How social media is playing a new role in presidential campaigns

Minnesota Now

When you think about a political campaign ad or marketing, your mind probably doesn’t go straight to TikTok and Instagram. Most of the U.S. population grew up with an onslaught of television or radio ads during election season.

But social media has brought a new dimension to reaching voters. And for the first time, it seems that campaigns are doing it well.

The campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris, known as Kamala HQ has 3.4 million followers and more than 75 million likes across all of their videos on TikTok. By comparison, Team Trump, the campaign for former President Donald Trump, has 210,000 followers on TikTok and nearly 200,000 likes, though Trump does have more than 7 million followers on Truth Social.

To understand how social media is playing a new role in reaching voters, MPR News reached out to April Eichmeier, an assistant professor of Emerging Media at the University of St. Thomas who is an expert on political messaging.