The way to voters’ hearts? It must be memes and TikTok, influencers say

Jim Saksa | (TNS) CQ-Roll Call

Politics, it is said, is the art and science of persuasion. A politician gathers power by convincing people — but needs to get their attention first. And who better to give advice on that than those pied pipers of the internet: influencers?

That was partly why a crowd of Capitol Hill communicators gathered last Friday to hear from the likes of V Spehar and Maria Comstock, who have millions of followers on TikTok.

The other reason: networking. Hosted by the Democratic Digital Communications Staff Association, it was the group’s first in-person conference since 2019. Sessions at “Digital Day 2024” ranged from a crash course on “mastering short-form video” to tips on how to get the most out of a lawmaker’s franking privileges.

While current or former Hill staffers led most of the panels, the group also invited a few certifiable social media stars to share their secrets, including Comstock, who uses her channel to interview her dad and other self-described retired spies. And the keynote speaker was Spehar, who earned 3.1 million followers by posting short videos recounting the day’s news from underneath a desk (and from a progressive perspective).

Spehar provided a quick 101 lesson on growing an audience that could be summed up by Marshall McLuhan’s old chestnut: “The medium is the message.”

Social media accounts need to be for just one thing, Spehar said, whether that’s selling, informing or influencing. Too often, politicians try to be cool, or worse, do the trite, overly performative bit of an Old doing the TikTok because their Gen Z staffers said so.

On TikTok especially, you want to speak directly to the camera, using short clips of 30-45 seconds, focused on no more than one topic, Spehar said, pointing to the success Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., has had on the app since pivoting to that style after previously posting clips of interviews with traditional media.

In another presentation, Emma Mont, the “public face” of the anonymous collective behind the @OrganizerMemes account, offered pointers on how to go viral, like “the early memer gets the worm,” and “you don’t want to beat people over the head with your message, you want it to dissolve into them slowly.”

The mood was upbeat at the event, which was held a day before the political landscape was upended by the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. More than 200 staffers RSVP’d, according to Eric Jones, one of the conference organizers and a communications aide for Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo.

For members of Congress and their typically much younger staffers, bridging generational divides and finding the messaging sweet spot on social media has been an awkward challenge for years.

All the presenters shared the same argument for getting elected officials, even those born before the invention of color TV, on the apps: You’ve got to meet voters where they are.

“A lot of what I am is catching people who didn’t watch the news,” said Spehar, who uses the pronoun they. Repackaging a 1,200-word article into a minute-long video can act like a gateway drug to harder news. “If I can get you interested, you feel included and you feel smart. Then you go to the next level, right?” they said. “And then, soon enough, maybe you subscribe to The Washington Post.”

Spehar said Democrats need reinforcements on social media to counterbalance the waves of disinformation and misinformation on TikTok and YouTube. “There’s a lot of bad actors out there, right? There’s a lot of people who are very good and very comfortable lying and misrepresenting things for clicks or engagement,” they said. “More truth out there, more accountability out there and more actual experts out there — even if they’re in shorter clips — is going to do a lot more to beat all of these long-winded podcast bros who talk about nonsense all the time.”

Some Democrats, like Sen. Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut, have lamented social media’s apparent impact on real-world socializing, blaming the apps for contributing to an epidemic of loneliness. Social interaction with friends and family is a necessity of life on par with shelter or food, the argument goes, and these parasocial, one-sided online relationships are akin to Doritos — a habit-forming source of empty calories that might satisfy your immediate hunger pangs but will leave you malnourished if you consume too much.

But the presenters Friday saw social media as an inalienable segment in the patchwork of political speech.

“Twitter is real life to some people,” said Mont, encouraging political accounts to interact with users who engage with them in good faith. “People want to feel like they are a part of something. … Give people a sense of community and they will love you for it.”

Many Democrats supported a bipartisan law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, that will force ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, to either sell the app or shut it down in the U.S., viewing its ties to the Chinese Communist Party as a national security risk.

Spehar used part of their time in front of Hill staffers to advocate against shutting down TikTok. “If you ban this app, it will bum out America in a way that you have never seen, because a lot of people have trauma-bonded to this app through the pandemic,” they said. “They built community when there was none and when they felt like the government abandoned them.”

Even if a Democrat voted for that bill, Mont said, they should still get on TikTok to reach voters, citing a Tufts University poll that found nearly 30 percent of 18- to 21-year-old voters heard about the 2020 elections on TikTok.

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