The Politics of Participation: 2024 Election Night
How Digital Spaces Redefine Voter Engagement
How did Trump win, how did Harris lose, what awaits us in the next 4 years, what will Trump’s America be like? These questions are on our minds and being asked not only in the U.S. but across the globe.
In this charged environment, Kamala Harris’ “defeat” speech also attracted significant attention, sparking both positive and negative commentary. Among the reactions, the most repeated — and the one that caught my attention as I listened to the speech — was the term “emotional rollercoaster.”
While I found her speech ordinary and ingenuine, when I look back on election night, I realize we truly experienced a vast range of emotions — from excitement to panic. I watched the election results with a friend, both of us excited about the possibility of seeing a female president for the first time in U.S. history.
We quickly switched to Live TV so we wouldn’t miss the evening news — something neither of us typically watches. As the evening news ended and ballot boxes closed, the election programs began, and we turned to social media for updates and reactions. It was clear from the intensity of activity online that this was a shared experience for many.
Throughout the night, we engaged with the digital realm, following memes, comments, and posts from people all over the world, showing them to each other as we simultaneously watched the election program on TV. The blending of real-time news broadcasts with live social media commentary created a hybrid, emotional environment that transformed the evening into something far more than just a political event.
Real-Time Reactions in the Digital Public Sphere
In today’s hyper-connected world, checking social media has become almost instinctual, especially during major events like elections. With its immediacy and interactivity, social media mediates how we process and participate in events. This makes social media platforms more than one avenue of communication, virtual stages on which people perform and negotiate their political identities within a shared cultural narrative about democracy, power, and identity.
For instance, MAGA supporters often use social media to reinforce a collective identity around nationalism, skepticism of mainstream media, and anti-establishment messaging. They rely heavily on memes and hashtags like #MAGA or #Trump2024 that echo a populist sentiment. Platforms like Truth Social, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook serve as echo chambers where users reinforce shared beliefs and amplify their sense of community. Real-time engagement with news, aggressive trolling, and direct engagement with opponents are typical, as they use humor, satire, and strong imagery to convey political critiques and rally support.
Democrats, in contrast, emphasize inclusivity, progressive values, and social justice themes in their digital performances. They often use visual symbols, influencer partnerships, and branded content across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and X to appeal to diverse, younger audiences. Hashtags like #VoteBlue or #ClimateAction connect users in support of causes beyond the election cycle. Democrat-aligned content typically includes calls to action, fact-checks, and mobilizing hashtags to create solidarity and a sense of purpose around issues like climate change, reproductive rights, and voting access, making political engagement accessible and attractive to those who may not typically follow politics.
Both sides also lean on influencer partnerships to reach diverse audiences. Besides celebrity figures like Kanye West (now Ye) and Kid Rock, MAGA influencers like Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, and Adin Ross (streamer) regain prominence by aligning with Trump’s ideals, amplifying nationalist and anti-establishment messages to reignite their relevance, particularly during election cycles. Their influence is fueled by strong support from the MAGA base, who values their steadfast loyalty.
On the Democratic side, celebrities such as Taylor Swift, LeBron James, and Beyoncé use their platforms to advocate for progressive causes. Also, Democratic influencers, such as Jeremy Jacobowitz (food influencer) and Deja Foxx (content creator), often operate as grassroots figures, engaging directly with followers on social issues.
These celebrities’ political involvement not only boosts visibility for certain causes but also sets trends in the digital discourse, reaching beyond political spheres into the mainstream pop culture surrounding elections.
In this dynamic digital environment, as election results begin to unfold, social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok transform into hubs of real-time reactions, commentary, and debate. Such real-time interaction evokes a high sense of immediacy where reactions to each update on a swing state or candidate announcements become a wave traveling across the digital public sphere.
For many users, commenting, sharing, liking, or re-tweeting is a way to collectively process the election, turning a very isolated experience into a communal event.
In other words, the participation makes one abstraction election really away and somewhat formalized event, one cultural phenomenon that everyone has ownership of, adding layer after layer of meaning to each result. In this environment, the election story is no longer solely crafted by journalists, pundits, or political elites; instead, it’s collectively woven by millions of individual contributors to become part of the election’s legacy.
Through these virtual spaces, people who only watch the elections on TV, passive observers, are also enabled to interact with and actively participate in the event. From hope-filled excitement to shock and disbelief, the spectrum of feelings creates one “live” digital narrative.
The election night was a real-time digital spectacle, where millions collaboratively and interactively defined what the election meant to them as if the line between audience and actor collapsed. The shared experience of watching, reacting, and contributing to this public narrative represents new democratic engagement, an engagement virtually equated with the expression of performance and identity as much as with political argumentation.
Digital Performance of Political Identity
Beyond just engaging in a communal experience as active participants, social media allows users to “perform” their political identities, often by curating a specific look that reflects their values and affiliations.
Users build out an online persona representative of their identity through selected posts, memes, hashtags, and visual styles. This performance is public, allowing people to appeal to the group or ideology they support, feeling included in a more significant movement.
For instance, TikTok allows users to create videos, parody political figures, display election-themed expressions (dances), or share post reactions to reinforce these curated personas and their audience. Here, social media is positioned as a means of recasting political engagement through participatory cultural events and contributing forms of appearance and performance to a cumulative digital narrative.
What is more, viral posts and memes offer unique opportunities for digital performance, allowing users to circulate content that blends humor and critique in ways that resonate widely. By reducing complex ideas into visual or textual shorthand, memes make political issues accessible to broader audiences — and their viral nature amplifies this reach, spreading these simplified messages rapidly across social networks.
As memes or videos go viral, they bridge political divides, reaching audiences that might not otherwise engage in the same conversations. Marginalized voices reach the mainstream, often challenging mainstream narratives and expanding the perspective of messages in the public sphere.
This democratized narrative-building allows those who may have previously been silenced through traditional media to add points, perspectives, and criticisms through social media; it develops a more complete understanding during a critical period, like an election cycle. This amplification of diverse voices underlines how social media can make democratic engagement more inclusive, as people from various walks of life find community and solidarity in these shared experiences and stories.
Challenges: Misinformation and Polarization
The immediacy of social media and democratized storytelling also has its complexities. The virality that characterizes social media can often reduce complex narratives to simplistic or polarized ones; the rapid information can, too, usually facilitate the spread of misinformation or exaggerated emotion. According to NewsGuard, 90 total false election narratives have been published since Sept. 1, and 22 new false election narratives published Nov. 2 — Nov. 8
One viral post (above) was a video showing a person destroying several ballots for Republican candidate Donald Trump while allegedly preserving ballots for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, which quickly gained traction and fueled distrust in the electoral process.
Another example (below) was about Haitian migrants allegedly voting in Georgia. A viral video on social media showed a group of people, purportedly Haitian migrants, casting ballots in the state. This video quickly circulated on platforms like Facebook and X, fueling baseless claims that illegal immigrants were influencing the election outcome. The video was later debunked, as it was announced as fake, but by then, the damage was done, with many users amplifying the narrative of voter fraud.
Only these two examples are enough to show the virality of social media can sometimes lead to oversimplified or polarized narratives, and the very tools that allow for rapid sharing can also lead to the spread of misinformation or heightened emotional reactions.
The tension between authentic, inclusive dialogue and the risks of sensationalism or echo chambers is an inherent part of digital democracy. This intensifies the “us vs. them” dynamic, reinforcing identity boundaries rather than fostering a cohesive narrative. Nevertheless, the collaborative nature of this new form of storytelling makes it a dynamic force, reshaping how we experience, remember, and understand pivotal political moments.
The Digital Commons as a New Arena for Democracy
The transition from a passive election night experience to a dynamic, participatory one underscores the evolving role of digital spaces in shaping democracy.
As we move from watching election results to engaging in real-time commentary, social media platforms transform into the stages for a new kind of democratic performance — one where every tweet, meme, and post contributes to a collective memory and political identity. Given this shift, how can we effectively navigate the evolving nature of democracy in the digital age, where every digital interaction shapes our political reality?
If you would like to read about the social media atmosphere post-election, I really liked Madison Malone Kircher’s article titled “Disappointment on Social Media Looks Different This Time Around” on NYT. You can read it here.
