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.
