Did TikTok really swing young voters rightward?

Earlier this week, Democratic data scientist David Shor appeared on The Ezra Klein Show to share his theories on why Democrats lost the 2024 election and where they should go from here. Towards the end of the interview, Shor made a pretty wild assertion: that social media platform TikTok caused young voters to shift more Republican at the ballot box. 

Here’s what Shor said:

“The share of young voters who get their news from TikTok has more than quadrupled in the last four years. This is the biggest and probably fastest shift in media consumption that has happened in my lifetime, and it closely correlates with support change. TikTok users are younger, they’re less politically engaged, and it’s not surprising that we dropped among this group. This is what you’d expect given these demographics.

But if you run the regressions, there’s clearly a causal element at play. And when you zoom in specifically on people who get their news from TikTok but don’t care very much about politics, this group is eight percentage points more Republican than they were four years ago — which is a lot.”

Shor’s argument is this: Young voters shifted to Trump. Young voters use TikTok a lot. Therefore, TikTok made young voters shift to Trump. 

As someone who closely analyzed political content trends in the election on TikTok on a weekly basis, I think it’s worth taking a closer look…

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