Biden moves on drilling, TikTok test young voters
TEMPE, Ariz. — Recent moves by President Joe Biden to pressure TikTok over its Chinese ownership and approve oil drilling in an untapped area of Alaska are testing the loyalty of young voters, a group that’s largely been in his corner.
Youth turnout surged in the three elections since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, helping Mr. Biden eke out victories in swing states in 2020, pick up a Democratic Senate seat in the 2022 election and stem potential losses in the House.
But the 80-year-old president has never been the favorite candidate of young liberals itching for a new generation of American leadership. As Mr. Biden gears up for an expected re-election campaign, a potential TikTok ban and the Alaska drilling could weigh him down.
Meanwhile, his plan to wipe out billions of dollars in student loan debt is in jeopardy at the Supreme Court. The effort, announced shortly before last year’s midterms, was an attempt by Mr. Biden to keep a promise he made after defeating progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary campaign in 2020.
The risk for Mr. Biden is less that young left-of-center voters will vote Republican and more that they would sit out an uninspiring election altogether.
“I’m a Democrat, but I’m not voting for Biden,” said Mark Buehlmann, a 20year-old Arizona State University student who said he likely would abstain if Mr. Biden is the Democratic nominee, as expected. “He’s maybe capable of doing a good job, but he’s not capable of gathering the troops, rallying the people. Especially the Democratic voter base. I don’t think he’s a strong candidate.”
TikTok allows users, 150 million of whom are in the United States, to post short, creative videos for friends and strangers. Its algorithm has an uncanny ability to figure out what interests its users and serve up videos they’ll enjoy. It’s become a supremely popular — some say addictive — place for young people to find entertainment and community.
Western governments are growing increasingly worried that TikTok’s owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, might give browsing history or other data about users to China’s government or promote propaganda and disinformation. The U.S. and other nations have banned TikTok from government-owned devices, as have several states.
The U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment, part of Mr. Biden’s Treasury Department, has threatened to ban TikTok if ByteDance doesn’t sell its stake in the app, according to a Wall Street Journal report this month.
Mr. Trump tried to ban TikTok in 2020, but the move was blocked in court and later rescinded when Mr. Biden took office and ordered an indepth study of the issue.
ByteDance says it’s working to address security concerns and has plans to route traffic through servers owned by Oracle, a Silicon Valley-based tech company.
Biden administration officials insist that political concerns aren’t weighing into the national security review underway, but they’re also not blind to it.
Both political parties have reoriented around staking out tougher economic and security positions on China’s rise, and Mr. Biden has come under increasing pressure from GOP lawmakers to take action against TikTok.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo offered hyperbolically, “The politician in me thinks you’re going to literally lose every voter under 35, forever.”
But it’s clear that the Biden White House and his likely re-election campaign are keenly aware of the app’s massive domestic reach and demographic skew toward Democratic-leaning younger voters.