Will 2024 Be The TikTok Election— With Señor Trumpanzee Pretending To Be TikTok's Protector?

Yesterday, YouGov’s latest horserace polling showed Biden had taken a slight lead over Trump (46-44%), despite most people (58-37%) disapproving of the way Biden has handled his job. In fact, voters actually have a more favorable opinion of Trump (42%) than they do of Biden (38%), though both candidates are widely disliked. Only 4% of voters say they would vote for Kennedy and Cornel West, Jill Stein and Chase Oliver each has about 1% support. According to this poll it looks like the only reason Biden is leading is because of Trump’s criminal conviction. (In the generic congressional race, Democrats lead 45-43%.)

Everything in the paragraph above will change and change again and again and again as we head towards November. I hope Biden has some smart people running his campaign because if he doesn’t, we’re going to wind up with a deranged and out-of-control fascist bent on revenge in the White House. Someone is going to have to explain to young voters that as far from ideal as Biden is, he’s not terrible— except for teh genocide thing (and Trump’s worse on that)— and if Biden is a C or C-minus, grading Trump with an F would just normalize what he really is.

Yesterday Elena Schneider reported how Team Biden is trying to shore up the youth vote. Unbelievable they have to commit resources to that when Trump is the alternative! There’s a new PAC in town Won’t PAC Down. Tangent for a second? I had lunch with an old colleague on Friday, a top music business attorney who I hadn’t seen since the pandemic. I didn’t realize that every single time I wrote about Tom Petty trying to stop Trump and other Republicans from using I Won’t Back Down, it was my friend who was doing the cease and desist work. He was Petty’s attorney and then Petty’s estate’s attorney. And, he told me over lunch, he won every single time; no exceptions— and always for the same reason: Trump and the Republicans did indeed back down… every time. They didn’t stand their ground; they did back down.

Anyway, the new Won’t PAC Down, reported Schneider “will raise and spend $20 million to $25 million… turning to Hollywood for help. Won’t PAC Down has hired millennial and Gen Z writers, directors and producers to help craft pro-Biden content that’s specifically engineered to sell an octogenarian candidate to typically disillusioned and hard-to-reach voters under 30.” I sure hope they— or someone with a pulse— can talk Biden out of his war against TikTok. And I hope they start running ads on TikTok, which has been morphing into Trump territory since the idiot Democrats in the House refused to protect the platform from the psycho-Republicans. 

Another tangent. The only 33 Democrats to vote against the foolish anti-TikTok bill in the House were:

• Jamaal Bowman (NY)

• Cori Bush (MO)

• Greg Casar (TX)

• Joaquin Castro (TX)

• Danny Davis (IL)

• Maxwell Frost (FL)

• Chuy Garcia (IL)

• Robert Garcia (CA)

• Al Green (TX)

• Val Hoyle (OR)

• Jonathan Jackson (IL)

• Sheila Jackson Lee (TX)

• Sara Jacobs (CA)

• Pramila Jayapal (WA)

• Sydney Kamlager (CA)

• Ro Khanna (CA)

• Andy Kim (NJ)

• Rick Larsen (WA)

• Barbara Lee (CA)

• Summer Lee (PA)

• Zoe Lofgren (CA)

• James McGovern (MA)

• Gwen Moore (WI)

• AOC (NY)

• Ilhan Omar (MN)

• Mark Pocan (WI)

• Ayanna Pressley (MA)

• Delia Ramirez (IL)

• Rashida Tlaib (MI)

• Juan Vargas (CA)

• Nydia Velazquez (NY)

• Maxine Waters (CA)

• Nikema Williams (GA)

I’m a little nervous about this. I know some of these writers and they may be really funny but the ones I know don’t know anything bout politics beyond what they see in teh headlines or— at best— on MSNBC. Schneider wrote “Those movie industry creatives, with credits from Saturday Night Live to Parks and Recreation to Big Mouth, have been meeting monthly for the last half year in a rented, loft-style conference room in a downtown Los Angeles office building. There, they have pitched everything from 30- and 90-second influencer-style ads that could run on Instagram Reels to highly produced, scripted ads. The group’s first actual ads— which will only appear on social media and streaming platforms— are expected to drop in early July.” God help us; they better have someone like Dan Pfeiffer guiding them and not James Carville.

The hope, officials involved with the super PAC say, is that ads that are crafted for and by a younger, online audience can more effectively reach nonpolitical voters under 30. And for that reason, the group plans to avoid the crutch that other politics-meets-Hollywood ventures have deployed: splashy celebrity videos meant to go viral online.

“There’s a big difference between putting a celebrity on camera and having them say, ‘if you liked me in “Madame Web,” then you’re going to love voting,’ versus what we’re doing,” said Travis Helwig, a former head writer for Crooked Media who is now leading the super PAC’s writers’ room. “We’re taking the best young writers and directors, who are the age and demographics of the people we’re targeting, using poll-tested messaging, and shaping it in a way that will resonate with young people and get them excited.”

John Della Volpe, a pollster who specializes in the youth vote and worked on Biden’s 2020 campaign polling team, is providing the research for Won’t PAC Down. And Doug Rubin, a longtime Democratic strategist who was a senior operative on Deval Patrick’s two gubernatorial campaigns, is also involved in the effort.

The Biden campaign is legally prohibited from coordinating with the Super PAC. But in a statement, it said it supported the effort. “Groups like Won’t PAC Down, which understand the power of the youth vote, will play a key role in mobilizing and activating young people across the country,” Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement shared with Politico.

Won’t PAC Down’s efforts is one of the clearest illustrations to date that Biden allies continue to see youth voters as a major political weakness.

And for good reason. Voters under 30, who backed the president by a 25-point margin in 2020, have voiced increasing frustration with the administration over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the stubbornly high cost of living, particularly around housing. During his first term, Biden notched some of the lowest job approval ratings ever seen by a Democratic president from voters under 30, according to Gallup. And there is fear among Democratic operatives that that cohort will either look to other candidates or not vote at all, potentially costing Biden key support in battleground states.

“The challenge is immense, and that’s why we’re doing this,” said Della Volpe, who has briefed top White House officials and is serving as a senior adviser to the super PAC.

But he pointed to how Barack Obama doubled his lead over Mitt Romney among young voters in 2012 once he effectively defined the GOP nominee. And Biden can do the same, Della Volpe said, but it will require mastering an entirely different media landscape.

“That’s why the goal here is to share a narrative of what’s been happening [with the Biden administration] and what’s at stake in this election in videos that are memorable, sharable and empowers young people to have meaningful conversations with their peers,” Della Volpe said. “We believe that tapping into the most talented storytellers of this generation can help us get there.”

Helwig, the head of the super PAC’s writers room, said it plans to “hyper-target” young voters in swing states “who are on the fence.” Top issues they’re already testing and workshopping include reproductive rights, gun violence, the U.S. Supreme Court and cost of living.

But the group has already confronted Democrats’ challenge in communicating what they argue are the president’s accomplishments for young people. During the writers’ room first meeting in January, an adviser for the super PAC presented the Gen Z and millennial writers and producers with talking points, focused on what Biden had done on canceling billions of dollars in student debt. Few of the participants in the room knew about it.

The first step in fixing that, advisers to the super PAC advisers said, requires reaching young people where they already are with their unconventional ads. Almost a third of people aged 18 to 29 said they were regularly getting their news from TikTok, according to Pew Research, as well as upticks on YouTube, Instagram and Twitch.

“We’re not talking about Facebook or Twitter,” Helwig said. “We need to meet young people where they are and present them with this information in ways that won’t make them roll their eyes or immediately make fun of the ad they just saw.”