After President Joe Biden left office and Harris announced her candidacy, excitement around the new campaign grew quickly. Campaign officials told WIRED that the number of followers of the KamalaHQ TikTok account grew fivefold in the first week, and new content focused on Harris garnered 232 million views and more than 33 million likes, far surpassing Trump’s total number of likes. As of writing, Trump’s account has about 30 million total likes, while Harris has 60 million.
Beyond the engagement data, the campaign also noticed that TikTok users and content creators were producing content in support of Harris at a rate that would have been unthinkable when Biden was the front-runner.
“We’ve seen such an increase in the number of people creating content on KamalaHQ that we’re now able to leverage our For You page in a different way,” Lauren Kopp, who runs the Harris campaign’s TikTok account, told WIRED. “We’ve also seen the same thing happening with our engagement with influencers and celebrities. KamalaHQ has seen a huge increase in comments and re-sharing of content that we didn’t see as much with BidenHQ.”
This created a feedback loop where supporters created their own remixed content for the campaign. “Our audience is always encouraging us to use different sounds and trends, and we respond by capitalizing on these viral moments and engaging directly with our audience in a way that excites them,” says Kopp. “Our comments section is flooded with, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been waiting forever for you to do this!’ It creates a community with followers and encourages content to be shared widely and organically.”
Harris isn’t the only one benefiting from the surge in digital support for the campaign: Political influencers and content creators are also raking in followers, likes, and engagement. Several creators who spoke to WIRED told WIRED that their posts on platforms like TikTok and Instagram are getting more likes and positive comments than when Biden was leading.
“The response to anything with Kamala’s name in it has been incredible, more than I’ve ever seen for Biden,” Saadia Mirza, a political creator with nearly 100,000 followers on TikTok, tells WIRED. Mirza describes herself as a “Never Trumper” who aggregates news and opinions from across the web. “I don’t know their numbers, but I’m noticing a huge amount of engagement, shares, comments, replies, and private DMs just from looking at my posts.”
“I’ve definitely seen a shift in people’s enthusiasm. People are getting more involved in politics, joining the conversation, and starting to share things that they didn’t before,” says singer, actress and political influencer Malinda Hale, who posts news commentary to her 50,000 Instagram followers. “A lot of people that I’ve spoken to are like, ‘Oh, I don’t really care about politics,’ but they’re definitely paying attention to politics now because this is such an important election.”
For Kelton Allen, a TikTok creator from Florida, the excitement he’s witnessed online has seeped into his everyday life.
