Pro-Biden PAC launches $1 million campaign to pay social media influencers

LaToi Storr, a 42-year-old content creator and lifestyle blogger based in Philadelphia, normally posts Instagram and TikTok videos of local restaurants and skincare tips, mingled with some community-focused material on Black mental health care.

Last fall, she started posting a new kind of message on her feeds.

In an Instagram reel in October, she urged her 16,500 followers to register for a Pennsylvania election for state judges and district attorneys. She posted the same video on TikTok. Then, she posted another reel reminding people to get out to vote.

For her political posts, she was paid by Priorities USA, a super PAC supporting President Joe Biden’s reelection.

The influential Democratic PAC is spending $1 million for its first-ever “creator” program, enlisting Storr and 150 other influencers to post on social media in the 2024 election cycle, according to details first shared with POLITICO.

The effort is part of a larger Democratic strategy to lure young voters in battleground states, who polls show are increasingly critical of Biden, whether over his age or issues like his stance towards Israel. Biden’s reelection campaign itself is amping up its work with social media influencers in 2024, though those partnerships are currently unpaid, Daniel Wessel, a Biden campaign spokesperson, told POLITICO. The White House team separately is also flexing its creator game, throwing its first-ever influencer Christmas party last December.

Other liberal PACs, including NextGen America and American Bridge, deployed paid influencer campaigns in the 2022 midterms. But Priorities USA’s creator campaign amounts to a stamp of approval from one of the most influential partisan political action committees — with a new approach using both local and national influencers — and part of a sharp shift in how campaigns are pivoting online to reach voters.

The investment highlights just how much social media has changed from previous campaign cycles when the platforms were newer and candidates like Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders could enjoy free support from young voters. Democratic PACs' move to pay directly for backing also underscores just how much Biden is struggling to go viral with the young voters and influencers whose support is crucial to the party in 2024.

Priorities plans to transition all its spending to digital communications in 2024, and sees the influencer campaign as key to reaching people who don’t see typical campaign ads on TV. As it does, however, it is running into platforms’ at-times confusing guidelines on political ads — and appears to have violated some policies banning paid political content on TikTok.

With few federal regulations over campaign advertising on social media, each platform sets its own rules. TikTok has the strictest policy — banning political advertising entirely, including branded political content from creators. Instagram and Facebook, owned by Meta, allow for paid political ads and sponsored political content from creators as long as the group is registered in its ad library. (Priorities is listed.) And X, formerly Twitter, lifted its political ads ban last year.

The policies appear to be poorly enforced. After POLITICO shared five TikTok videos from August and October from national creators paid by Priorities, TikTok removed four of them for violating their branded content policies on political issues.

Similarly, Storr said one of her TikTok videos she posted on Oct. 27 encouraging people to vote in last November’s Pennsylvania election was removed by TikTok for violating its branded content policy.

However, the same video she posted on Instagram remains — showing how far platforms’ rules can diverge around paid political content.

Jack Doyle, a Priorities spokesperson, said the group is committed to following guidelines from TikTok and the other platforms it’s using. “If content is taken down, our general practice is to work with the social media company to understand why,” Doyle said. “We look forward to working with TikTok throughout the cycle.”

When asked about how it’s following TikTok’s branded content requirements, the group said its paid creator content is “storytelling focused,” and the group works with creators to “talk about their lived experiences.”

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Social media is a far more fragmented landscape than traditional media, and “micro-influencers” like Storr — small creators with fewer than 100,000 followers — can be important in reaching highly targeted, and often very local, younger voter groups.

Priorities’ current strategy mixes micro-influencers with bigger, more expensive national influencers to spread messages in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, Danielle Butterfield, Priorities’ executive director, told POLITICO.

Storr has been paid approximately $1,000 in total for the several TikTok and Instagram posts she’s made so far. She says she supports Biden’s reelection because he aligns with her “personal values the most,” and wants to use her videos to talk about Black maternal health issues and encourage people to get politically involved — taking their conversations “from the platforms to the polls.”

To political action committees, that kind of connection offers a unique opportunity to directly reach young voters — especially since polling shows a third of people under age 30 get their news on TikTok. In the coming year, Priorities says it plans to pay for creators to make videos on TikTok and Instagram — and eventually YouTube — to discuss topics like the economy, abortion access and democracy.

“As we looked to 2024, we felt like it was important to reach voters where they were spending their time,” Butterfield said, and that was increasingly on TikTok.

“We're going to have a ton of success in marketing Biden's accomplishments when we can anchor it in terms of impact and real people and putting some personality behind what Biden's accomplishments are doing,” she said.

Patrick Kelly, 24, a content creator who works in government affairs in Washington, D.C., for his day job, is also part of Priorities’ creator program. Kelly is originally from Philadelphia; ahead of the Pennsylvania elections, Priorities reached out to pay him in the 4-figure range to create videos on TikTok and Instagram to reach his network.

Like Storr, he sees the political posts as organically connected to his own beliefs, and wants to use his large TikTok presence — with 67,500 followers — to motivate his generation to vote for Biden. “[A]nything that I can do to help out with the upcoming elections, I want to take advantage of that opportunity,” he said.

Priorities is also paying larger amounts to bigger influencers, those with 100,000 or more followers, in order to amplify voices from local community leaders and expand messaging on key Democratic issues like education and voting access to national audiences.

Priorities says that it does not script the videos or give creators like Storr and Kelly direct talking points — but it does brief them on internal polling and the group’s messaging, as well as best practices. “It's however abortion is impacting their life or however they kind of want to talk about democracy. We're gonna leave it up to them to do that,” Butterfield said.

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Each influencer puts his or her own spin on the Priorities videos. Alex Pearlman, a comedian and content creator in Philadelphia with 2.3 million TikTok followers and 70,000 Instagram followers, deployed his wry humor in his rant-style video reminding people to vote in the 2023 Pennsylvania election. (Priorities said it paid Pearlman as part of its program; his agent didn’t respond to a request for comment.) “You’ll be surprised by how much change you make right here at home, and then we can all get back to doomscrolling,” he said in an Instagram Reel for Priorities last October.

Other influencers share how political events impact them personally. Priorities recruited Raven Schwam-Curtis, 25, a Gen Z content creator in Chicago who discusses race, religion and politics for her 101,000 TikTok followers. Priorities paid Schwam-Curtis to create a TikTok video last October after Rep. Mike Johnson was elected as the House Speaker. (Her follower count qualifies her as a “macro” influencer, though she declined to share how much she was paid.) Her video criticized his anti-LGBTQ+ stance and support of the “big lie” that Trump won the 2020 election.

“I don’t think you realize how dangerous it is to have someone this right, this conservative, this MAGA-affiliated in that kind of position of power,” she said in the video. “As someone who is queer, black, Jewish and a woman, this literally flies in the face of my entire world view and violates my religious freedoms.”

Butterfield said Priorities is particularly targeting young people and people of color this year, and their internal research has found black voters are more than twice as likely to have used TikTok in the past week compared to all voters. Based on their internal data, Priorities found TikTok was better at reaching younger audiences — under age 44 — with its paid creator videos than YouTube, where it ran paid ads last in the platform’s search function last August.

So far, Democratic groups appear to be pursuing paid partnerships more aggressively than Republicans in the 2024 election cycle.

Currently, the Trump campaign doesn’t pay for influencers or posts, according to a Trump campaign adviser who was granted anonymity to speak about campaign operations. The adviser didn’t say if it planned to change that strategy after the primaries.

Trump’s super PAC — MAGA Inc. — did not respond to a request on whether it’s paying influencers.

Trump spent over $1 million in his 2020 presidential campaign to social media influencer firm Legendary Campaigns to drive online engagement, according to his FEC filings, although the filing didn’t specify whether creators were directly paid.

Currently, the Republican National Committee told POLITICO that its RNC Youth Advocacy Council, made up of millennial and Gen Z individuals, is working with nearly 40 influencers to promote RNC initiatives, including messaging surrounding the GOP debates. However, the RNC said it has not paid influencers for this campaign cycle.

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Few federal guidelines regulate social media influencer paid partnerships in politics.

The Federal Trade Commission revised a regulation last July that required endorsements by social media influencers to “clearly and conspicuously” disclose their paid partnerships. The Securities and Election Commission has said its current regulatory scheme covers social media influencers involved in endorsements of financial products, even charging Kim Kardsahian in October 2022 for not disclosing payments for promoting a crypto asset.

But the Federal Election Commission recently punted on an opportunity to regulate social media influencers in the political realm. In a December rulemaking that modernized its regulations related to internet communications, the agency decided not to require paid social media influencers to disclose they’re paid by another group to post election-related content. Two Democratic FEC commissioners issued a separate joint statement saying the agency missed a “golden opportunity” to address this increasingly significant form of paid advertising.

Butterfield said Priorities’ campaign is following current federal regulations. But when it comes to social media companies, she said their policies can change “on a whim.” She added, “We're in the business of making sure that we're always following the rules as best we can.”

Priorities says it follows existing guidelines on TikTok and Instagram for disclosing partnerships and directs creators to include “#PrioritiesPartner” on their video captions. All of the videos POLITICO reviewed that were posted by creators on TikTok and Instagram included the #PrioritiesPartner disclosure.

Ishan Mehra, the director for media and democracy at watchdog group Common Cause, said he was disappointed the FEC decided not to require paid influencer disclosures. He said regulations on paid social media political content should be the same as those for political television and print ads, which are required by the FEC to include disclaimers.

“The ability to pay influencers to carry their message on behalf of a campaign is a loophole,” he said.

In the political landscape of 2024, Mike Nellis, a Democratic digital strategist who was a senior adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, said Democratic groups paying social media influencers is a smart way to reach voters who have lost trust in cable TV news and media, and are getting their news from social media.

“There's a lack of trust in political leaders. There's a lack of trust in the media. There's a lack of trust in the parties. Where there is high trust is in individuals,” he said. Content creators have niche audiences that Democrats can tap into, “so we can reach them with a great deal of efficacy and trust this way,” he added.

Some Republicans worry about what happens if Democrats successfully discover the trick to reaching divergent voter groups online. Eric Wilson, a Republican digital campaign strategist, said that while he thinks influencers will play a large role in the 2024 election — for Democrats and to an extent Republicans as well — he stopped short of calling it an “influencer election.”

“But in December 2024, if we're looking at a landslide for Democrats — it will be because they have cracked the code for reaching voters in a fragmented media and technology landscape,” Wilson said.

Meridith McGraw contributed to this report.