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It’s just days before the 2022 midterm election that has professional Democrats fretting about a “red wave,” and though she’s new to politics, Thao Nguyen is confidently nailing all of her marks. The Atlanta-based college student is filming in her mom’s Honda while back home visiting in Michigan, the sort of caught-in-the-middle-of-real-life setting that TikTok seems to eat up. Plus the natural light does wonders for the skin.
Nguyen — known as @_nguyenthaoo to her 334,000 followers — is making the latest in her series of #redflags videos, listing the behavior she considers warning signs in a person. One, openly hating on certain fast-food side items: “You know McDonald’s French fries hit different.” Two, only listening to one type of music: “What’s the point of being friends with you if don’t even know, like, old Disney pop songs?” And lastly, being uninterested in politics or voting: “Like, at your big age, you don’t really care about what’s going on around you? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Blink and you might have missed it: The future of political persuasion, slipped into a mostly apolitical piece of online content — an innovation that could be a game-changer for politics and, by tapping into the votes of those most likely to sit out elections otherwise, democracy itself.
“Thao came up with the most interesting ideas,” says Linh Nguyen, 35 and no relation.
Linh, who lives in Houston, is executive director of Represent Us Now (a.k.a. RUN) AAPI, a left-of-center nonprofit founded in 2021 by Chloe Bennet, an activist and actress who appeared in Marvel’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and Funny or Die managing director Brad Jenkins, a veteran of the Obama White House’s Office of Public Engagement. The pair founded the group to funnel the growing cultural and political might of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States into political power capable of swinging elections. Linh started at the group as executive director in 2022, shortly after running outreach efforts to Asian American voters in the Georgia Senate elections on behalf of the coordinated Democratic campaigns of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who were both ultimately elected.
In the waning days of the 2022 election, RUN AAPI and its voter-turnout push, called “Give a F*ck About Midterms,” got a sudden influx of funding, $75,000 that Linh and her colleagues decided to pour into the video app TikTok. They turned to five previously non-political creators with ties to key swing states, including Thao, and who had a combined reach of 6.7 million viewers.
A RUN AAPI influencer coordinator found Thao, whose posts are often related to Vietnamese identity, on TikTok shortly before election day while scrolling online, and, on an intro call, pitched her on the mission. The coordinator wanted to tap into the creativity of young Asian Americans to boost in that cohort a shared sense of political participation, emphasizing that even if they’re rightly dismayed by the state of American politics, they have the opportunity to make outsized use of their political power by voting in often-overlooked non-presidential year elections. Linh recalls Thao as especially receptive: She had been bothered by what she saw as the political apathy of her peers.
“She was so sweet, so down, and just really understood it,” says Linh — including what her audience would respond to. And Thao, says Linh, was given particular creative freedom: “She pitched just a ton of different ideas. By that time, as much as we wanted to maintain and honor a feedback protocol, to make sure that we were being supportive with how the content was being created” — including fact-checking to be sure influencers were given out accurate voting information — “it was just so close to Election Day, and Thao just ran with it.” Thao posted twice for RUN AAPI; the creators, says the organization, were paid between $2,500 and $5,000 for their participation.
What Linh knew was that TikTok was a particularly powerful channel for reaching her target audience. The 150 million TikTok users in the United States skew younger and more diverse than the general population — which represents, to Linh and to other political strategists, a big opportunity to get through to the most hard-to-reach voters.
Linh is not alone in trying to meet these voters where they are. In interviews with nearly two dozen digital consultants, political aides and voter mobilization experts, mostly but not exclusively Democrats, sources took me inside the quietly booming campaign ecosystem that is spreading on the app and that has become crucially important in connecting with voters of color. These strategists aren’t turning to TikTok just for brand-building, messaging and mobilizing on behalf of candidates and causes, but for establishing trust and combatting disinformation, which have proven to be particular challenges in connecting with these voters in recent years.
