Newt Gingrich was not happy. It was the night of December 6, minutes before the US Senate race was held in Georgia for Raphael Warnock, and on the Fox News show “Hannity,” the finger-pointing at Herschel Walker’s imminent loss had begun. One big culprit: TikTok.
TikTok? The Chinese-owned social media platform, which didn’t even exist at the start of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, should be banned “for reasons of national security,” Gingrich said. “But as long as it’s legal,” he continued, “we have to learn to compete in a place like this, because that’s where Generation Z gets such a high percentage of their information.”
“We have to learn how to be competitive in that,” he added.
That is one – and probably the only – point on which Mr. Gingrich and Annie Wu Henry would agree.
At the age of 26, Mrs. Henry – or @Annie_Wu_22, as she is known TwitterInstagram and TikTok — was a relatively low-ranking staffer since July in Senator-elect John Fetterman’s campaign against Dr. Mehmet Oz in the US Senate race in Pennsylvania, when she took over Mr. Fetterman’s TikTok account.
“John already had a great communications team working for him, and he’d been a Twitter guy himself for years,” Ms. Henry said during a video call from her apartment in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood. She was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie (“very on-brand today,” she said with a laugh). “But we were able to move his voice and his message to other platforms,” she said.
And those other platforms were even “more important than usual,” said Ms. Henry, because Mr. Fetterman was unable to get out after his stroke in May.
Ms. Henry soon became, according to Mr. Fetterman’s communications director, Joe Calvello, their “TikTok Queen.” The account gained more than 240,000 followers, three million likes and tens of millions of views in three months. Mrs. Henry’s was able to make the fun serious, and the serious fun; and her motto – in life and on TikTok – is “embrace the cringe.” That is, let the world see you as your messy, authentic self.
‘Young people trust’
Of course you have to have a candidate who wants you to do this. “John is not an Instagram dude” — polished, carefully curated — “nor would he be allowed to dance around on TikTok,” she said. “But if we can kind of use a weird, quirky sound and edit our posts to be a little, well, not messy, but not super sophisticated, it aligns with who he is, who this campaign is.”
Some of her hits: Dr. Oz bragging about growing up “south of Philadelphia,” followed by a map showing that across the water… is New Jersey, covered in Smash Mouth’s “All Star” (“Somebody once told me the world is going to roll me / I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed”).
Another of hers more cutting examples: a trippy TikTok duet of the heavy metal dolls in “Numbers (I Can Only Count to Four)” by Psychostick, where Dr. Oz is unable to count the number of houses he owns.
While she did not create Mr. Fetterman’s response on the infamous raw food video of Dr. Oz, in which he complains about the price of “crudités” and mixes up Philly supermarkets Wegmans and Redner’s, she had a eureka moment raising money. For any donation over $5, donors would receive a sticker that read, “Wegners: Let Them Eat Crudité.” Money soon poured in.
“Annie is like this generational force,” said a young political operative known as Memes. He has a Twitter account called @OrganizerMemes, an aggregator for clever political imagery and writing, which doubles as a place for harried young staffers to vent without being exposed to their bosses. (Memes is 25, works in politics and would like to keep his job, hence the anonymity.)
He considers Mrs. Henry to be a good friend, although they have just met non-virtually for the first time in Georgia, when Mrs. Henry decided at the last minute to fly to Georgia and help cast the Asian vote for Senator Warnock during the second round. .
“Young people are often not trusted in campaigns to do things,” Memes said. “Annie is what happens when you trust young people to do what they do best.”
‘She’ll get what she wants’
Mrs. Henry grew up in a rural, very conservative town in York County, Pa., the only child of Tom and Beth Henry, both special education teachers. She was adopted in China at 13 months.
When her exhausted and excited parents got their new daughter, Mr. Henry said, the nurse told them, “This one is very proud, she will get what she wants in life.”
From an early age, her parents said, injustice would make her head explode. Her liberal but devout Methodist parents were in despair when they couldn’t get their daughter to attend church with them when she learned what gay marriage was and that their church wouldn’t allow it.
“Because she was adopted in China and we had very few other ethnic races in our city, I think maybe she felt like an underdog herself,” her father said. “Sometimes she was bullied. But when she saw someone else being bullied, she was furious.”
She got her first smartphone in high school and tweeted about the 2012 election before she could vote. Four years ago, she led the Black Lives Matter protests in her predominantly white hometown.
And it was her father who first told her about Mr. Fetterman. “When he was mayor of Braddock, I admired him because he really helped people who were struggling, because he stood up for the common man,” said Mr. Henry. When he announced that he was thinking about running for Senate, I told Annie, ‘This is a man to think about. This is someone you can support.’”
She graduated from Lehigh University in 2018 — her senior thesis was on the intersection of identity and social media — and then worked a series of jobs: organizing for a few local politicians in Philadelphia and doing social media for a bridal company to pay the bills.
At the start of the pandemic, she wrote an essay that drew attention to dealing with her ethnicity for the first time and feeling genuinely scared as an Asian American in a country where the president called Covid-19 “the Chinese flu.” Wearing a mask in public, she reminded herself to “look friendly” and not to sneeze or cough.
Last year, she made her first viral tweet with a friend: a Stop Asian Hate meme that gained millions of views, helped by reposts from celebrities like Chrissy Teigen and Ellen Pompeo.
Sophie Ota, Mr. Fetterman’s digital director, hired her at the end of July. The next few months, Mrs. Henry said, were a blur. There were no days off. There was no time to check what experts were saying about the predicted ‘red wave’, and Ms. Henry and other staff members were diligently tuning in to the news.
Mrs. Henry was also one of the few people in the campaign to own a car, which meant she drove colleagues from one part of the state to another, covering about 1,000 miles a week; the joke was that she had memorized the Pennsylvania Turnpike and knew the best rest stops and coffee shops. (At one point, the compliance officer, who controls staff costs, looked at how many lattes she bought and wanted to know who she bought coffee for each day. They were just for her.)
Although she and Mr. Fetterman were often in different places, she showed up early at events so she could take and post photos of the crowd, the lines, the people. Most events had a tracker: a man from the Oz team who kept an eye on the goings-on.
‘That’s very common,’ said Mrs Henry, ‘but this man was mainly there to see if he could record John messing up words so they could make fun of John’s health. He also took in John’s children. There are ways to do this where you are not rude and disrespectful.” Mrs. Henry had a final word of contempt: “And he used one camcorder.”
Mrs. Henry has a fairly high online profile, aside from her Fetterman connection. Her personal Instagram account (which has more than 80,000 followers) alternates information on how to get involved in the fight against racism and the protection of abortion rights with selfies with rally friends like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker or the actress Kerry Washington .
And Mrs. Henry isn’t shy about supporting low-paid political work with a few side issues. Not only does she work with non-profit organizations that promote reproductive rights or protect democracy, but also the occasional manufacturer of skin creams or vibrators.
Political tchotchkes and pop culture references – “just little references to people I look up to – fill her apartment. Her doormat reads: “In this house, we understand that fundamental human rights are not political issues and that science is a fact, not an opinion. Welcome.”
Taylor Swift merchandise is scattered around and autographed copies of books by Jimmy Carter and Gloria Steinem are on the coffee table. Next to her door is a tote bag that reads, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Miss Election.”
She’s trying to catch up with her real life after the haze of the past few months – answering emails, paying a speeding ticket and, perhaps most importantly, getting tickets to the upcoming Taylor Swift concert. (She and Mr. Fetterman’s wife, Giselle, have a “text bond” over Taylor Swift, she said.) She’s single and unemployed, but like many of her peers, she’s not freaked out.
“I don’t know how this is going to turn out, and I don’t necessarily want to know,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to have this, like, one big dream job forever.” She said she doesn’t think she wants to work on the Hill, though a recent Instagram post shows her looking very much like Jackie O, mysteriously visiting the White House.
And she’s enjoying that first taste of celebrity. She said she was walking down the street recently and a man rolled down his window and yelled, “Are you Annie?” “I said ‘yes’ but was a bit surprised/confused,” she texted me. Then he yelled, “Thank you for all you’ve done,” and hurried off.
