Since the presidential debate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s campaign has heavily leaned into X and TikTok as part of its strategy to get the third-party candidate into the national conversation. It’s working.
By Vittoria Elliott, WIRED
The presidential debate on June 27 between President Joe Biden and former president and convicted felon Donald Trump was widely panned as a shit show. Trump lied about issues like abortion, taxes, and the Capitol riot on January 6, while Biden struggled to respond to questions and appeared lost or confused.
In the days since, Biden has been fighting for his legacy and his candidacy: Post-debate polls have not been favorable to the president. An AARP poll released earlier this week in the swing state of Wisconsin showed Biden lagging behind Trump by six percentage points, with 9 percent of respondents preferring Kennedy. A poll from the Cook Political Report found that Trump now leads Biden 47 percent to 44 percent percent in the “the most drastic shift in the race all year.” Pundits and some Democrats have called for Biden to leave the race.
But for independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s campaign, this could be a breakout moment. While the presidential debate aired on CNN, Kennedy streamed a parallel debate where he answered the same questions. The campaign has since leaned into X, increased its efforts on TikTok, and continued to take any opportunity to get the candidate into the national conversation. And at least some of its efforts appear to be working.
While around 47 million people watched the CNN debate, according to Nielsen, a company that measures media audiences, 9 million tuned into Kennedy’s parallel debate, hosted online and on X, according to his campaign. “We’re very lucky that X exists in this country and for the world,” says Amaryllis Kennedy, the campaign director and the candidate’s daughter-in-law.
According to political advertising data released this week by X, on June 28, the day following the debate, the Kennedy campaign spent more than $19,000 on advertisements, the most the campaign has spent on any day on the platform.
The pro-Kennedy American Values Political Action Committee says it is also spending money on X. “We have spent much, much more money on X than on any other platform,” says Tony Lyons, treasurer of the American Values PAC. “And we will likely continue to do so, because it’s clear that Elon Musk has a real commitment to freedom of speech and to supporting democratic dialog.” Documents shared with WIRED by the American Values PAC show that the group spent $761,000 on X on the day of the debate.
The campaign has posted 30 videos on TikTok on and after June 27, nine of which have received more than 1 million views. One video, which has more than 6 million views, attempts to address a Vanity Fair article that alleged that the candidate had eaten dog on a trip to South Korea. In the video, Kennedy cooks steak and chicken to serve to his dogs, saying he now has to “work his way back into their good graces.” Amaryllis Kennedy told WIRED that though the campaign has reservations about TikTok, it plans to invest more heavily in the platform, including participating in town halls on TikTok Live. “TikTok is a very powerful platform for us in that way,” she says. Kennedy’s TikTok account, which is just over a year old, has more than 1.6 million followers.
In the hours leading up to the debate, the campaign participated in a town hall on TikTok Live with a group of content creators. Tiffany Cianci, a TikTok creator with 160,000 followers who has organized a series of these TikTok town halls with third-party candidates, claims that interest in having Kennedy participate in town halls has grown, particularly following the debate. “After [Kennedy’s] last town hall, I received over three dozen requests from creators with over 1 million followers to participate in his next town hall,” she says. “I think they needed permission. Since the debate, those numbers have skyrocketed.”
Cianci says the Biden campaign has refused to do a TikTok town hall, and the Trump campaign has given her a “maybe.” “There’s a vacuum being created, and I believe this has the potential to fill that vacuum,” says Cianci. “Bobby is drawing a crowd.”
She has also hosted town halls with third-party candidates Jill Stein and Chase Oliver, but says that interest in Kennedy easily outstrips them. “With Jill Stein and Chase Oliver, we had about 30,000 people on the livestream.” For Kennedy, that number “was over 198,000.”
Cianci says she is now expanding the town halls to include a post-TikTok Live conversation to be hosted on X, the platform requested by the majority of participants in the series of TikTok Lives she has hosted.
“I don’t think the town halls will necessarily rocket your following,” says James Li, a TikTok creator who participated in the town hall. “I think what they do is create a deeper sense of community.”
Though Amaryllis Kennedy says the campaign has shied away from investing in Meta, given the candidate’s own history with the platform and allegations around “censorship,” the campaign has consistently bought ads on Facebook and Instagram promoting the candidate since June 2023. (In February 2021, Meta banned Kennedy from Instagram for spreading misinformation about the safety and efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccine. The company reinstated Kennedy’s account when he announced his run for office in 2023.)
Amaryllis Kennedy told WIRED that the campaign has just brought on a surrogate director, Orion Solarion, who previously worked for the Bernie Sanders campaign, to capture and direct this new groundswell of support.
Matt Corridoni, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, says he believes that voters will realize that there is a “binary choice” between Trump and Biden. “Public polling shows that the more people learn about [Kennedy], the less appeal he has.” He says that as the election draws nearer and voters start paying more attention, “the amount of information that will be out there on him and where he really stands on these positions, and the fact that he’s backed by Trump’s largest donor, the fact that he was recruited to run by the likes of Steve Bannon, I think will really resonate with voters.”
Although the campaign continues to face challenges getting Kennedy on ballots across the country, his campaign has continued to lean into the internet as its primary platform.
“I’m grateful that we’re running this campaign in an era of new media and social media and the internet, where voters can seek out other points of view,” says Amaryllis Kennedy.
July 12, 2024: This story has been updated with the amount of money American Values PAC says it has spent on X.