If you’re on TikTok, you’ve probably heard of Kamala HQ, Kamala Harris’ popular appeal to “chronically online” Gen Z voters. Kamala HQ has almost 5 million followers and 200 million likes, growing especially popular during the “BRAT” era following Charli XCX’s unofficial endorsement of Harris with her tweet “kamala IS brat.” Amalia Allen ’26 is an intern at Kamala HQ, and spoke about her experience working for the campaign.
“We’re trying to service voters,” Allen says. “Social media [can seem] silly and be dismissed by a lot of people, but we’re really leaning into it because we want people to be informed.”
The summer before her junior year at Smith, Allen applied to intern at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) and got a position working for the Instagram account @thedemocrats where she was introduced to the political side of social media. As her internship came to a close, her supervisor asked her to stay on through the fall working for the Rapid Response Team of the Biden campaign (before it became the Harris campaign).
The Rapid Response Team was composed of two interns, two full time employees and one supervisor, all under the age of 25. The team members come from different states, have different interests, different backgrounds, different perspectives and most importantly, different “For You” Pages (FYPs) on TikTok. The variety of trends the team members were exposed to helped the account access as many voters FYPs as possible.
“We’re trying to use any trend we possibly can to reach any variety of voters,” said Allen. “We want our message spreading as far as possible.”
The Harris campaign leadership relies on the Rapid Response Team to know current trends and what to post. The team receives a lot of aid from their higher-ups and legal support, but still have a lot of freedom to take a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach.
“It’s never been done before,” said Allen, referencing the scale of the Harris campaign on social media. “There’s not much precedent for what does and doesn’t work.”
The team keeps constant tabs on what trends the TikTok algorithm is promoting to them, so they can tweak them to fit the campaign’s messaging and post them to reach voters. They also track week-to-week the accounts followers gained, total views, total likes and the holy grail of TikTok creators: the like-to-view ratio of 20%.
“If all of our videos about healthcare are reaching that 20% threshold,” said Allen, “then we know that’s something people are really engaging with right now.”
Tracking these engagement markers help the team understand what’s trending and what’s died down, so they can focus on creating videos that will be popular. It also helps them to know what type of Tik Tok is the most popular; a photo carousel with music, a video of a staff member talking to the camera, an edit, etc.
Recently, the team has seen a lot of success with negative advertising, a form of campaign ad that attacks the other candidate — in Kamala HQ’s case, it’s posting clips of Donald Trump and JD Vance making problematic statements, making weird jokes or telling blatant lies. Some of their most successful videos appeal to the poor attention spans of TikTok audiences by putting clips of Subway Surfer gameplay, or adding “click here for 2x speed” buttons on videos of Trump’s speeches, interviews, or debates.
“Those videos are getting millions more views in comparison to our old [similar] videos that were longer form,” Allen said.
This exemplifies a negative aspect of the use of TikTok as a campaign tool: by nature, popular TikToks are short and reductive. Kamala HQ’s most popular videos are short and trendy, which means they also simplify complex political issues.
“You can’t be posting a two minute long video explaining the details of project 2025 when we have max 20 seconds […] before people’s attention span is gone,” said Allen. The team has a hard job: to highlight serious and important political topics with funny, trendy 15 second videos that play into Gen Z humor and actually reach voters. It has also been shown that videos from unofficial campaign accounts do better than official ones — therefore, they need to distract the viewers.
“I think we run the risk of desensitizing people to how serious some of the things are,” Allen said. The short form nature of TikTok forces the team to come up with strategies to get into the detail of Harris’ policy concepts. One strategy they’ve utilized is build a following through shorter, trendy videos and then intersperse those posts with longer, more policy oriented videos that reach their followings FYP and expose voters to policy-based information.
But there is a positive side to this tradeoff: Kamala HQs popular videos reach millions of people, especially younger people. Many campaigns dismiss young voters, and for good reason — they have much lower turnout rates than 29 and older.
In the first campaign she worked on, Allen was told by a campaign manager to exclude voters 18 to 24 from the calling list. “The rhetoric was that they weren’t going to vote, so they weren’t worth contacting,” Allen said, “which always confused me because if you’re not asking them to vote, why would they?”
TikTok’s users skew young, so the popularity of Kamala HQ has exposed many young potential voters to the importance of politics and this election.
“This is one of the largest scale outreach campaigns directly targeted toward young voters,” said Allen. Young people who may not be interested in politics are seeing Kamala HQ’s videos on their FYPs explaining important issues to them in formats they are familiar with and understand.
Allen thinks part of Kamala HQ’s popularity may be due to the increasing distrust of established news networks, especially among younger people. “We’re in this weird period where, for some reason, we trust what we see on social media more than anything,” she said.
Kamala HQ especially wants to appeal to undecided voters, a key demographic the Harris campaign is trying to mobilize. The team has to balance their posts with what the strong Harris voters want to see and what will get the undecided or moderate voters to vote for Harris. So far, they’ve found that discrediting videos of Trump and Vance without other editing do well with undecided voters.
“They are trusting it more because you’re not telling them what to think,” said Allen. “We want to keep our loyal voters on the hook, but for the undecided voters […] the best content is what we know they haven’t seen and letting them form those opinions for themselves.”
In an era where attention spans are shrinking and young people are increasingly turning away from formal news outlets, Kamala HQ relates and reaches out to young voters. “No presidential campaign has engaged with social media on this scale,” Allen said. “[Kamala HQ] is demonstrating what the campaign scene is going to look like going forward in the 21st century.”
