Sound bites have been a part of American politics for centuries, since before Abraham Lincoln told Republicans at the Illinois State Capitol that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” What’s new is the format and how it has seeped into every crevice of American life, conquering our collective attention. “We’re in a clip-based economy,” says Keith Edwards, a progressive political commentator who oversaw content strategy on Ossoff’s 2021 runoff campaign. “Clavicular is a clear example of that. He really came out of nowhere just from the clips that surfaced online.”
Only a small fraction of America regularly watches the streams hosted by Twitch personalities like Clavicular and Hasan Piker, but our feeds are inundated with content from these figures, churned out by so-called clippers who are often paid to blast the videos out into the world for engagement revenue.
“[Ossoff] understands this in a way that [Donald] Trump used to. I think Trump just doesn’t have it in him anymore,” says Edwards. “Sure, it’s a speech. But really, the rally is a clip-making factory. When I go live on Tuesdays,” he adds, referring to his own stream on YouTube and Twitch, “maybe 4,000 people are watching concurrently, but the cut-downs and the clips that we make from it generate millions of views. So it’s just about being really focused with your time and understanding that what happens in that room is a production process to generate as many clips as possible.”
Ossoff is well suited to these shifts in media consumption. When he first ran for Senate in 2020, recalls Hussien Salama, the lead video producer for the campaign during the runoff election in early 2021, his campaign embraced TikTok in an effort to appeal to younger voters at a time when many politicians were keen to avoid the platform over its ties to China. Ossoff, then in his early 30s, was more natural in front of the camera than other candidates Salama would go on to work with, and he had a close relationship with his video team. But the candidate started paying real attention to social strategy after a video compilation of his stump speeches assailing his then opponent, David Perdue, went viral on TikTok. “That success and hearing from students, young voters on the ground being like, ‘We love your TikTok,’ made him engage much further,” Salama says.
