The TikTok Election: Why 2029 Will Be Won or Lost in the Feeds of 12-Year-Olds

In the years leading up to the 2029 General Election, Britain will witness the covert deployment of the most technologically advanced political campaigns in its history.

We are on the cusp of the most significant electoral shift in more than half a century, with the creation of a new youth coalition that will fundamentally re-engineer the political landscape and turn social media into the primary battleground for campaigns. Yet beyond the symbolic gesture of voting inclusivity, in the shadows, a new political playbook is being written, where the minds of this new generation are the ultimate target.

The decision, following precedents set in Scotland and Wales, will allow 16-year-olds to vote in the 2029 General Election, introducing approximately 1.5 million new voters into the system. This will present an opportunity for parties to forge the political identity of 12 and 13-year-old voters-in-training, making them the most fiercely contested and valuable group for strategists in the years ahead. They are digital natives from birth, raised in an era of profound economic anxiety, systemic distrust, and most importantly, all-encompassing hyper-personalised social media consumption. This is the window through which political ground will be gained or lost, as campaigns compete to flood their feeds with seemingly apolitical content that can subtly reinforce key political messaging. A trending meme or viral video that a child encounters today has the potential to ever so slightly mould their political outlook and subsequently influence how they vote when they turn 16.

For parties, the make-or-break nature of this cohort cannot be overstated, as political participation in this age group remains unmatched, especially for a first-vote event as will be the case in 2029. This has already been demonstrated in Scotland, which lowered the voting age for the 2014 Independence Referendum, and saw voter turnout among 16 and 17-year-olds reach 75%, dwarfing the 54% turnout for the 18 to 24 age group. Additionally, it has been found that by instilling a high level of participation in voters at 16, young people continue to vote in greater numbers as they move into their twenties. This will mean that effective campaigns can be expected to have a continued influence on the ballot box behaviour of a geographically balanced and highly engaged subset of voters in future election cycles, making them ideal targets.

However, while participation from the youth is fairly predictable, this is a generation profoundly alienated from mainstream politics, with disparate political allegiances that make the group far more complex than often modelled. The traditional view that a younger electorate is a de facto electoral gift to left-of-centre parties is a dangerous oversimplification that fails to appreciate the underlying political polarisation within the group itself. This generation is not a monolith, but is highly fractured, with notable drift occurring on both the far-left and far-right, driven by a rejection of the mainstream political establishment across the ideological spectrum. However, this innate fragmentation reflects a significant malleability in their political allegiances, presenting an opportunity for parties to pull youth voters towards their cause.

Furthermore, there is an inherent volatility within the new youth electorate due to a deeper crisis of faith in the existing political and economic systems. The cumulative effect of economic exclusion, social disenfranchisement and a profound sense of abandonment is pushing Britain’s youth towards a total rejection of the status quo. Growing numbers are turning to the ideological fringes in search of retribution against a broken system, not driven by a desire to shape future policy, but to totally overhaul the existing structure. So far, this has manifested itself as a distancing from mainstream parties, an alignment with radical narratives, and the proliferation of online movements that are believed to accelerate this dismantling process. Fueling the rise of digital activism and social media campaigning, which has allowed young people to fulfil their desire to be part of political protest movements, but requiring minimal direct involvement outside of the online realm. This will present a key mechanism through which parties will target political campaigning in the run-up towards the next election, shaping the youth vote via the deployment of highly issue-specific movements that appear organic but appeal to carefully selected segments of the group. This has been made possible by the youth’s embrace of entirely algorithmically driven social media platforms that can act as powerful delivery vehicles for highly personal campaign messaging disguised as content.

The likely campaign blueprint for the 2029 election will undoubtedly see the techniques pioneered in the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election supercharged through a new arsenal of digital weaponry, and focused almost solely on the new youth voters. These two controversial campaigns were at the forefront of social media-driven political warfare, utilising psychological profiling and hyper-targeted messaging to deliver a desired electoral outcome from each target voter. Yet, despite being revolutionary for their time, the rapid advances in technological capabilities over the last decade, combined with increasingly malleable social media platforms, will mean that the techniques used in the run-up to 2029 will be far more sophisticated.

The secret weapon in these original campaigns was the ability to micro-target potential voters, with parties able to craft highly personalised advertisements that were most effective at triggering an individual's subconscious motivations and biases in the run-up to making a voting decision. This strategy is cheaper and faster than ever before, following the widespread adoption of generative AI tools, making it possible to produce thousands of highly differentiated pieces of campaign material, each personalised to specific subsets of the target youth voter base. Additionally, this material can be refined and tweaked in real-time, following the move away from traditional polling and towards synthetic voter surveying, which uses a model that can mimic the political behaviour and preferences of a voter segment. Campaigns can now utilise these synthetic voter models to run simulations that test the potential impact of different messaging and deploy ever-evolving material that responds instantly to changes in voter behaviour. Most importantly, this will also ensure that campaigns can keep up with the ever-changing format of social media content, mimicking the same factors that drive organic content creation, to remain seamlessly aligned with the latest trends and topics.

Furthermore, while generative AI will play a vital role in creating content, the vast quantity of data now available on social media users will enable parties to target this content far more subtly than in previous campaigns. The material will be integrated into the algorithmically curated feeds of future youth voters, undetectable from other content, but designed to convey a particular message that will stick. Individuals, who on the surface may appear identical; same age, same location, same background, and even the same public interests, may experience vastly different content in their feeds. Consequently, political material will be crafted to resonate with their true online self, one that can only be determined after hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of demonstrated behaviour, only recently accessible through algorithmically driven platforms. For campaigns, this will allow coordinated messaging to be disguised as naturally viral content, shifting the ground on core issues without voters or opposing campaigns, realising.

These strategies, when contrasted with the typical vision of campaigning whereby a local MP diligently canvasses in their constituency, meeting voters at the doorstep with a leaflet in the hope of a photo-op, seem far-fetched and implausible. Yet these covert methods have been implemented and honed for over a decade, with a similar youth-targeted campaign being used in the 2010 General Election in Trinidad and Tobago. In the run-up to the election, the parent company of now infamous Cambridge Analytica was contracted by the opposition United National Congress party, and subsequently determined that to win the election, they needed to influence the voting behaviour of the youth. They implemented a strategy to suppress turnout from this group by creating an apolitical youth movement that reframed political abstention as an act of empowerment. This was catalysed through seemingly organic viral imagery and social media trends, allowing the core message to be disseminated totally undetected. By the time of the election, this campaign managed to drive a significant drop in voter turnout amongst the targeted youth demographic in key swing locations, delivering a victory in the closely contested national vote. In the years since this campaign, many of these same strategies have been enhanced significantly to deliver results more efficiently, and most importantly, more subtly.

In the run-up to the 2029 election, the anticipated youth vote will intensify competition in marginal constituencies, with parties, especially those on the fringes, increasingly focused on key battleground locations where the power of this newly enfranchised group will be most concentrated. Prior to the 2019 election, it was determined that in 56 marginal seats, the number of newly eligible 18-year-old voters alone was greater than the incumbent MP's majority. Thus, highly targeted regional campaigns to favourably alter voting behaviour in young people could have an outsized impact, with Britain’s First-Past-the-Post electoral system acting as a vote multiplier. Despite the likely outcome being far more fragmented overall, making a single-party majority unlikely, capturing large swathes of the highly polarised youth vote in key battlegrounds could very easily be an election decider.

Those coming of age in the years ahead will experience an onslaught of political campaigning that is harder to detect and more insidiously personal than ever before. Their highly curated social media feeds will remain the preeminent political battlefield for campaigns whose sole purpose is to alter their future voting behaviour by any technical means necessary. This will be an election decided not by policy, but by the actions of a small number of first-time voters, whose ultimate voting decisions were engineered long before they saw the ballot box.