The Hall of Hotties was an installation featuring portraits of prominent Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and progressive heroes such as Ariana Grande and Jason Kelce. Hotties for Harris is a reference to the name of rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s fanbase, who endorsed Harris and performed at her Atlanta rally.Lily McLaughlin/Supplied
When President Joe Biden stepped down and Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, there was, to use internet vernacular, a vibe shift. For progressives, what once felt like a doomed election had evolved into a collective sense of giddiness. The place where this glee has reached a fever pitch, particularly among younger voters, is on social media.
In the past month, the Harris election campaign’s official TikTok account, KamalaHQ, has posted memes referencing Love Island, Harry Styles, Grey’s Anatomy, Lady Gaga and rising pop star Chappell Roan, amassing millions of views. The campaign’s TikTok videos have some 98 million likes, more than double the amount former president Donald Trump has netted.
The X platform was for a time flooded with user-generated clips of Ms. Harris dancing and laughing against a backdrop of club anthems from British artist Charli XCX’s album brat, remixed with a now-ubiquitous sound bite of Ms. Harris recalling some confusingly phrased wisdom from her mother. (“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and all that came before.”)
The social-media floodgates opened after Mr. Biden endorsed Ms. Harris at the end of July. Just hours later, the Vice-President picked up another potentially consequential endorsement, this one from Charli XCX herself. The X post said, simply, “Kamala IS brat.”
All of this is particularly notable because the Biden campaign’s online efforts had nearly the opposite result: despite paying influencers to create pro-Biden content, the 81-year-old President failed to achieve internet virality. Instead, his gaffes often became meme fodder.
It’s easy to dismiss this all as internet noise, but the Harris campaign considers it serious business. (It spent US$57-million on Meta and Google ads in the weeks after Ms. Harris became the nominee.) Meanwhile, political strategists and internet-culture academics caution that the good vibes may not last, a concern bolstered on Sunday by the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, which showed Mr. Trump with a slight national lead after a summer of Harris momentum.
Even if the campaign’s online success continues, the real challenge will be translating that enthusiasm into votes.
Laura Olin, a digital strategist and former social-media director for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, said it can be easy for campaigns to overlook the importance of social-media platforms such as TikTok. “I think the overall assumption is like, ‘Oh, that’s just for kids. It’s not for people who engage in serious politics.’” she said. “But young people are a huge constituency in elections and that’s a reason to get on it.”
The key to a successful online campaign, Ms. Olin said, is maintaining authenticity while avoiding one of the biggest missteps: in Gen Z parlance, “looking cringe.”
“You’re building a brand and you want people to become a part of it.”
As an example of a political brand that is unappealing to many voters, she pointed to Mr. Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, whom the Democrats’ have painted as “weird.” The catchphrase was coined by Ms. Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz.
Robyn Urback: Why ‘weird’ is the perfect, pernicious political attack against Republicans
Although the Harris campaign is dominating TikTok, political memes have in the past been the domain of Mr. Trump and the Republicans. The 2016 election showed that social-media posts can be a powerful tool for riling up support and pushing less-popular ideas into mainstream conversation, and also for disseminating misinformation.
This election cycle, Mr. Trump appears to be following a similar playbook. In late August, he went on a posting spree on his social-media platform, Truth Social, sharing a slew of memes that baselessly suggested Ms. Harris had used sexual favours to advance her career and called for her and other Democrats to be thrown in prison.
“The thing about these types of memes is that they don’t turn people on,” said Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor at CUNY Queens College who studies memes. “They could lose voters with these memes rather than gain them. The more they dig into the very online, the less they connect with the suburban moms.”
Attendees at the Hall of Hotties installation.Lily McLaughlin/Supplied
Memes can influence the overall mood of the electorate, but social-media posts alone are not effective at persuading people to go out and vote, Mr. Cohen said. “Memes aren’t a tool that converts to civic action. It’s not a tool that makes people vote. But what it does do is create a mood barometer, so you can take that mood and use influencer actors to encourage people to register to vote.”
This is a strategy the Democrats deployed last month at their national convention, when for the first time in the party’s history they accredited online content creators to cover the event. Two hundred influencers attended. According to the party, their content pulled in more than 500 million views collectively.
One of the videos that went viral at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was of L.A.-based creator Heather Gardner in a suit made of fabric that was the same lime green as the cover of Charli XCX’s album, with a T-shirt featuring conspicuously placed coconuts.
“Even though I talked about things like abortion rights and SCOTUS reform, it was the video of me walking on the floor of the DNC in a brat suit that got 300,000 views,” said Ms. Gardner, who makes political-satire videos.
Only a few references to “weird” and other online running jokes critical of Mr. Vance – ask any TikTok addict about couches and childless cat ladies – made it on the DNC stage, but the memes were like a backdrop to the convention, Ms. Gardner said.
An event she attended while in Chicago was called Hotties for Harris, which she said “felt like the internet exploded in a party.” The event, organized by a democratic political action committee, catered specifically to influencers.
It was chock full of Instagrammable photo ops: feminist mini golf, including a hole named “the Childless Cat Ladies”; a life-sized statue of Mr. Vance next to an old couch; and a “Wall of Weirdos” with portraits of Republican political figures such as Mike Pence, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Ron DeSantis.
Another risk of using memes as a political tool is the threat of overexposure. “It just seems like we’ve entered the fall, and brat was summer. It seems a little dated at this point,” said Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University.
“What else does her campaign have besides a chartreuse green meme? Memes can only take you so far at the end of the day, and the candidates are going to need to stand on their own platforms.”
On Labour Day, Charli XCX posted a short paean: “Goodbye forever brat summer.”
It was a reminder that memes don’t last forever.