Earlier this week, Democratic data scientist David Shor appeared on The Ezra Klein Show to share his theories on why Democrats lost the 2024 election and where they should go from here. Towards the end of the interview, Shor made a pretty wild assertion: that social media platform TikTok caused young voters to shift more Republican at the ballot box. 

Here’s what Shor said:

“The share of young voters who get their news from TikTok has more than quadrupled in the last four years. This is the biggest and probably fastest shift in media consumption that has happened in my lifetime, and it closely correlates with support change. TikTok users are younger, they’re less politically engaged, and it’s not surprising that we dropped among this group. This is what you’d expect given these demographics.

But if you run the regressions, there’s clearly a causal element at play. And when you zoom in specifically on people who get their news from TikTok but don’t care very much about politics, this group is eight percentage points more Republican than they were four years ago — which is a lot.”

Shor’s argument is this: Young voters shifted to Trump. Young voters use TikTok a lot. Therefore, TikTok made young voters shift to Trump. 

As someone who closely analyzed political content trends in the election on TikTok on a weekly basis, I think it’s worth taking a closer look…

First of all, partisans on both sides of the aisle have been accusing TikTok as a platform of having a political bias for a long time. After October 7th, pro-Israel members of Congress argued that the app was turning younger generations into rabid anti-Zionists. On the Left, I have spoken to progressive creators who accuse the platform of censoring content that mentions gay rights or abortion or gun violence prevention topics. The platform is a black box, and few have real insight into how certain topics are prioritized or “shadow-banned.” I’ve personally spoken to a former lead TikTok engineer who said there’s no intentional upranking or down-ranking of certain topics. Believe whoever you want. 

In terms of Trump and Harris content, however, we have actual data to paint a picture of how the election played out on the platform. In May 2024, Tara Palmeri at Puck published a shocking report that included internal TikTok numbers showing twice as much pro-Trump content on the platform than pro-Biden. Soon after, I started using a sophisticated scraping tool called Zelf to analyze thousands of posts on the platform every week. Zelf would scrape the entire platform for any post mentioning Trump or Harris related search terms, and use a combination of AI and manual cross checking to assign a sentiment score to each post. 

What we saw throughout the campaign was that Trump indeed continued to be mentioned more than twice as much as Harris - he dominated attention on the platform, and tens of thousands of users would create content mentioning Trump every week. Especially in the final week of the election, Trump was everywhere - Zelf detected more than 400,000 posts mentioning him. 

However, it’s important to take a closer look at the sentiment of the posts that were reaching the majority of users last year. Week after week, we found that the majority of top-performing posts mentioning Harris were positive or favorable to her candidacy, and until October, the majority of top posts mentioning Trump were negative. 

These trendlines show that Harris indeed did experience a wave of support during “Brat Summer,” when young people rejoiced that they had someone other than Joe Biden to vote for. Pro-Trump viral content did surge late in the game when it mattered, but throughout the final 3 months of the Election, TikTok was not disproportionately filled with viral MAGA posts. 

I can provide more data and share the top performing posts and creators we saw week after week, but you get the point. In terms of Trump-Harris head to head, election-related content on TikTok was either tilted in Harris’ favor, or at least a wash. Trump did begin to peak at the end of the campaign however, when more people were tuning into the election.  

What all of this data doesn’t capture is that I still agree with Shor that Democrats do face a critical deficit on TikTok that they should urgently address. Way too much content from the Left on the platform is preachy and features explicitly-pro Democratic creators just yelling into the camera about politics. While “Blue MAGA” accounts like Harry Sisson or Chris Mowrey or Meidas Touch are critical for Democrats to engage their grassroots fans, they are becoming a dime a dozen, and I fear they are reaching the same 500,000 to 1 million people with every video. Instead, the Right benefits from massive cultural brands and accounts that are only politically-adjacent and reach parts of that key audience that Shor mentions: “people who get their news from TikTok but don’t care very much about politics.”

One of those brands is Barstool Sports, an account with over 9 billion lifetime post likes on the platform. Barstool doesn’t post about politics often, but when it does, it has shared content favorable to Trump. Last year, the sports media company would share videos of Trump walking triumphantly into a UFC fight as crowds cheered, or conversations with podcasters who were surprised that Trump was so friendly and authentic. On top of that, Barstool’s founder, Dave Portnoy, doesn’t hide his own political POV, and frequently bashes Democrats online. 

If you’re wondering how Barstool’s engagement stacks up against top progressive political accounts, here’s a chart:

The lack of investment in cultural or entertaining content by people who share progressive values is a key gap that hasn’t been filled and funded. Few in DC realize its even a problem, but David Shor should know. Last year, the Democratic outside group that he worked with, Future Forward, raised a historic $950 million - more than any single independent expenditure group in American history. They could have invested a good portion of that money in funding permanent progressive media infrastructure on platforms like TikTok. Instead, they spent half of their budget on broadcast or cable television ads, and dedicated just $30 million to content creators and emerging owned media efforts. 

That’s it for today! Today’s full issue was just for All-Access subscribers. Thanks for being a part of this community. If you have questions, feedback, tips, or ideas for a future newsletter, just send me an email: [email protected]