Even the TikTokers know the Biden administration thinks they’re stupid.
It may be the one thing a Midwestern blue-collar worker in a swing state and an influencer have in common, and that’s bad news for the White House.
“The energy of the call felt like a press briefing for kindergartners,” said Jules Suzdaltsev, a journalist on TikTok, after a White House Zoom briefing on Ukraine and gas prices last week.
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White House communications leaders Jen Psaki and Matt Miller hosted an hour-long briefing for 30 TikTok influencers—ranging from news creators like Marcus DiPaola to teen fashionistas like Ellie Zeiler—the latest in a string of attempts to reach large online audiences with the administration’s messaging. Unsurprisingly, it’s beginning to look as cringe as, well, your Facebook Aunt joining TikTok.
In 2021, the administration enlisted pop star Olivia Rodrigo, among others with large online followings, to boost COVID vaccination among young people. A video with TikTok star Benny Drama, in which he parodied an inept intern for Psaki while flashing a matching skirt suit and nails, was met with much internet mockery and many a meme.
Gambits like the TikTok meeting are Team Biden’s attempt to leverage the popularity of the most-downloaded app in the world for three years running. Cumulatively, the influencers in the Zoom meeting reach a young audience of many millions, often far bigger than cable news, with short videos ranging between 30 seconds and three minutes long (TikTok last year added 10-minute videos, but the genre is generally short-form).
And it’s not all dance videos, though my Elder Millennial soul would like to decry it as such because (grumble grumble) these kids today. Audiences are leaving legacy media sources to find news and education online, and the form offers short, accessible content about otherwise intimidating subjects. Personal finance and medical TikTok accounts are popular niches, while video from Ukraine (along with a deluge of fog-of-war and deliberate disinformation) flooded the app over the last month.
But the White House strategy comes with downsides. When Barack Obama engaged new technologies to reach young people, he was ribbed by opponents, but he had a certain dignified panache in his approach. Obama was bemused dad while Biden, without Obama-like oratory to buoy him, gives off confused, irate grandpa whose message is in danger of disrespecting both the influencers he’s trying to cultivate, and turning off the audiences he really needs to reach.
Whether it’s online or off, the White House can’t muster the very things candidate Joe Biden was supposed to revive—normalcy, empathy, and truth.
Voters haven’t felt normalcy, they don’t hear empathy, and they’re repeatedly told not to trust their lying bank statements in favor of the White House’s spin on things like gas prices and inflation, the most kitchen-tabley of issues.
The White House seems eager to pin most (if not all) of the blame for anything that ails the American economy on “the Putin spike,” as Psaki put it, or “Putin’s price hike,” as the president said in a statement. Contrary to the White House’s persistent argument, voters know that gas prices increased through all of 2021. They may not know the specifics—that it hit an average of $3.01 per gallon, a high since 2014, and peaked in the late fall and winter at $3.41—but they felt the increase as it happened. They were there.
When it came to inflation, the Biden administration ignored warnings even from Obama-alum economists in forging ahead with another $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. In early 2021, the Biden team was proudly “brushing warnings aside” and by July, Biden claimed inflation was “temporary.”
TikTok’s own 2021 trend report indicates voters weren’t aligned with the administration’s chill on this issue, reporting instead, “videos about #inflation saw a nearly 1900% gain, as people came to the platform to learn about what's causing inflation, what the Consumer Price Index is tracking, and what the impact will be for their pockets and personal bank accounts.”
Other Biden administration officials have piled on the average Americans’ double-whammy at the pump and grocery store by offering them $50,000 solutions to $4-a-gallon problems.
Vice President Kamala Harris touted electric vehicles and more Green New Deal government spending at an event to celebrate the anniversary of the last giant government spending bill (which kicked off a year of historic inflation). Psaki is often flippant when asked about problems plaguing Americans, once joking about the supply-chain “tragedy of a treadmill delayed.” Not exactly “I feel your pain” stuff, here. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told MSNBC that if families bought electric vehicles, they’d "never have to worry about gas prices again.” This was said in November, the same month Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of Virginia—in what’s been seen by many political observers as a predictor of the coming midterm elections.
Virginians hadn’t elected a Republican statewide for more than a decade, and Biden won the state by 10 percentage points. But Youngkin sailed to victory on a raft of kitchen-table issues that attracted suburban, college-educated voters thought lost to the Republican Party, boosted turnout among rural voters first energized by Trump’s candidacy, and even made inroads with Hispanic voters—all of whom felt Democrats didn’t care about what mattered to them.
There are plenty of things a White House can’t control in the run-up to a midterm election. But they can control the way they talk to voters about the problems they’re facing. On TikTok, Zeiler sported the truly flawless hair that is the hallmark of a great influencer, and offered the White House’s message to her 10 million followers, blaming a spike in demand on the economy’s recovery and Putin for everyone’s woes.
But in the parlance of another TikTok hashtag, Americans have the receipts.
