Welcome to the Zelf Political Report, where we share one-of-a-kind TikTok insights and analysis on current politics based on our platform’s proprietary technology. In this edition, we gathered insights from trends about the presidential race between Aug. 6, 2024 and Aug. 14, 2024.
Zelf Data and Insights
Kamala Harris experienced a
surge in positive sentiment on TikTok after President Biden bowed out of the race, clearing the path for the vice president to rise to the top of the Democratic Party’s ticket. At the time, Harris had the highest Net Promoter Score (NPS) on the platform among all the major candidates (49%).
Our biggest question leading into this new report was whether Harris would maintain her momentum on TikTok. Here’s what we found:
- Harris has overtaken former President Donald Trump in posts and views as the most popular candidate on TikTok, meaning that for the first time the Republican candidate is no longer dominant on the platform since we started monitoring this election cycle:
- Harris amassed no fewer than 85,500 posts in the last seven days, compared to 76,500 posts for Donald Trump.
- Content about Harris raked in 1.4 billion views, compared to 1.3 billion views for Trump content.
- Harris’s NPS increased to 62%, while Trump’s NPS is now at -73%.
Top Harris/Walz Video With Positive Sentiment
10M views
21.23% engagement rate
Top Trump/Vance Video With Positive Sentiment
1.8M views
8.69% engagement rate
We also found a major contrast in how successfully the presidential candidates are using the platform for their own content:
- The Harris team (@kamalahq) has generated 66 million views on TikTok, averaging an almost unprecedented 18.3% engagement rate.
- Meanwhile, Trump’s team (@realdonaldtrump) amassed 49 million views, with a 10.7% engagement rate.
- Notably, @kamalahq needed 22 videos to achieve these results—an average of three posts per day in comparison to only three videos in total from @realdonaldtrump.
On the VP front, there was also a substantial difference between the Republican and Democratic candidates:
- 13,900 videos were generated about Democratic VP pick Tim Walz following the announcement that Harris had picked him as her running mate.
- In comparison, two weeks ago there were fewer than 700 videos posted about him.
- He currently has an NPS of 39%, although immediately after the announcement it was as high as 64%, higher when Harris received the support of the Democratic Party to be their presidential candidate.
- Meanwhile, 7,300 videos were posted about Republican VP candidate Vance and his NPS score dropped to -87%.
On the issues, the subject “(un)fit to serve” was generating more reactions on TikTok than any other, with Trump receiving more negative sentiment (nearly 8 million engagements) on the platform than Harris (nearly 2 million engagements).
While the “(un)fit to serve” topic was the biggest drag on both Biden and Trump for much of the election cycle, Harris seems to be attracting positive sentiment around the same issue. She had a net score of +1.1 million engagements, compared to a net score of -6.7 million engagements for Donald Trump.
Methodology
Zelf conducted a comprehensive assessment of 39,299 TikTok videos from August 6, 2024 to August 14, 2024, that mentioned Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump, as well as vice presidential picks J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. Zelf also tracked key political issues including immigration, inflation, and reproductive rights.
The Zelf assessment monitored the number of videos, views, and engagements, as well as whether the videos were positive, neutral, or negative for any of the candidates or policies being measured.
A key metric that Zelf uses is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is an assessment of how positive or negative discourse is about an individual, issue, or topic within a given timeframe, weighted based on video engagement.
For an individual commercial post, Zelf accurately ascribes sentiment 97.5% of the time. Measuring political posts is more complex as sentiments are often far more nuanced with some posts expressing both positive and negative sentiments. For individual political posts, Zelf accurately ascribes sentiment 85-90% of the time. Measuring those posts at scale, Zelf's analysis offers the most accurate snapshot by far of political discourse on TikTok. As Zelf continues to analyze political content, it's already high overall accuracy will continue to increase.
