'Speaking the language of TikTok': Politicians court young voters by using Gen Z humor online

When Ken Russell came across a video on TikTok of a user dropping it low to a Megan Thee Stallion song and transitioning outfits on the song's beat, he thought to himself: “I bet I could do that.”

A Miami city commissioner running for Congress in Florida’s 27th district, Russell waited until the next city commission meeting so he’d be in his suit, and closed his office door so his staff wouldn’t see him crouching on the floor. After three tries, he finally got the transition right.

When the song’s beat dropped, Russell dropped too, leaning in close to the camera and giving his 300,000 TikTok followers a message: “Hey, are you registered to vote? There’s a primary on Aug. 23 and the general election Nov. 8."

The video went viral on TikTok in June and on Twitter and Instagram in July, after digital marketing consultant Sonia Baschez shared the video in a tweet.

“Here’s to politicians using TikTok properly,” Baschez said of Russell's video.

In an effort to raise their profiles and connect with young people, whose votes are notoriously hard to earn, politicians and political candidates are courting Gen Z voters by speaking the language they know best: TikTok.

From making niche memes to participating in viral trends, it's an effort that youth voting and political humor experts say can either make or break a candidate's campaign.

"If that strategy pays off, it's amazing. But if it falls flat, that's a big failure because young people on TikTok are really quick to sniff out content that they perceive as inauthentic — especially with politicians that...are using Gen Z humor, which is really specific and really odd in some ways," said Ioana Literat, a professor at the Teacher's College of Columbia University, who studies online political expression and participation.

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2022 candidates lean into Gen Z humor on TikTok

Russell told USA TODAY he joined TikTok a little over a year ago, around the time he launched his campaign for one of Florida's Senate seats, which he ceded to Democratic Rep. Val Demings in May before announcing a different congressional bid.

Making videos on the app was a hobby at first but over time the platform sucked him in — and his following grew. He attributes success on the platform in part to just being himself.

"You can't fake it, and you shouldn't try to if you want to be successful on the platform," Russell said of TikTok. "You really have to be yourself and let it go."

Former U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham, who won South Carolina's Democratic nomination for governor, told USA TODAY he joined TikTok about a year ago after his followers on Twitter suggested it.

In one of Cunningham's most viral videos, he acts out what he'll do when the state's "anti-abortion bill hits my desk as governor." The South Carolina politician squares up and throws a gentle punch with overset text that reads "Veto." Then, he throws a second, harder punch with the text "Veto so hard."

The video has more than 2.1 million views.

"I take this campaign and I took my job in Congress very seriously. However, you can't take yourself too seriously,” Cunningham said. “We have some serious challenges in front of us, but it's okay to make a joke every once a while.”

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Demings, who is running for theSenate seat currently held by Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, is also a TikTok savant.

Her campaign's digital director, Cayana Mackey, said that the team has a dedicated "vertical video creator" who spends all her time on TikTok learning trends and translating Demings' platform into messages that resonate with Gen Z. That way, the congresswoman's account showcases her personality and platform in a "more relatable" way to young voters, Mackey said.

Rubio has tried to use her savvy on the app against her, saying the congresswoman should "know better" than to use the app, which has caught heat from some national security experts and Republicans due to its Chinese ownership. But Mackey argued that Rubio's disdain for TikTok shows the senator doesn't understand how to run a "modern digital campaign."

"Young voters are inspired by Chief Demings and they want to get involved, they want to mobilize," she said. "Seeing that contrast between Marco Rubio, wanting to ban one of the most popular apps for young people these days—that just helps us even more to get closer to our voters.”

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Campaigns have used TikTok before

Political candidates running for office this year aren't the first to use the platform. A number of sitting Congress members used TikTok to bolster their campaigns in 2020 and 2021, including Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.).

Markey's TikTok grew in popularity by employing abstract Gen Z jokes, like making three-second videos cooking pasta or zooming in on the Senator's shoes as a lo-fi remix of one of his ads plays in the background. Ossoff, on the other hand, leaned into his age, perhaps conceiving the concept of the political "thirst trap" — a flirty post meant to entice a response, usually about the poster's attractiveness online — on TikTok.

The politicians' TikToks also touch on issues important to young voters, like climate change and gun violence.

"I feel lucky to join (young people) online in pursuit of a better future and a livable planet," Markey said in a statement to USA TODAY. "When we come together on platforms like Twitter, TikTok and Twitch, it is as part of a broader community, fighting for our values, while having fun online.”

While it's almost impossible to prove their TikTok prowess is what brought voters to the polls, both Ossoff and Markey saw a surge in young voters that helped elect, or reelect, them to office.

Georgia's 2021 runoff elections, in particular, were strengthened by young people. Some 63% of Peach State voters age 18-29 cast their ballots for Ossoff in the high-stakes race against Trump-endorsed GOP incumbent Sen. David Perdue, according to Tufts University's Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Among young Black voters only, that number rose to 91%.

Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who made frequent appearances on Ossoff's TikTok while the pair ran parallel campaigns for Congress, received 64% of youth votes and 91% of Black youth votes.

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In Kansas, state Sen. Christina Haswood has seen similar success with her own TikTok, which now has more than 145,000 followers.

Haswood was elected to represent the state's 10th House district in 2020. While she's unsure whether her TikTok drove people to the polls, she told USA TODAY that the feedback she received from voters at the time was positive.

“We really had a high voter turnout and I'm not too sure how much TikTok played into the heart of that — because, you know, the average voter age is not Gen Z— but I know I've got a lot of folks who see me or message me saying that their children saw me on TikTok," she said. "That might have played a part in it too, even if the parent or the grandparent isn't on TikTok.”

But the playbook isn't infallible. TikTok politicians with sizeable followings, like Democrat Kelly Krout, who ran for a seat in Arkansas' state House in 2020; self-described socialist Joshua Collins, who ran for Washington's 10th U.S. Congressional district; and former Minnesota state Sen. Matt Little, D-Minn., did not win their election or reelection bids.

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The elusive youth vote

Connecting with Gen Z on TikTok is just the newest way political candidates are courting the votes of young people, a voting bloc that has historically turned out to vote in low numbers.

Youth voter turnout has remained under 55% since 1972, dropping as low as 39.6% in 1996, according to Statista. However, youth voter turnout did see an uptick in recent elections, with 55% voting in 2020. In 2018, the previous midterm year, some 36% of people aged 18 to 29 cast ballots — up 16 points from 2014's 20% voter turnout, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Jon Grinspan, a curator at the National Museum of American History, said there are two ways politicians have historically sought out young voters: encouraging them to head to the polls by declaring voting as the "grown-up" thing to do, or meeting them where they are. Politicians' TikTok efforts are the latter.

Connecting with young voters on their own turf can be successful if a political campaign understands the moment. That's what Abraham Lincoln did during his 1860 campaign for president, Grinspan said.

"(Lincoln) really focused on getting young people engaged and used these comic books about a young man becoming a Lincoln supporter that are full of all this crazy slang that is incomprehensible to us today — and probably was incomprehensible to anyone over 22 back then," he said. "Lincoln did it really well, and he won in large part because of the youth vote."

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Efforts to entice young voters have also spectacularly failed.

In 1972, for example, when the youth voting age lowered from 21 to 18, campaigns created red, white and blue Keds sneakers and bell bottom pants adorned in stars, hoping to connect with their younger constituents, according to Grinspan.

"It's not like people are going to look at Richard Nixon in Keds and think, 'Oh, voting is cool,'" Grinspan said. "It didn't work. The youth vote dramatically dropped, even though the age of when you can start (voting) was lower.

"I'm not saying the young vote crashed in '72 because of Keds and bell bottoms, but it's just like a physical embodiment of trying and missing," he added.

Other efforts, like former President Bill Clinton's saxophone performance on the Arsenio Hall Show or MTV's "Rock the Vote" campaign, likely fall somewhere in the middle.

Whether efforts to reach young voters on TikTok will translate into increased voter turnout is yet to be seen. Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run For Something, said it will likely depend on whether the candidates campaigning on the app have more to offer young voters than funny jokes.

"It doesn't just matter that they're there, it matters what they're saying on these platforms," Litman said. "If you are a TikTok icon but you don't actually have policies that will deliver for young people, they can smell (expletive) ."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How candidates are using TikTok to court young voters with Gen Z humor