“Especially for Democrats, understand that the bad actors who push misinformation and inflate conspiracy theories are overrunning social media with their content,” Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and former Republican congressional adviser, told me. Wariness of the platform can mean missing out on a powerful tool. Bernie Sanders didn’t want to talk about the app. Many, like the White House and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, didn’t reply, while even some of the most well-known Democratic figures like Rep. In reporting this story, I reached out to political strategists and about a dozen national elected officials, their campaigns, and their staff.

It’s no surprise, then, that the landscape of political TikTok is fraught. Its CEO will testify before a House committee in March. The app’s future operation in the US remains in jeopardy, and though a straight ban seems unlikely, a bipartisan consensus is forming in Washington and state capitals that the app poses a national security threat and requires major reform. The short video app has never faced as much scrutiny as it has endured during the last year - for its collection, storage, and usage of user data, alleged spying on journalists, and Chinese ownership. It’s happening at a strange moment for American politics and for TikTok. Just a few years ago, TikTok was hailed as a potentially huge disruptor in politics, advocacy, and communications, but now Jackson is one of a small group of politicians using TikTok in an official or campaign capacity, and, in another rarity, has mastered the art of the political TikTok. TikTok has quickly become a convenient bipartisan punching bag for politicians who call it “China’s backdoor into Americans’ lives.” Now that he’s officially in Congress, Jackson is a rarity: an elected official posting directly on a Chinese-owned social media app that’s facing the prospect of a national ban and growing security concerns, and that has already been banished from official devices in Congress. “We’re already saturated with people who want to give us the daily talking points or the daily outrage. “I’m big on reaching people directly,” Jackson told me during a recent interview. Given the toxic nature of political discourse online, it’s the kind of engagement the average politician can only dream of having. Jackson was accomplishing something very different from most politicians: He was not just using TikTok to chronicle his journey from candidate to officeholder he was actually connecting with people. And as I clicked onto his page and kept scrolling, I realized something. I, along with 2 million other people, had already watched that 87-second clip (in it, Jackson describes the “weird process” by which new members of Congress pick offices through a raffle pulled from a “mahogany box that is a century old”). Would they be any different from those of the scores of amateurish news recappers, college students, and aspiring Joe Rogans on political TikTok? The 3 million people who watched this particular video must have felt some of this.

The whole scene felt very intimate, impressive, and quite informative. And nothing happens until this happens, including swearing us in.” Either these 20 folks cave, which they’ve sworn they won’t do, or the 200 other members of the majority party put up someone else as speaker, which they’ve sworn they won’t do. Wearing a burgundy tie loosely around his neck, Jackson looked directly into my eyes and told me about the Freedom Caucus, the group of hardline conservatives who held up McCarthy’s speaker bid. “I told you that the next time you heard from me I would be an official member of Congress, and then something very strange happened, and I’m still not,” he said in a TikTok posted to his 300,000 followers on the penultimate day of the GOP’s speaker fight. But Jeff Jackson, a Democrat and incoming first-term representative from North Carolina, was a step ahead of me. Part of my job as a political reporter during this tumultuous week was to understand why this was happening and explain it to the world ( my Vox colleagues on Capitol Hill took the lead on this). We were also seeing a confounding stalemate preventing the country from having a fully functioning government. We weren’t just watching a historic fail unfold (the kind of embarrassment Congress hadn’t seen in a century).

I was on the West Coast with my non-politically obsessed family and a friend, watching Republicans fail to elect Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House 14 times over the course of four days. The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives was in chaos. I don’t remember the first time I saw one of Jeff Jackson’s TikTok videos, but I definitely remember the one that turned me into a follower.

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