TikTok influencers were recruited to a ‘content house’ on the Main Line to strategize ahead of the 2024 election

“Hey, Siri, navigate me to a Harris victory in 2024,” a content creator named Russell Ellis, known as jolly_good_ginger, said into his phone while sitting at the driver’s seat of a black SUV in a video for social media. Ellis has 5.2 million followers on TikTok and 287,000 followers on Instagram.

“The road to a Harris victory in 2024 must go through Pennsylvania,” responded the automated voice.

“OK, Pennsylvania it is!” he said, pushing the gas pedal, and picking up other content creators along his route through Gladwyne, a posh Montgomery County enclave where a house had been rented for them.

The extravagant Main Line residence had been transformed into an election-themed “content house” complete with a Harris-Walz-branded cornhole game outside. Twenty creators — 10 from Pennsylvania, 10 visiting from other states to get the word out about voting in the key battleground — would spend the weekend there. They were hosted by Amplify, a $25 million messaging initiative focused on swing states and funded by the Democratic donor hub Way to Win.

Amplify, which estimated the 20 creators have a combined reach that tops 21 million, sees creators as the key to reaching young voters, a notoriously unreliable voting bloc that could help Vice President Kamala Harris win the election — if they show up for her.

For both Harris and former President Donald Trump, memes have played a starring role in their campaigns this election cycle. (Enter the Harris campaign’s “brat” rebrand and the pet-eating memes that ricocheted across the internet after Trump’s false claim that immigrants in Ohio were eating household dogs and cats.)

Meanwhile, mouthpieces across the political spectrum compete for attention online, including fringe and right-wing influencers like Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlson, and Joe Rogan, who spread misinformation and conspiracy theories.

And earlier this month, the Justice Department alleged that a network of Russian election disrupters was illegally targeting swing-state voters with propaganda through right-wing influencers.

There is no doubt the online attention economy is crucial for the election. Both the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention hosted creators for the first time this year. The Harris campaign has its own Creators for Kamala network and invites influencers to campaign events.

Advocacy organizations have leveraged their own creator groups, and a new network just recently launched through the progressive Future Coalition to recruit small-scale creators who may post only for their friends and family but nevertheless have influence over an election many voters are following through social media rather than traditional news channels.

“The saturation of how many places people can be looking for information now is so vast, because anyone can have a platform,” said Annie Wu Henry, a creator and strategist working with Amplify who previously worked for U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.). “There’s so many different types of media now, and so we in the political space need to make sure that we are investing into and visible in all of these different spaces.”

Enter the decision to rent a Gladwyne manor on a recent weekend and put 20 influencers there at a Harris-themed hype house.

The creators had a busy and bonding weekend. Amplify taught messaging workshops about the stakes in Pennsylvania and the economy, and in the evenings creators went to a Phillies game together, hung out at Xfinity Live! doing “Karaoke for Kamala,” and interviewed people on the street about the election.

Perhaps most importantly: They made content together. And by posting together and sharing one another’s content, they didn’t just reach their own followers; they crisscrossed networks and grew their reach. (Amplifying, in the language of their host.)

In one video skit, Matt Gordon, a creator with 455,700 TikTok followers who goes by usmcangryveteran, embodied Project 2025, the controversial conservative blueprint for the next Republican administration, hurling a Harris-Walz-branded beer pong game and shoving two creators into the house’s pool.

“I’m Project 2025 and you’re a woman wanting to make a decision about your own body!” he shouted.

Two other creators at the house reposted the video to their own TikTok followers, reaching hundreds of thousands more people. The post garnered 12,600 likes.

One of the creators thrown into the pool was Alex Cascio, 29, known as casalmon, who is based in D.C.

“When you’re a content creator, you’re just a dude in your bedroom, like, writing a script and doing the research, you’re editing the videos,” Cascio said. “It’s like, all you … so anytime I have an opportunity to add tools to my arsenal to make me more effective at putting out the messaging that is important to me, I’m like, yeah, sign me up.”

Cascio, who grew up in Michigan, said she knew Pennsylvania is a swing state but didn’t realize its weight until coming to the content house. She said it was “mind opening” for her and other creators to learn how critical a Pennsylvania victory is to completing the puzzle of an Electoral College win.

“Now I know I need to do more Pennsylvania-related content and make sure I’m connecting with those people specifically,” she said. Cascio has 73,600 followers on TikTok and 36,600 followers on Instagram.

Amplify bused the creators to an event hosted by TaskForce called the “Greedflation Market” that was set up outside North Bowl in Northern Liberties, showing off camera-ready creative messaging about the economy. A balloon arch, free ice cream, and “Hotties for Harris” bandannas decorated with cat, coconut, and reproductive rights imagery lured passersby into the event to learn about greedflation, a term coined by Pennsylvania’s own Democratic Sen. Bob Casey to blame inflation on big corporations that rake in huge profits while raising prices on consumers.

At the event, attendees could choose to go down a path to the left or right that showed through Democratic messaging what the economy would look like under Harris’ and Trump’s economic policies. The path on the left showed Harris’ policies in a positive light for everyday American families, and the path on the right showed a system set up to benefit corporations, Big Pharma, and the wealthy at the middle class’ expense.

Creators posted selfies wearing “Make America broke again” hats that were used as props, mocking the Trump slogan. Amplify said the images and videos made there were collectively viewed millions of times, mostly by Pennsylvanians.

One of the creators at the Northern Liberties event was Jasmine Duke, 33, a Philly creator known as diaryofamadblackvegan, who has 106,000 followers on Instagram and 67,200 followers on TikTok. By partnering with Duke, who posts about being vegan, Democrats are aiming to reach people whose algorithms may be focused more on food than politics.

“I stand at the intersectionality of Blackness, veganism, and womanhood, so there’s politics involved in all of that,” Duke said. “… This election year, it has really been my whole journey to really make sure that I’m talking even more and more about it, because I have such a gift of influence that I don’t play about.”

At a recent launch call for the new Future Coalition network, A.B. Burns-Tucker, a California-based lawyer who also attended the Montco content house, spoke about how creators can bring politics into the topics they’re interested in, like health and fashion. Burns-Tucker, whose handle is iamlegallyhype, describes her content as law and politics in African American Vernacular English, also known as AAVE.

Burns-Tucker, who has 712,300 TikTok followers and 93,700 Instagram followers, reframed politicians’ “kitchen table” topics as “group text” topics for reaching a young audience.

“There are ways to be authentic about messaging,” she said on the call. “… How would you talk about this issue in your group text with your friends?”

The Future Coalition creator network has been promoted by big-name creators like Claudia Conway, the TikTok-famous daughter of Trump ally Kellyanne Conway and Republican anti-Trump activist George Conway, but unlike Amplify, it’s aimed at people with followings as small as 200 to 1,500, its executive director, Corryn Freeman, said.

Freeman said the 501(c)(4) organization’s creator program seeks to recruit and train between 1,000 and 5,000 people to “flood the internet” with “organic content” aimed at young voters, particularly uncommitted voters in swing states who are thinking about sitting the election out over single issues. The effort is primarily funded by the Future Democrats PAC, though it’s not paying the creators, Freeman said.

Back at the Gladwyne content house, Kary Santayana, 27, a Philly-based nonbinary fashion and lifestyle creator with 13,900 Instagram followers and 7,834 TikTok followers who are largely queer and ages 18 to 34, sat on a green velvet couch interviewing Ellis, an army veteran from North Carolina, and Gordon, a Marine Corps veteran from Kentucky now living in New York. Santayana interviewed the two left-leaning big-bearded men, asking such questions as what the veteran community and the queer community have in common and what they would say if their child came out to them.

That video got nearly 26,000 views and 1,000 likes on Santayana’s Instagram profile, but a video Santayana co-posted with two other creators in the house “searching for the nearest closet” if Trump gets reelected got more than 363,000 views and nearly 5,000 likes on the platform.

In another video made at the house, Burns-Tucker, the lawyer, taught a “white ladies for Harris class.” She co-posted the skit with three other creators who appeared in the video on Instagram, garnering more than 24,500 likes and 13,500 shares. The video also got 22,000 likes, over 82,000 views, and more than 3,200 shares on TikTok.

“I heard she wants to tax my unrealized cap gains,” one of the women said.

“Honey, are you worth at least $100 million dollars?” Burns-Tucker shot back. “Then that got nothing to do with you, and actually, her economy policy is going to help you. Next!”