Can Kamala Harris meme her way to becoming president?

For a very long time in American politics, the primary question of presidential candidate likability was voters asking themselves, “Could I have a beer with them?” But over the course of the social media age, a new gut check has emerged to test a president’s ability to capture the internet’s attention: Does this person make […]

For a very long time in American politics, the primary question of presidential candidate likability was voters asking themselves, “Could I have a beer with them?” But over the course of the social media age, a new gut check has emerged to test a president’s ability to capture the internet’s attention: Does this person make a good meme?

After four years of a president for whom the answer was “not really” (with a minor caveat for “Dark Brandon,” which was funny for precisely one second), Democrats now have a candidate who can actually compete with Trump in the court of internet opinion. On social media timelines the world over, Vice President Kamala Harris is currently being made into frenzied supercuts where she dances, laughs, and delivers her now-iconic metaphor about coconut trees as she expounds on being “unburdened by what has been.” She’s being edited into pop songs and remixed queening out to “Brat,” the Charli xcx album that’s become this summer’s biggest cultural breakout and digital shorthand for unapologetic, messy hedonism. 

Memeability is an ineffable quality with undeniable electoral repercussions: Obama’s grabby slogans and punchy graphic design made him infinitely more memeable than standard-issue Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney, while Trump’s exaggerated facial expressions and off-the-cuff remarks can admittedly be very funny (who could forget his reaction to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death as “Tiny Dancer” played?) when they’re not overtly cruel. In both cases, the candidates’ ubiquitous internet presence spoke to their wider ability to capture young people’s attention and energy, even when the memes themselves were barely legible to the average voter. 

Now, Democrats have been handed the blessing of completely organic Kamala memes. The out-of-context clips and creative edits of the vice president, usually steeped in at least some level of irony, gained steam following Biden’s disastrous performance at the June presidential debate, when swaths of voters were clamoring for a change in candidate and turned to the next most likely option. 

Suddenly, mentions of the “KHive” were everywhere, referring to Harris’s supporters during her 2020 campaign, as were viral clips of Harris singing “The Wheels on the Bus,” theatrically sharing Thanksgiving turkey recipes seconds before snapping to attention for an interview, and talking about her favorite subject, Venn diagrams. Harris is particularly prone to being memed: Many people on the internet have described her kooky persona as “your Xanned out aunt,” thanks to her propensity to burst into a high-pitched cackle at any moment. 

Only recently has Harris herself embraced the jokes, now that she’s officially running for president with Biden’s backing. Should you visit the campaign’s account on X, you’ll notice a lime green banner with “kamala hq” written in the “Brat” font, an homage to the album cover. After Charli xcx tweeted “kamala IS brat,” Harris followed her on both X and Instagram. 

Fellow Democratic politicians have followed suit, with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker asking, “You think I just fell out of a coconut tree?” as his way of winkingly endorsing Harris (or perhaps gunning for a VP nomination), while Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz posted a photo of himself climbing a literal coconut tree. 

Is this the beginning of a campaign that, for the first time since 2008, Democrats have actually found … fun? In 2016, the MAGA crowd delighted in memes circulated on red-pill forums that depicted Trump as a cartoonish strongman who was exactly as hateful and despotic as the left feared. Everything that made him invigorating to his fans — an unlikely nominee who captured a certain kind of irony-poisoned nihilistic impulse on the internet — now seems to be working in progressives’ favor.

Until recently, 2024 promised to be one of the most uninteresting elections in history. After a series of extremely unpredictable events (a poor debate performance, an assassination attempt, a case of Covid, and a historic dropout), Harris has now filled a most unlikely role: a Democratic presidential nominee who’s entertaining to watch, even if you don’t agree with everything she stands for. 

This, ultimately, is the power of memeability, or the talent of a candidate to transcend politics and become a legible cultural brand. It has played a crucial role in elections since before anyone used the term: Memeability is Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on Arsenio Hall, and it’s Howard Dean’s awkward scream that lost him the 2004 Democratic nomination. 

Candidates have always attempted to stage this kind of virality — Hillary Clinton’s “I’m just chilling in Cedar Rapids” Vine, for one — but the moments that truly take off lock into the absurdist, chaotic energy of the internet and are almost impossible to predict. Clinton never cracked that particular formula, whereas Harris has done it while barely even trying. 

As Ryan Long, the 22-year-old senior at the University of Delaware who created one of the most viral Kamala “Brat” video edits, puts it, “She’s the perfect candidate for the TikTok generation. I’ve gone so deep into the Kamala Harris YouTube archives, and there are just so many moments of her laughing and dancing.” The clips, he adds, stand in stark contrast to the stagnant mood coloring the Biden camp over the past year. “Kamala just brings new energy and the possibility of change,” he tells me. “She does such a good job of embodying ‘Brat’ summer.”

It wasn’t long ago that Harris was dubbed “Copmala” by liberals and leftists dismayed by her “tough on crime” criminal justice record. The vibe online has shifted significantly since then, and the left seems ready to embrace the absurdity and make peace with the candidate they’ve been handed. Though some online have warned the Harris campaign against leaning into the jokes and memes too heavily or risk coming across as corny and try-hard, it’s just as easy to imagine large portions of voters excited about the prospect of a candidate who can — convincingly! — laugh along with them. 

Perhaps progressives have finally learned from Trump, who understood that memes, even when they were theoretically unflattering, could help craft the persona that won him the presidency. There’s an infallibility that comes with being in on the joke, and now that the Harris campaign has joined in, the attacks from the right don’t stick as they might have with a different candidate. 

It was the RNC who made the four-minute video splicing together every time Harris used the phrase “unburdened” back in December. Now, the most popular quote tweet of that post reads, “The RNC staffer that posted this is getting executed as we speak,” referring to how the right’s criticisms of Harris have, so far, backfired. That Trump’s epithet for her is “Laughin’ Kamala” feels particularly uninspired when compared to “Sleepy Joe” and “Crooked Hillary” — laughing is, after all, a famously fun and good activity. The Harris campaign even gleefully reposted a tweet advising Republicans to drop the “unburdened” jokes because “[t]hey’re going to spin that into marketing for her campaign.” 

What this all amounts to is a viral marketing stunt that any presidential candidate would pay millions for, but one that no strategist or ad agency could create. It’s all entirely organic, forged from the fires of a truly bizarre and unpredictable time, and the feeling that a little chaos might be exactly what American politics needs. For once, it really does seem like we can become unburdened from what has been. And perhaps Kamala Harris will be laughing all the way to the Oval Office.