Biden turns to TikTok as concerns over young voters mount

President Biden’s reelection bid is now on TikTok as the 81-year-old incumbent looks to reach younger voters amid rising anxiety about his age.

A 30-second video from “Biden-Harris HQ” showed Biden running through a series of questions about the Super Bowl, with the quippy caption “lol hey guys.” 

The move to join the video-sharing app popular among young Americans comes as Biden’s campaign battles enduring concerns about its traction with young people and a surge of new critiques against the president’s age after a special counsel report labeled him an “elderly man with a poor memory.”  

But the decision has also sparked controversy because of national security concerns about the app’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance. Last year, Biden signed a bill that included barring TikTok from government devices.

“I’m a little worried about a mixed message,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said of the campaign’s decision, citing concerns about China.

Republican opponents seized on the move for the same reasons.

“Biden campaign bragging about using a Chinese spy app even though Biden signed a law banning it on all federal devices,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Still, Biden advocates argue the move was essential to reach a younger portion of the electorate.

The Biden campaign now “has TikTok as one of their new tools in their toolbox to reach young voters,” said Jack Lobel, press secretary for the Gen Z-led nonprofit Voters of Tomorrow.

“TikTok is a key way of reaching my generation. A lot of us get our news there. What we see on our For You pages shapes how we think,” Lobel said.

More than 150 million people in the U.S. are on the app — and a growing share of Americans, including roughly a third of U.S. adults younger than 30, say they regularly get their news on TikTok, according to a Pew Research report released late last year. 

The first Biden-Harris HQ TikTok took advantage of the weekend media blitz of the Super Bowl to run through questions about the competing teams — but also jabbed at far-right conspiracy theories circulating online that the game was rigged in a ploy that would eventually help Biden.

“Deviously plotting to rig the season so the Chiefs would make the Super Bowl, or the Chiefs just being a good football team?” a voice behind the camera asked the president.

“I’d get in trouble if I told you,” Biden joked, and the video cuts to an image of “Dark Brandon” — a character created by the Biden team in light of a “Let’s Go Brandon” chant used by many supporters of former President Trump to diss the Democrat.  

The video boasts more than 7 million views and more than a half-million likes. A separate “Dark Brandon” post poking fun at the conspiracies has also pulled attention on Instagram and X. 

“The President’s TikTok debut … is proof positive of both our commitment and success in finding new, innovative ways to reach voters in an evolving, fragmented, and increasingly personalized media environment,” said Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty. 

“I suppose you could say our Roman Empire is meeting voters wherever they are,” Flaherty said in a statement, referencing another top TikTok trend.

In the viral social media space, “authenticity and building that brand and personality” is key, especially for campaigns that might otherwise come across are more formal and strategic — and especially when it comes to reaching young voters, said Kaivan Shroff, press secretary for the pro-Biden Gen Z group Dream for America.

That means leaning into humor, reacting quickly to news of the day and jumping onto leading trends.

“I think it’s a particularly stark reflection, given that Biden is getting all this criticism for his age, because he’s actually, I think, running one of the most responsive, in-touch digital social media campaigns,” Shroff said. 

At 81, Biden is the oldest president to serve in the Oval Office and would be 86 by the end of a second term. Trump, his top GOP rival in the 2024 White House race, is just a few years his junior at 77. 

As he runs for another four years in the White House, Biden has been beleaguered by concerns about his age and health. And last week, after an investigation into Biden’s classified document handling, a special counsel report decided against bringing charges but called out Biden’s “poor memory.” 

Biden fired back in defense of his mental fitness, but the comments in the report stoked worries about whether Biden should be running for reelection. An ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted after the special counsel’s report was released found that more than 8 in 10 Americans think Biden is too old to serve another term. Notably, nearly 6 in 10 respondents said they think Biden and Trump both are too old to serve.

Biden’s 2024 bid has seen some positive signals among voters younger than 30, but there also have been warning signs about young voter enthusiasm overall as the race heads toward a possible Trump-Biden rematch. 

Axios reported in November that the Biden campaign was weighing whether to get on TikTok to reach younger voters.

“I think that not being on that platform would be an extremely easy missed opportunity,” said Annie Wu Henry, a digital communications strategist dubbed by the New York Times as a “TikTok whisperer” for her work on Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) digital strategy during the midterms.

There’s no age limit for what makes a viral user on the app, Henry noted, and “just because [Biden’s] not an 18-year-old dancing on the platform doesn’t mean he can’t be successful.”

But despite its popularity, TikTok has been the subject of heavy congressional scrutiny and criticism due to concerns about the app’s Chinese parent company — pitting data security concerns against the opportunity to reach millions of Americans on the app. 

The White House has previously threatened to ban the app nationwide, and it has put a policy in place barring the app from federal devices. 

Asked whether the White House still has security concerns about TikTok now that the campaign has joined it, John Kirby, Biden’s national security communications adviser, said “nothing has changed” on that front. 

“Nothing has changed about the national security concerns, from the [National Security Council’s] perspective, about the use of TikTok on government devices. That policy is still in place,” Kirby told reporters at the White House’s Monday briefing, stressing he can’t speak for the campaign. He declined to answer when pressed on whether the administration is still weighing a ban.

Notably, Biden isn’t on the platform, just his campaign operation, and campaign officials told The Associated Press they were taking security precautions.

But while the campaign could change course if new legislation moves forward or new concerns crop up, “everyone’s job right now is to reach people,” said Democratic strategist Jon Reinish, pointing toward November’s high-stakes race.

“So many young voters, first-time voters, Gen Z, young millennials live on TikTok, get a lot of their news on TikTok,” Reinish said. “A lot of the conversation and conversation spurs really exist there, so the campaign’s job is to meet voters where they are.”