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.
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.
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.
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.
Videos featuring Mr. Trump have often made him appear more relatable.
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.
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.”
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.
