On July 21, President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. While it’s unlikely he read my previous article, I’d like to believe it was part of the deluge of media calling upon him to step down for the sake of the nation. “I revere this office but I love my country more,” Biden said from the Oval Office on July 24.
While Biden’s subsequent endorsement of the Vice President was far from surprising, the wave of excitement since over the Democratic party’s new nominee has fundamentally changed this race.
Biden’s Endorsement Overpowered Democrats Who Called for an Open Convention
Vice President Harris, a former District Attorney of San Francisco and Attorney General of California, clinched the Democratic nomination this past Friday in the Democratic National Comittee’s virtual roll call. Yet, huge figures like political strategist James Carville and The New York Times’ Ezra Klein called for an open convention to determine who would succeed Biden.
But after a chaotic few months of speculation about Biden’s future, Harris sparked a fuse within the Democratic party that squashed those calls pretty quickly. She appeals to the fanbase of RuPaul’s Drag Race, as demonstrated by her recent visit to the ‘Werk Room,’ and moderate Democrats, even Republicans, who don’t want to see Trump back in office.
In Harris’ first week alone, her campaign raised $200 million. “The end result of mini-primaries would have been the same,” Politico’s Eugene Daniels said, who has been reporting closely on Harris since 2019. “You can’t hop, skip, and jump over not just a Black woman, but the Black woman who’s been the vice president.”
Young voters seem to feel the same way. Harris led Trump by nearly 20 points among registered voters under 30 in a New York Times poll conducted only two days after Biden dropped out, and momentum only seems to be increasing.
Charli XCX says ‘Kamala Harris IS brat’
Just hours after Biden’s endorsement, Harris got another from pop sensation Charli XCX. It sparked an online frenzy like Charli’s album did this summer. Shortly after this endorsement, KamalaHQ rebranded their X account with the iconic ‘brat’ green.
Top reporters, such as CNN’s Jake Tapper and Kaitlan Collins, spoke about hearing the term for the first time on air. The Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association quickly released merch reading ‘demo(b)rat.’ These sorts of moves, while seemingly small, reach young people. I can vouch for it.
“I think fan culture created and runs the internet,” said Brent David Freaney, who helped design the iconic ‘brat’ album cover with Charli XCX, to The New York Times. “There’s this thing right now where we want to be excited about something in this insane, dystopian world we’re living in.”
An old picture of Doug Emhoff, Harris’ husband, went viral this week. Users reshared the picture with captions like “Dayum Doug” and “Make him TikTok’s white boy of the month.” Within days, Kamala HQ responded with t-shirts, mugs, and stickers branded with the photo. There’s a running joke that a single ‘Gen-Z’ intern is carrying the Harris campaign on his or her back. The content on these accounts reflects where senior strategists are pulling information from. The Harris campaign is taking note of the importance of the youth vote in this election.
Memes Have a Tangible Effect on Young Voters
In the two days after Biden endorsed Harris, Vote.org saw a wave of 38,500 new voter registrations, most of whom were 34 and under. On X, Kamala HQ’s bio reads “Providing context,” a nod to one of Harris’ most viral clips where she quotes her mother saying, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”
According to Amanda Hess, who covers internet culture for The New York Times, memes about Harris’ at times flowery rhetoric feel incredibly low stakes.
“It’s a reaction to the legitimately concerning gibberish generated by the elder statesman in the race over the past few months. It’s a quirk, not an existential threat to American democracy.”
Amanda Hess, author for the New York Times
Even the Harris campaign’s labeling of the GOP— Trump and Vance especially— as ‘weird’ reflects a different political strategy for Democrats. “There is so much excitement that Democrats are finally no longer being nice to people who are not nice to us,” said Emma Mont, an administrator for Organizer Memes, an X account made up of former Democratic field organizers.
‘Weird’ is a simple and relatable attack. It reflects more on the nature of clippable moments that the internet runs off. Biden’s “Trump is the end of democracy as we know it” was predictable. Hillary’s ‘deplorables’ became an easy target for the far-right. But Harris can create a clean-cut comparison between her and Trump: a former prosecutor versus a convicted felon… and the internet loves it.
This is What Trump Was So Afraid Of
Trump’s latest attempts to avoid meeting Kamala Harris on the debate stage are revealing. She represents all that he and his supporters are afraid of: a strong, intelligent woman of color with the chance to beat him. Simultaneously, she brings the youthful energy he was so banking on Biden not to have.
Harris has the support of Quavo and Megan Thee Stallion at her rallies. Meanwhile, Trump just became the oldest presidential nominee in U.S. history, and now he’s flailing. We saw it at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, where he declared within minutes of appearing before the nation’s largest gathering of Black journalists that Kamala Harris “had just happened to turn black” a few years back and that he was the “best president for Black people since Abraham Lincoln.”
The same Trump who just put on a Republican National Convention that was more of a show than anything else surely understands the importance of Harris’ internet presence. This past week, the Trump campaign started spending significant money on ads in North Carolina and Nevada—both states with polls that showed sizable leads for Trump against Biden.
But while these ads follow the campaign’s strategy of attacking her past policy record, Trump’s increasing personal attacks, including his recent “Kamala Harris is not a smart person” on Fox News, are not doing him any good with independent and moderate voters. Even Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, author of Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, agrees that “It’s not a great idea for either of the parties to be playing racial identity politics.” If Josh Hawley is worried, I’d say Kamala Harris has a fighting chance.
Note: Every vote counts, but in this election, the youth voter is more important than ever—and I don’t mean that lightly. Let us use the energy we see on social media to have a real effect. Register to vote at vote.gov.
