Politicians vying for "poll" position need to stay on top of society's trends. Hence a Democratic candidate for governor of California will be giving TikTok a go, but with a caveat: He'll only post videos in Spanish.

At least for now.

Former Biden administration Health Secretary Xavier Becerra is embracing the popular short-video app to target Spanish-language users. His campaign and surveys note that Hispanic adults use TikTok in much higher numbers than Black and white adults.

Trump, a Republican, had tried to ban dealings with ByteDance during his first term, but he joined the TikTok platform last year and has millions of followers. He has repeatedly extended the deadline for ByteDance to find a buyer and has hinted occasionally, as recently as Monday, that there was a deal over the future of the social media app, but without offering details. The White House started its own TikTok account last month.

Becerra's new approach is part of an effort by Democrats to counter the rightward swing that was seen last year both in red states such as Texas and Florida and blue states such as California, New Jersey and New York, where Trump improved his numbers among Latinos.

The idea is to lock in a key user base by pushing out content early on a platform politicians are still largely experimenting with. The effort comes when the Trump administration is phasing out multilingual services as part of the president's push to make English the official language of the United States.

A 2024 Pew Research Center survey concluded that while TikTok has seen significant user growth in a short time, the demographics were different depending on race and ethnicity. Nearly half of Hispanic adults reported using it compared with 39 percent of Black adults and 28 percent of white adults.