

Who’s to say? As for me, I’m going to go record a TikTok about it.