Looking through the roll call on the U.S. House of Representatives’ vote to ban the immensely popular TikTok, I can’t find any real discernible pattern. Overall, the bill which is formally called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, passed overwhelmingly 352-65, with one member voting “present” and 14 not voting at all.

Just among Democrats, the vote was 111-38 in favor of the bill. Here are some key markers:

Maxine Waters, who is the ranking member on the powerful Financial Services Committee, supported the ban. Pramila Jayapal, the leader of the Progressive Caucus opposed it. So did notable progressives Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Hispanic and Black caucuses definitely split on the issue, and institutional or establishment Democrats were not united. For example, Ways & Means ranking member Richard Neal of Massachusetts opposed the ban, as did House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark.

The effort here is aimed at forcing TikTok’s parent, Beijing-based ByteDance, to sell the social media company or face a ban on App Store sales in the United States. So, if you want the TikTok application, you might want to download it in the near future before that becomes impossible.

It’s not clear yet whether the bill has the votes to pass in the U.S. Senate. So far, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been noncommittal about bringing the bill to the floor. He probably realizes that banning TikTok in an election year is not a great way to win the youth vote, but you’d think House Democrats would have the same concern.

Donald Trump, who tried to ban TikTok while he was in office, now opposes the ban. This is probably because he’s seeking financial support from hedge fund manager Jeff Yass who has a huge stake in TikTok. But it’s also just a shrewd political move. Trump lost the youth vote by a lot in 2020 and he needs to make inroads. What better way than to paint the Biden administration as a bunch of unhip old fogies and sticks-in-the-mud?

Not to mention that a lot of people now make serious money on TikTok, and they don’t want the audience clipped.

Now, I saw Matt Yglesias make his case against TikTok and parts of it were compelling. For example:

Here’s the analogy I like to use. It’s 1975 and a state-owned Soviet firm wants to buy CBS. What happens? Well, what happens is they wouldn’t be allowed to. The FCC would block it. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US or its predecessors would block it. If they didn’t have the power, congress would write a new law. And even if it wasn’t CBS, if it was a chain of local TV affiliate stations, the outcome would be the same. There would be no detailed factual analysis or demand for gold standard evidence that a Soviet-owned television statement might do Moscow’s bidding or that television is capable of influencing public opinion. We’d reject the idea out of hand. And rightly so, because the downsides would be very clear, and the upside minimal.

That’s how the TikTok situation looks to me.

It’s easy to pick this reasoning apart, what with the abandonment of evidence as a standard. But on the other hand it’s clearly correct not only about what would have happened in 1975 but also about what should have happened and why. There was a lot of panic about the Soviet Union during the Cold War and much of it was unwarranted, but we had good reason not to let them own our television networks and stations. And on a basic level the same is true about the Chinese government. You can start with not letting China own critical infrastructure and then find the legal justification later.

But is TikTok critical infrastructure? Is the problem about protecting consumer privacy or about preventing foreign influence campaigns? China says we’re just getting our butts kicked in the commercial sphere and so now we’re trying to use hegemonic tools to regain market share.

I think that if this bill becomes law it will be tied up in court for quite some time, so I don’t really expect any near term effect other than the political fallout. I think anyone who is for the TikTok bill is going to wind up on the wrong side of the political argument in November.

Of course, I could be wrong. But a lot of effort will be required to make this a liability for Trump instead of for Biden.