The ‘feral 25-year-olds’ making Kamala Harris go viral on TikTok
Originally published by Drew Harwell for the Washington Post
After Tuesday night’s debate, as former president Donald Trump worked the reporters in the spin room in Philadelphia, Vice President Kamala Harris’s TikTok team was busy appealing to a different crowd.
In the digital “war room” at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., they hit the button on their pièce de résistance shortly after midnight: A six-second video that mocked Trump’s performance by showing his lectern inhabited by a laughably dramatic “Dance Moms” star. “I thought I was ready to be back. I thought I was stronger than this but obviously I’m not,” she lamented. “I wanna go home.”
Viewed more than 7 million times, the video was produced by a small TikTok team — all 25 and under, some working their first jobs — given unfettered freedom to chase whatever they think will go viral. Over the past eight weeks, Harris’s social media team has helped supercharge her campaign, harnessing the rhythms and absurdities of internet culture to create one of the most inventive and irreverent get-out-the-vote strategies in modern politics.
They have trolled Trump inside his own social network, Truth Social. They have made viral memes out of bags of Doritos and camouflage hats. In 2016, a single Hillary Clinton tweet might have required 12 staffers and 10 drafts; today, many of Harris’s TikTok videos are conceived, created and posted in about half an hour.
“This campaign empowers young people to speak to young people,” said Parker Butler, the 24-year-old director of Harris’s digital rapid response content, a team that watches all of Trump’s speeches and can blast a clip onto social media at a moment’s notice. “And we’re here to put in the work.”
Trump also has leaped forcefully into social media, seeing it as critical to grabbing voters’ attention in an age of mass distraction. But while Trump has posted attacks on Harris’ intelligence, warnings of economic “disaster” and grim polemics about how America’s “FUTURE IS AT STAKE” — “We’re a nation in decline,” he says in one video, holding handcuffs aloft. “Nobody is safe. Absolutely nobody” — the Harris team has adopted a more playful approach, chasing virality with snarky, upbeat and oddball content delivered at internet speed.
Trump’s team has occasionally worked to mimic Harris’s online energy, but with darker memes. This week, Trump’s Truth Social account posted AI-generated images showing him saving cats from a crowd of dark-skinned men — a reference to the false claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating pets, which Trump repeated on the debate stage. In other images, cats hold up signs reading “Don’t Let Them Eat Us. Vote for Trump!” and “Kamala Hates Me.”
Harris’s “digital rapid response” team, as it’s called, is active on every major social platform, posting family photos on Facebook, hours-long speeches on YouTube and Spanish-language calls to action on WhatsApp. On debate night, they hosted live-streamed watch parties on Twitch, walloped Trump’s untruths on Threads and X, and hyped Harris’s most fiery lines on Instagram and TikTok. Minutes after she claimed Trump rallygoers leave “his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” her team posted the clip with the caption, “Holy s— 🔥🔥🔥 She just cooked him,” following up with a photo of Harris in a kitchen, smiling.
“They really run it like a fan account,” said Rachel Karten, a social media consultant who writes Link in Bio, a newsletter about online culture. “It’s not like it’s coming from a campaign. It’s like: We talk like you. Even the caption is like: ‘You have to watch this.’”