The fever dream of TikTok Live election results

It takes me a minute to figure out what’s going on in this TikTok livestream happening on the morning of the US presidential election.

The screen is split in two. On the top, a man is streaming himself from the chest up, shouting at viewers. On the bottom is an electoral map of the US, with each state colored red (Republican), blue (Democrat), yellow (third-party), or tan (unclaimed). The man appears to be auctioning off the Electoral College.

“Uh oh! Two Texas blues just came in, ladies and gentlemen!” he shouts, clicking to change the state of Texas from red to blue. A few seconds later, Texas goes red again. “It’s a neck and neck game right here!” he says. “It’s anybody’s game right here! Oh! I just got an Arizona blue!”

I eventually figure out that the rules go like this: comment a state, along with a heart the color of the party you want. If the streamer sees your comment, he will turn the state over accordingly. When I tune in, 5,000 people are watching the streamer click states on a fake interactive electoral map on the website 270toWin. When one of the parties reaches 270 electoral votes — the number required to win the presidency — he resets the country and starts all over. Comments pour in, including a few highly concerning ones: “Who is red and who is blue?” one viewer asks. Another is skeptical of the results they’re seeing: “Is he lying?”

The 270toWin interactive map has been everywhere on TikTok Live this week as the chaos of Election Day has neared. Some streamers play god with the Electoral College, clicking away at the map to make California go to Republicans and Georgia turn blue. Others aim their camera at a forecast map and invite viewers one by one to join the livestream as a cohost and share their election predictions, which are based on nothing. I saw one stream where the host endlessly begged people to comment, like, and otherwise “boost” the stream, where they repeated word-salad phrases about encouraging people to vote and participate in democracy — while they also raked in small amounts of money through digital “gifts” sent by viewers. The streams are sandwiched between posts from NBC News and week-old videos of women talking about a sale at Ulta — all one and the same to my personalized algorithm.

In some ways, this election has felt tailor-made for a platform like TikTok, where sound bites, in-group jokes, and trends carry messages more effectively than a press conference or a stump speech. Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign launched with an explosion of lime green, which, in 2024, is not a color at all but a Gen Z rallying call. Harris announced her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, with a video of frenetic jump cuts and glitchy music — what the kids call a “fancam.” And the Kamala HQ TikTok account has spent the last three and a half months spreading the gospel of a Harris presidency and trolling JD Vance about a couch, which has been received with equal enthusiasm. If the election content you’ve seen on your For You page feels like a meme, it’s because memes are a viable political strategy — something Donald Trump perhaps knows more intimately than anyone else. We are forced to take TikTok seriously: the share of adults getting news from the platform is growing faster than any other social media site, according to data from Pew Research Center.

It is perhaps fitting, then, that watching livestreams hosted by unqualified strangers with a few thousand followers at most is how some people are spending their Election Day. On TikTok Live, nearly anything can be gamified, and thus monetized; there is always the incentive to produce more — but not necessarily better — content. As the evening wears on, I expect to see many, many more 270toWin maps on TikTok, whether they’re showing real-time results or the whims of a streamer’s comment section: it’s the easy money of the week.

I messaged the streamer to ask him a few questions about his livestream game, but an hour later, he still hadn’t responded, perhaps because he was still on Live. When I popped back into his livestream, Trump had just won the game for the 45th time.