Scoop: Obama hits TikTok to register young voters
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Vice President Harris, former President Obama and President Biden during an East Room event on the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act in 2022. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Former President Obama is taking to TikTok today in search of eligible voters who aren't yet registered to pull the lever for Vice President Harris.
Why it matters: Democrats want to press their advantage with young Americans.
- To run up the score on former President Trump with Americans under 30, they need them to be on the voter rolls in real life.
- Enter TikTok, the insanely popular video app, even though the White House still has deep concerns about the data collected by its owners, Beijing-based Bytedance.
Driving the news: Obama's TikTok push is part of a broader Democratic effort to use National Voter Registration Day to reach some 30 million potential voters through non-traditional means.
- The former president conducted a series of interviews to chat with influencers, like Carlos Espina, a 25-year-old nonprofit director with 10.3 million followers on the platform.
- The goal is to convince potential voters to head to IWillVote.com, register and make a plan for election day.
- Meanwhile, the Harris-Walz campaign is launching a new battleground effort to register young voters — online and on campus.
The big picture: Both Democrats and Republicans have had a complicated relationship with TikTok, the content it creates and the passions it generates.
- Democrats have both privately and publicly expressed alarm about the tenor of the debate on social media, especially around the Israel-Hamas war.
- Last November, Obama called out the "TikTok" activism.
- But in February, Biden's re-election campaign officially launched its TikTok account with a Super Bowl-themed video.
- Then in April Biden signed a bill that could lead to a potential ban of the app.
- After Biden dropped out of the race, Harris officially joined the app, declaring "thought I would get on here myself" and quickly embraced the site's meme culture.
The other side: Trump, who led the original charge to ban TikTok on national security concerns, surprised many of his own allies in March when he argued against banning TikTok.
- "If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don't want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!" Trump posted on his Truth Social app.
What we're watching: The Harris campaign — as well as the Biden campaign before it — has tried to deploy Obama strategically, tapping him to raise money from wealthy donors and small-dollar party activists.
- More recently, they used Obama's one-liners, and suggestive hand motions about Trump's crowd sizes, to needle the former president.
