Business
Trump vs. Harris: The 2024 Election Has Taken Over TikTok
Welcome to the TikTok election.
Every week, people post tens of thousands of videos on the app that mention Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald J. Trump, including election updates, conspiracy theories and dance routines. Those posts attract hundreds of millions of views — on par with the interest in hit shows like “Love Island” or the pop star Chappell Roan, according to Zelf, a social video analytics company — even though the videos represent just a slice of the content about the election on the app.
No two TikTok feeds are the same, because the app’s algorithm sends different videos to users based on their interests. To better understand the election content that’s reaching the app’s 170 million American users, The New York Times watched hundreds of videos from creators across the political spectrum.
What emerged was not a single type of video. Everyday Americans, news outlets and political operatives have been trying to crack TikTok’s algorithm with a range of videos, including bombastic debate clips, songs made from speech snippets, comedic impersonations and solo diatribes.
Here is what many of them look like, and what some of the people behind them are trying to achieve.
The
Swifties
Even though Taylor Swift has announced she’ll be voting for Ms. Harris, TikTok users on both sides of the aisle use the pop star’s music for political content.
@kayleighhhlynnnn
@swifties4kamala
The
Impersonators
Impersonators are a fixture of presidential elections — lucky are the “Saturday Night Live” stars who resemble candidates — and they’re all over TikTok, too. The app seems cannier than other platforms in funneling comedy videos to receptive viewers.
Austin Nasso, a 29-year-old comedian in New York City, regularly posts impressions of both Mr. Trump and President Biden.
“I’m trying not to deliberately choose sides in the content,” Mr. Nasso said. “I’m trying to make fun of both of them.”
Sam Wiles, a 37-year-old comedian and writer in Los Angeles, amassed 45,000 TikTok followers in one three-week period this summer with his exaggerated impressions of Mr. Vance. He said the same videos hadn’t received nearly the same attention on Instagram or X.
@votesamwiles
Mr. Wiles said that his videos seemed to be reaching mostly liberal-leaning viewers and hadn’t drawn many pro-Vance or pro-Trump comments.
“On TikTok, like minds can collect a little more, for good or bad,” he said. “I’m just finding people who like my stuff much more easily.”
Since 2019, Allison Reese, a 32-year-old comedian in Los Angeles, has cornered the social media market on impressions of Ms. Harris. A key element of her portrayal? Nailing the laugh.
Her impression of Ms. Harris is funny but often flattering. “I think she’s got a good head on her shoulders,” Ms. Reese told The Times earlier this year. “I don’t agree with everything, but who would?”
The
Hamilton Liberals
The musical “Hamilton” is nearly a decade old and tells the story of politics in the United States from the centuries before that. Still, on TikTok, plenty of users on the left have found the show’s founding-father-inspired music a fitting vessel for explaining and debating the current election. The official Broadway cast also released a video last month urging voter registrations.
The
News Outlets
Established news outlets have largely been behind the curve on TikTok, where viewers often prefer colloquial videos from individual commentators over traditional news anchors speaking from behind a desk. But several outlets, including The Daily Mail, CNN and NBC News, have made strides this cycle by posting debate snippets, interview clips and their own analyses.
This CNN video shows how even formal news networks are taking their cues from TikTok. While many of the network’s TikTok videos seem like excerpts from its TV programming, some of its biggest hits feel more organic and less slickly produced. David Chalian, CNN’s political director, is still sharing poll results as he would on air, but from a very different environment.
@cnn
A particular standout on TikTok has been The Daily Mail, the news site and British tabloid. It has amassed over 14 million followers with rapid-fire updates and short clips with punchy headlines: “Trump Hits Back At Obama” or “Harris Tells Oprah Intruders Are ‘Getting Shot.’” The publication often traffics in sensationalism, recently promoting a conspiracy theory about the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump in July and asking undecided Black voters to share the animals they associate with Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump.
Phil Harvey, the site’s head of social video, said the outlet had recognized that being fast was essential: A couple of hours can be the difference between a post that breaks through and one that doesn’t. The organization has about 20 “short-form video specialists,” he said, split between journalists and “social creatives” who can navigate algorithms. Unlike traditional broadcasters, he said, “for us, every hook, every edit, every transition, every clip is structured to work on an algorithm.”
NBC News has also experimented on its TikTok channel, condensing the 90-minute presidential debate between Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris into a single minute, and using the app’s tools to overlay a video of one of its analysts onto debate footage.
Efforts by traditional news outlets appear to be working. Eight of the 10 most viewed TikTok videos about the September debate were from mainstream news sources, according to Zelf data.
The
Pundits
Political commentators on TikTok are a little different from their MSNBC and Fox News counterparts. They’re more casual and accessible to their viewers, engaging with comments and answering questions.
Link Lauren, a 27-year-old political commentator who worked for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign, has over 700,000 followers on TikTok, where his daily videos often refer to Ms. Harris as “Kamalamity” and criticize the “liberal media establishment.” He likens his three- to four-minute posts to TV segments, where he dissects a news story from the day while projecting images and videos behind him.
Plenty of other creators operate using a TV-esque model, like V Spehar, known online as Under the Desk News, who has over three million followers. (The name is literal. Mx. Spehar, 42, got their start recording segments under a desk.) Spehar, whose content leans left, regularly posts multiple videos a day covering breaking news and updating stories, often wearing a suit like a traditional anchor.
The
Manoverse
Mr. Trump’s campaign has spent much of the year trying to court young men, and TikTok is rife with that demographic. The candidate has rallied support from a group of YouTube pranksters known as the Nelk Boys, as well as the Gen Z streamer Adin Ross, who was banned from the streaming site Twitch for hateful content, and Jake and Logan Paul, the influencer brothers who have gone into professional boxing and wrestling. Bryce Hall, a TikTok creator who amassed more than 23 million followers by living in a party house with other social media stars, made a prominent endorsement of Mr. Trump recently after appearing on stage at one of his rallies.
@nelkboys
Videos featuring Mr. Trump have often made him appear more relatable.
@brysondechambeau
Their meeting was to raise money for charity and not meant to be political, Mr. DeChambeau later said.
Of Mr. Trump, one user commented: “Bro seems so chill. He’s actually somebody I would want to hang around.” Another said: “I want him as my grandpa and not even because of the money. He just seems so damn nice.”
The
Dancers
Perhaps no genre is bigger on TikTok than dancing, which was cemented as a hallmark of the app in its nascent years. Now, though, dancing has evolved from pure entertainment to an attention-holding tactic as a viewer watches a video about a completely disparate and often weighty topic, like the presidential election. In some cases, people have remixed comments from candidates into songs.
@rawlinsness
The
Candidates Themselves
This year, there are scores of politicians posting directly on TikTok. Representative Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat, has an account, and so does the former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. And while some of their posts repurpose popular memes, plenty of them are focused on politics.
For the first time ever, the major party presidential candidates are on TikTok, too. But Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump take decidedly different approaches to their content.
“Trump’s TikTok account is projecting this macro image of strength, potentially trying to appeal to younger men,” said Lindsay Gorman, the managing director of the technology program at the German Marshall Fund and a former tech adviser for the Biden administration. “In contrast, Harris’s strength comes across as female empowerment.”
@realdonaldtrump
@teamtrump
Like Mr. Trump, Ms. Harris and her campaign also have two distinct accounts, one with a more formal feel and a second, @KamalaHQ, where her campaign lets loose.
@kamalahq
@kamalaharris
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
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