The Biden administration is turning to TikTok to appeal to younger voters, but that strategy isn’t going so well. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: The Biden administration is turning to TikTok to appeal to younger voters, but it’s that strategy going well? I saw this article, I kept thinking, wow. Okay. Your TikTokers, they’re not exactly his age group. You know, it’s not exactly what. I think the problem that I saw here is there’s no centralized messaging.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: That the Democrats have lost their central, centralized messaging. And you had, you know, I, I think without that centralized messaging right now, they’re in trouble.
Farron Cousins: They, they are absolutely. And you know, they they’ve even brought in the people that are TikTok influencers.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: They brought them into the White House and actually had them help pitch the aid to Ukraine. You know, go, go.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Go to TikTok.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And get all this drummed up with Ukraine. And now they’re, you know, got, they’ve got these video clips of Biden, the massive CNN report on this and they’re sending ’em out to the same TikTok influencers saying, hey, this is a good way to, you know.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Spread this administration’s talking points for us, which, look.
Mike Papantonio: You’re spreading to 15 year olds. 14 year olds. Certainly.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. No,
Mike Papantonio: I mean.
Farron Cousins: Nobody wants to watch the old man on TikTok talk about politics.
Mike Papantonio: More importantly, nobody’s in charge of the message. Used to be you’d have James Carville and Begala, Belgala. They’re kind of, they’re kind of long in the tooth right now.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: So maybe that’s where this is coming from. As a matter of fact, what really concerns me is there’s nobody at the top saying, you can’t do this in your messaging. I, I, I took a look at this story, a video of Tiara Mack, she, Rhode Island state Senator twerking on, on TikTok and, and this thing goes viral. Well don’t you call, don’t, I mean let’s, let’s show it. Let’s show it. I mean, this. Okay. So she’s twerking running for, she’s running for Senate, state Senate in Rhode Island. And she says, this is gonna have appeal to my voters. But nobody calls her and says, you know, why can’t we, why can’t you just get on our messaging? We have better messaging than this. And I think you’re probably gonna do better with our messaging. What do you think?
Farron Cousins: Right. It, it’s a party in total disarray and that’s why you have everybody, I guess, trying to go at their own, coming up with new, innovative ways to reach voters, which.
Mike Papantonio: Is that innovative?
Farron Cousins: It’s, look, it’s certainly novel. I’ll give her that. But the thing is, you’re right. We don’t, who is the leader of the Democratic party right now?
Mike Papantonio: Who makes the call to her and says, really? Do you have any idea what this is, this is all over the world. This, this little twerk now is all over the world and she’s running as a Democrat in Rhode Island as a Senator. What do, what do you think the GOP does with that?
Farron Cousins: Right. It, it, it is absolutely red meat. And when, we’ve seen it, right? If you go to any, you know, conservative news site, Fox news has had that clip on, you know, God knows how many times in the last week and a half.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Right wing news sites have it all over the place. And they’re trying to paint this as like, this is what.
Mike Papantonio: This is Democrat.
Farron Cousins: Your whole party is.
Mike Papantonio: No, no, this is Democrat.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: That’s right. This is, this is part of that, that Democrat notion of what America should look like.
Farron Cousins: Well, well, and it’s a lot of the same way that, you know, the, the liberal sites do it with Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Mike Papantonio: Of course, of course.
Farron Cousins: So people do have to be a little bit careful, you know, anything you do is gonna be used by the, the other side.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: I mean, they used the dance video from college that AOC did, which was totally harmless to attack her back then.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: So.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: I, I think we do need to be more.
Mike Papantonio: Actually, I thought I was put a good video. It probably helped her get elected. I don’t know about that one though.
Farron Cousins: But, but what we need is somebody at the top of the Democratic party.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: To at least craft messaging and say, listen, here’s our talking points.
Mike Papantonio: A president sometimes does that too, right?
Farron Cousins: Well, yeah. But, but again, I’ll ask the question. I don’t know who’s running the DNC right now?
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: I, I truly do not. And I do this every single day. I don’t know who’s in charge.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: I don’t know who is calling the shots with this Biden administration.
Mike Papantonio: Let’s, let’s find it. Let’s find that person and then we do a show about it. Okay.
Farron Cousins: I think we need to.
Mike Papantonio: I, I’d like to be able to identify that person and say, yeah, that’s the person that should call this Senator who’s twerking and say, you know, maybe that’s not a good idea for our messaging as a national organization. That’s what I think. Farron, thank you for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week. But all of these segments are gonna be available this coming week right here on this channel. And you can follow us at Twitter @AmericasLawyer. I’m Mike Papantonio and this has been America’s Lawyer where every week we tell you the stories that corporate media won’t tell you because their advertisers won’t let ’em or their political connections don’t allow for it. We’ll see next time.
