April Eichmeier, an emerging media assistant professor at the University of St. Thomas College of Arts and Sciences, recently spoke with The Washington Post about how a young team of social media experts is using TikTok and internet trends to boost the Harris/Walz campaign.
From the story:
After Tuesday night’s debate, as former President Donald Trump worked the reporters in the spin room in Philadelphia, Vice President Kamala Harris’ TikTok team was busy appealing to a different crowd.
In the digital “war room” at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, they hit the button on their pièce de résistance shortly after midnight: A six-second video that mocked Trump’s performance by showing his lectern inhabited by a laughably dramatic “Dance Moms” star. “I thought I was ready to be back. I thought I was stronger than this but obviously I’m not,” she lamented. “I wanna go home.”
Viewed more than 7 million times, the video was produced by a small TikTok team – all 25 and under, some working their first jobs – given unfettered freedom to chase whatever they think will go viral. Over the past eight weeks, Harris’ social media team has helped supercharge her campaign, harnessing the rhythms and absurdities of internet culture to create one of the most inventive and irreverent get-out-the-vote strategies in modern politics. ...
And though campaigns dating back to former President Barack Obama have taken social media seriously, the Harris team’s big innovation has been letting a new wave of Generation Z innovators take control, said April Eichmeier, an assistant professor who studies political communication at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
“The under-25 group right now has never known a world without digital media,” she said. “They know how things land on TikTok because that’s their culture.”
