How ‘Congressman Nobody’ got 2.2 million users on TikTok

One minute he was eating a taco, and the next a king was reaching out to him. 

Jeff Jackson, a freshman Democrat from North Carolina, may not chair any committees or hold a position in leadership – but he’s quickly becoming one of the U.S. House’s better-known members outside of Congress, thanks to his viral videos about what goes on under the dome. After he was named to the Committee on Armed Services – unusual for a first-year member – top brass and even a monarch got in touch. 

Since being sworn in, the major in the Army National Guard and dad of three has gotten a crash course on many topics. Quantum computing. Taiwan’s “porcupine” strategy of defense. The House rule against calling people things like “little bugger” on the floor, even though members say much worse on TV.

Representative Jackson says the place reminds him of high school, and also a wax museum come to life. “I think a lot of folks in politics and some folks in media treat the outrage model as basically the only way to get attention,” he says.

“I can prove to them that that is false,” he adds, noting that his own nonsensational, explanatory approach has garnered him 2.2 million followers on TikTok – and, he says, 1 million on Substack. 

On an afternoon when votes were canceled because of intra-GOP wrangling, he sits down on his office couch for an interview. He understands why outrage politics can seem like the only game in town, he explains. He once did, too. Before he ran for Congress, he tried writing down all the members whose names he knew. He got to 38 out of 435. And that list, he says, presented a warped view. Coming in, he guesstimated the proportion of lawmakers on “Team Outrage” vs. “Team Serious” was roughly one-third vs. two-thirds.

“I was totally wrong,” says the former state senator, who realized Team Outrage actually makes up less than 10% of the Congress. Now he tells constituents back home: “There are many more serious people than you are led to believe.”

During his first month in office, he wrote about bumping into a fellow representative on the House floor whom he’d assumed he would never be able to work with, based on what he knew of them from TV and Twitter. To be polite, he introduced himself. They ended up talking for 20 minutes, and Mr. Jackson said he found this member to be “brilliant.”

“It taught me an important lesson,” he wrote to folks back home on his Substack. “Don’t assume anything about anyone here until I’ve had a chance to meet with them personally.”

When he started attending committee meetings, he learned that some members who routinely spout off in front of the cameras are totally calm and rational in meetings closed to the press.

In a much-watched video in which he claimed that the most angry voices in Congress are “mostly faking it,” he didn’t name anyone – but Newsmax did, defending GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert and mocking “Congressman Nobody” and his “boring” social media posts. Just because he’s calm doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a political agenda, they implied. 

A year ago, Representative Jackson barely knew what TikTok was. A staffer suggested he add it to his growing portfolio of social media accounts.

He had started with Facebook and Twitter when he was a 31-year-old who suddenly became a state senator when he was appointed to fill a vacancy.

“People had no idea who I was,” he recalls. “I was this young, broke politician, and social media was the only way I had to communicate with my constituents.”

The public response was so positive that he started considering it part of the job: keeping people posted.

Now, nearly a decade later, he writes several Substack posts a month and films his own highly produced videos – with a script, a high-quality Sony camera (iPhones just don’t cut it, he tells fellow lawmakers), a microphone, and lighting that he tests out on his kids so they can be part of the process. He’s even learned that there’s a special word for making the bowl of bananas in the background just the right amount of blurry: bokeh. He does all the editing on Adobe Premiere, which he taught himself.

“I watched a bunch of YouTube videos,” he explains. “I was watching a bunch the other night about color-grading. It’s just a super-deep rabbit hole.”

Other members are eager to develop his kind of following, but when they ask how long it takes him, they may be put off by his answer: many, many hours.

In the next few weeks he’s holding a workshop for digital staffers, who can help other members with such work. 

Notably, for Congress’s biggest star on TikTok, he was relatively restrained in his write-up of a contentious, marathon hearing with TikTok’s CEO this spring.

Amid a bipartisan push to ban TikTok, Mr. Jackson called senators’ grilling of CEO Shou Zi Chew “brutal” and explained the basis for their concerns about privacy and national security. While he would arguably have the most to lose of any member of Congress if the platform were banned, he still acknowledged a six-year-old Chinese law that, in his words, basically says “that if Chinese intelligence services tell TikTok to hand over all of your data, they have to do it, and they don’t have to tell you.”

He also noted he was optimistic about passing broader data privacy legislation that would cover all social media platforms. 

“I’m really interested in using this position to become a credible source of information,” he explains, which he sees as key to building consensus. “That’s so much harder than using this position to give my opinion on everything.”

In an age of growing disinformation and distrust in media, “there’s a real demand for speaking to people in a normal tone of voice and in a substantive way,” he says. “I feel like there’s going to be a generational shift in what we’re looking for from news. It cannot continue to be this angry all the time.”