Hire Well. Trust Your People. Let Them Cook.

I wrote recently about how the Harris campaign is winning TikTok, a notoriously tricky endeavor to pull off, with authenticity.

Instead of just repurposing existing campaign content for TikTok, like almost all other campaigns since TikTok became un-ignorable in the last few years, the Harris campaign is empowering genuine Gen Z experts to use the platform they way other users do. They’re shrinking approval chains and allowing their team to move opportunistically and capitalize on trends at the speed of TikTok. And it’s getting results.

Today, WaPo has an interesting piece diving a bit deeper into this team of “feral 25 year olds’ and how the campaign has wisely gotten the hell out of their way.

Viewed more than 7 million times, the video was produced by a small TikTok team — all 25 and under, some working their first jobs — given unfettered freedom to chase whatever they think will go viral. Over the past eight weeks, Harris’s social media team has helped supercharge her campaign, harnessing the rhythms and absurdities of internet culture to create one of the most inventive and irreverent get-out-the-vote strategies in modern politics.

They have trolled Trump inside his own social network, Truth Social. They have made viral memes out of bags of Doritos and camouflage hats. In 2016, a single Hillary Clinton tweet might have required 12 staffers and 10 drafts; today, many of Harris’s TikTok videos are conceived, created and posted in about half an hour.

“This campaign empowers young people to speak to young people,” said Parker Butler, the 24-year-old director of Harris’s digital rapid response content, a team that watches all of Trump’s speeches and can blast a clip onto social media at a moment’s notice. “And we’re here to put in the work.”

This part really stood out to me because I’ve been preaching exactly this for ages now.

Deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, who has described them as a pack of “feral 25-year-olds,” said the campaign started developing the strategy last year, worried voters had forgotten who Trump was and that the campaign needed “a voice that was more aggressive and hard-hitting” to remind them.

The team faces minimal content-approval checks and “barring objection, we’re gonna go. Everything goes on a five-minute warning,” Flaherty said. “You just gotta trust your people. Our f---up ratio [is as low] as if there were 19 layers of approval.”

Shortening approval chains as far as possible allows for a nimbleness that the mediums really demand in the age of TikTok. You can futz with copy or images or whatever all day long while the other side eats your lunch or you can hire well, trust your people and let them freakin’ cook. This is especially important in an electoral context as one young staffer points out. This isn’t traditional campaign comms. It’s not even traditional campaign social comms. They aren’t reacting or rpackaging the news anymore. Their job is to make the news and they know how to do it with a platform-specific fluency that is resonating with users.

A 13-person rapid-response team keeps a shared calendar of all major political events for both Republicans and Democrats and monitors them in shifts to ensure “we are never not watching,” said Butler, the team’s manager. When an eye-catching moment happens — like when Trump said immigrants had “poisoned” the country — the team races to post a clip of it on social media, working shifts that sometimes go past midnight.

“Campaigns are not just responding anymore,” Butler said. “Our job is to create the news.”

Each of the team’s social media “strategists” specializes in an individual platform, catering to its audience, subculture and slang. One strategist, for instance, is solely responsible for Facebook, where Butler said content for baby boomers thrives.

It’s a great piece and you should read the whole thing.