The Moneyball Theory of Presidential Social Media

Not even the president can bend the internet to his will.

On Monday evening, Jon Stewart returned to the hosting chair of The Daily Show after nearly a decade away—and he spent a nontrivial portion of his opening segment roasting Joe Biden’s first TikTok video. That post, which the Biden-Harris campaign uploaded during the Super Bowl on Sunday, featured the president answering silly, rapid-fire questions about the big game: Jason Kelce or Travis Kelce? The performance was cheeky but decidedly low energy. Biden’s voice is a little raspy, and at one point, he gets very excited about chocolate-chip cookies.

Stewart played the clip in the context of the press’s multiday fixation on Biden’s age. When it ended, he eyed the camera and offered some advice to the campaign’s social team. “Fire everyone,” he deadpanned. “Everyone. How do you go on TikTok and end up looking older?” The audience howled.

This type of exposure is probably not what Biden’s press office had in mind. In fact, it’s hard to tell what they’re going for at all: Although social media has been a cornerstone of campaign strategies ever since Barack Obama leveraged Facebook in 2008, things look very different today. This is a weird election (my colleague David Graham has noted that “no one alive has seen a race like this”), unfolding in a weird media ecosystem, on a fractured, placeless internet.

And so it’s worth asking, in a hyperpolarized rematch election that most Americans don’t really want, amid a political media cycle that isn’t engaging audiences: What is the point of Joe Biden getting on TikTok? (His campaign had, after all, reportedly decided not to make an official account over the summer.) And what does this reveal about the way that everyone’s relationship to social media has changed in the past decade?

What might an elder statesman, or any candidate, get out of social media in 2024? The obvious answer—essentially voiced by the campaign itself—is to reach TikTok’s highly engaged, young user base. “We're going to be wherever voters are, and Tiktok is a powerful platform for communicating to an important audience for us,” Rob Flaherty, the deputy campaign manager for Biden’s reelection run, told me. Flaherty also stressed the need to build out a bench of influencers who can deliver campaign messaging and raise awareness without having to involve the candidate himself.

But social media isn’t so straightforward anymore. I detect other, implicit strategies behind Biden’s TikTok.

Shameless Rage Farming

Social-media platforms tend to give a natural attentional advantage to the most shameless posters—the people saying and doing the most outlandish things. There are all kinds of engagement-bait posting strategies, but none is more reliable than picking fights and outraging people so that they share your post, even to disagree with it. Biden is not an edgelord, nor is he, as Donald Trump was, an all-caps poster who’s quick to hurl insults. In fact, much of Biden’s public image has been created in opposition to Trump’s volatility, so it seems unlikely that he’ll be posting pure, uncut ragebait. That said, you can see a watered-down version of this strategy taking shape on his TikTok account, which this week posted a video criticizing Trump as “rambling incoherently” at rallies.

Fan Service

The Biden-Harris campaign seems eager to engage and excite a specific crowd, which consists of people who are part of either the Democratic establishment or an overly online crowd that has developed an intense fandom around electoral politics. When Biden makes a winking joke about rigging the Super Bowl for the Chiefs atop a photo of the campaign's trademark “Dark Brandon” meme of Biden with laser-beam eyes, it’s an in-joke aimed at a crowd that’s been following politics with an ironic awareness of the latest right-wing conspiracy theories. The extremely online feel seen, and the campaign comes off looking self-aware and like it understands the nightmarish information environment it operates in. The downside to this fan service is that it can easily come off as inauthentic. Biden is not hyper-online, so these TikToks arguably feel cringey (his first post, which was captioned “lol hey guys,” feels especially inauthentic). To get around this, the Biden administration has courted influencers who have established, trusted audiences to post on the president’s behalf.

Programming the Media

Effective social-media strategies can easily change the day’s narrative. The sterling example of this was Trump’s Twitter account, which acted as an assignment editor for the press corps. Journalists would debate, report on, and fact-check his every utterance. On TikTok, you can see the Biden campaign attempting to use the platform to redirect the conversation around the president’s age by posting about Trump’s incoherence at his own recent rallies. TikTok is, arguably, the ascendant platform for news online, so being there makes sense. But the problem for the Biden campaign is that this type of social media is no longer a reliable means to reset narratives. Twitter, which was once the epicenter of the political elite and media conversation, is now a wasteland called X, and its many platform competitors lack a central political focus. The post-to-cable-news pipeline still exists, but every part of the cycle feels diluted in terms of interest and effectiveness.

Awareness

Just as Flaherty said, when you’re running for president, you want to meet people where they are. Especially young people who might not already be paying attention to you. (Plus, it’s potentially more efficient than running costly ads.) Biden’s social-media team, I’m sure, would have considered it malpractice to not dip their toes into the algorithmic waters of the “For You” page. But the FYP, as it’s known, is very different from classic social media, which was historically based around feeds populated by accounts that users intentionally followed. TikTok’s algorithm is excellent at assessing a user’s behavior and feeding them targeted content, no matter how fringe the interest. The result is a unique, more siloed internet experience. It also adds a wrinkle to the notion of discovery. Will TikTok show an avid user who rarely interacts with political content a Biden TikTok? It’s hard to say. And that’s a problem, if the campaign does truly intend to reach new voters.

---

The point is that it’s harder than ever for a political candidate to purposefully attract or direct attention. There are so many eyeballs, in so many different places, that it is tough for any one thing on any platform to matter in the same way it did in 2016 or 2020. Conversations can still coalesce around a single topic—unfortunately for the Biden campaign, the president’s age is currently one of those stories—but these are not moments candidates can control, and they don’t flow from social media the way they used to. No candidate illustrates this better than Trump, whose time in the fever swamps of Truth Social has left his online presence severely diminished. His all-caps posts, which would’ve led cable news in 2016, barely register in the press today.

Candidates using social media is no longer novel, so their very presence on a given platform isn’t likely to make news, unless, of course, they make a gaffe of some kind or somebody crosses a line with an insensitive comment. Social media used to be touted as a way for politicians to develop real connections with voters, but that’s only ever been true for a small handful of politicians who have earnestly embraced platforms and not relied on teams to do it for them. Even those who do engage in this way will note that the feedback mechanism on social media is broken. Is a TikTok that gets more than 8 million views—as Biden’s Super Bowl video did—considered successful if it’s also widely mocked?

Keith Edwards, a Democratic strategist who ran social media for the Lincoln Project as well as digital strategy for Senator Jon Ossoff’s 2021 runoff election, offered a simple explanation. “You need to be on these platforms because you need to amass a following for when the big moment strikes,” he told me. He used an example from Ossoff’s campaign, when a Fox News reporter ambushed the candidate outside his bus. Ossoff deflected and used the moment to address the TV audience, delivering a crisp, earnest message about corruption in Congress. The moment, captured only by the TV cameras, went viral—not because of Fox News, but because Edwards’s team posted it to the accounts they’d been quietly growing.

In this line of thinking, no one post really matters—until it does. And, as a campaign, you’re never going to know when that moment will come. To hear Edwards tell it, the scripted moments—the cheesy Super Bowl TikToks—are not themselves designed to go mega-viral or change the narrative; they are a way to gather a base audience. “It’s like building a weapon, and you’re aiming it every day,” he said. “Sometimes you hit; most of the time you miss. But the bigger the weapon, the more likely you are to hit.” The Biden campaign seems to agree, offering up what amounts to the Moneyball strategy for presidential social media. “In 2014’s internet you could afford to swing big and hit home runs—big one-off campaigns for more centralized audiences,” Flaherty told me. “That’s changed now. We’re going to look for home runs but we’ve got to collect singles and doubles. It’s about being in more places and narrowcasting and getting them to add up to broadcast.”

These descriptions should sound familiar to any creator online. With the exception of the largest accounts, trying to get a mass of people to care about something you’ve made is daunting—an exhausting process that feels more like luck or alchemy than science. The attentional rewards that come from algorithmic pickup or finding the right influencers to boost your posts feel more random and less easy to replicate, especially on platforms like TikTok. That this holds true even for the president of the United States—that a presidential social-media account may not be able to cut through the noise without the help of influencers—is striking. There are vanishingly few people who can bend our current, fragmented internet to their will; the rest of us have to hustle, throwing posts at the wall to see what sticks. Joe Biden, it turns out, is just another creator.