The Democratic Party’s post-election autopsy is beginning to take shape, and one of the most unexpected culprits in their 2024 losses is none other than TikTok.
Democratic data analyst David Shor has been making the rounds, presenting new findings that suggest the social media platform—long assumed to be a left-wing stronghold—actually helped shift young voters toward Donald Trump and the Republican Party. His research, from the influential firm Blue Rose Research, shows that voters who got their news from TikTok swung significantly more Republican, particularly those who were less politically engaged.
Speaking on The Ezra Klein Show and in an interview with Vox, Shor described the rise of TikTok as “the biggest and probably fastest shift in media consumption that has happened in my lifetime, and it closely correlates with support change.” He argues that this shift had a causal impact on the election.
The numbers tell a striking story. According to Shor’s analysis, young men are becoming more conservative, and young people in general shifted toward Trump in the 2024 election. Among those who relied on TikTok for news but weren’t particularly invested in politics, the shift was even more dramatic—this group became eight percentage points more Republican than they were in 2020.
The idea that TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, could be influencing political trends has raised new concerns. Ezra Klein speculated that ByteDance “could very easily have been turning dials, just softly,” in ways that harmed Democrats. But it’s also possible, as Klein put it, that TikTok is simply a “vibes machine” that reflects the prevailing mood—and in 2024, the vibes were bad for Democrats.
The implications of this shift go beyond any single election. Shor points to a “great political divergence”—where highly engaged voters who consume mainstream media have become more Democratic, while those who don’t follow politics closely have swung hard to the right.
This poses a serious problem for Democrats, who have traditionally relied on control of legacy media to shape narratives. As Shor explained, “We used to live in this world where in order to get your message out there, you had to get people who write really well to absorb your message and put it out. And now, we’re in a world where anyone can make a video, and if that video is appealing, it’ll get out there.”
And here’s the kicker: “This is naturally bad for the left, simply because the people who write really well are a lot more left-wing than the overall population.”
In other words, TikTok has upended the media ecosystem. The traditional gatekeepers—journalists, columnists, and media elites who overwhelmingly lean left—no longer have a monopoly on shaping public opinion. Instead, regular people are creating content, and the result has been an organic shift in political attitudes, particularly among the young and the disengaged.
This puts Democrats in a bind. If their primary problem is reaching less politically engaged voters, how do they change minds among people they don’t have a good way to reach?
