In the last two weeks of the campaign, Trump’s reach surged on TikTok, where views on his best-performing posts far outstripped those of Vice President Kamala Harris.
In the last two weeks of the campaign, President-Elect Trump’s reach surged on TikTok, where views on his best-performing posts far outstripped those of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Inthe final days of this month’s presidential election, pollsters and pundits insisted that the race was as tight as it could be — statistically tied. But on TikTok, the data told another story: former President Donald Trump had surpassed Vice President Kamala Harris in a dramatic shift of Americans’ online attention.
On October 22, then-candidate Trump showed up at a Philadelphia-area McDonald’s franchise (which was closed for the day) and filmed scenes of himself preparing food in the restaurant’s kitchen for a set of pre-screened customers. The stunt was pilloried by the press and dismissed by some fast food workers as “insulting cosplay.”
On TikTok, though, official Team Trump accounts flooded viewers’ feeds with the McDonald’s scenes, and broke through to a larger TikTok audience than either candidate had yet seen in a single day. Just one of Trump’s McDonald’s videos alone — with more than 63 million views and 7.3 million likes — received more engagement than VP Harris’s top five videos on the platform that day combined.
According to data from the TikTok analytics firm, Zelf, Trump’s TikTok surge continued from the McDonald’s stunt through Election Day when his top-performing post received 151 million impressions, and her top-performing post received just 29.6 million. Of the 10 highest performing TikTok posts by the candidates, eight would end up being Trump’s — five of them coming in the final week of the campaign.
The Zelf data shows a substantial difference between the Harris and Trump campaigns’ strategies on TikTok, with Harris averaging between 20 and 30 posts each day in October, and Trump averaging only 10.
