By the end of July this year, things were looking very dire indeed for the Democrats. Trump had survived his (first) assassination attempt, and in the process, solidified his status as a right-wing martyr. A few days later, a Florida judge dismissed the justice department's classified documents case against him, in another huge victory for the former president. And only two weeks prior, there was that catastrophic debate, when the then-nominee Joe Biden looked a strong breeze away from meeting his maker.
The atmosphere was apocalyptic, the election result – already nail-bitingly tight – now seemed a foregone conclusion. Despair was verging on delirium, people were in desperate need of light relief. And then, along came a coconut tree.
It started, as all great prophecies do, on TikTok, when a now infamous video featuring Harris at a White House event sharing an anecdote about her mother went viral. "She would say to us, 'I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?" Harris laughs, before abruptly switching to a gravely sombre tone. "You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you."
As with all good memes, it was absurdist, verging on sh*t-posting, and almost impossible to explain its appeal. It triggered a flood of online energy – “fancam” videos cast Harris in the kind of light typically reserved for top-tier celebrities, transforming the entire political narrative around the once-unpopular vice president into an almost overnight pop culture icon. All this then, of course, coincided with Brat summer – ushered in by Charli XCX’s culture-shifting, hedonistic sixth studio album – which soon became the grassroots campaign’s de facto soundtrack.
It was such a stark contrast to the staid battle between the two oldest presidential candidates in history – crucially, Harris always seemed to be genuinely enjoying herself, buoyed by a sense of whimsy and effortless charisma not seen since the Obama days. By the time Biden actually pulled out of the race, the Kamala-nomenon (a Chappell Roan reference, it’s an intricate web) was in full force, and Harris’ campaign was able to hit the ground running.
Since then, Harris has appeared on sex and relationships podcast Call Her Daddy (the second-most listened to show on Spotify), won the endorsements of Taylor Swift and Beyonce, and has adopted a fiercely efficient Gen Z-led social media strategy. While Obama certainly capitalised on nascent social media platforms during his campaigns, never has a presidential candidate managed to harness the power of pop culture with such ruthless precision.
From her A-list fans to the “pack of feral 25-year-olds” running her social media, here is a look at how the Harris campaign has set a precedent for garnering the pop culture vote.
‘Kamala IS brat’ – coconuts, lime green memes and ‘existing in the context’
When, on July 21, Joe Biden pulled out of the 2024 presidential race, the Brat-ification of the Harris campaign was already in full swing. In the weeks leading up to Harris becoming the presumptive nominee, social media had gone into overdrive, with Gen Z TikTok accounts run like the navy unearthing old videos of the Vice President set to the hyper-pop tones of Charli XCX’s ubiquitous lime-green album.
Clips of Harris’s infectious laugh, or her marching dance alongside a drum line at a 2019 event in Des Moines were edited together with quick cuts and glittering visuals, racking up millions of views in a matter of days. Footage of the VP cheerfully singing The Wheels On The Bus to herself as she boards a campaign bus became on online mainstay, as did a snippet from an interview in which she discusses her passion for venn diagrams.
Which is how, a mere day after Biden’s departure, Charli XCX, the auteur and high priestess of Brat herself was able to co-sign Harris’ campaign with three now-infamous words: ‘kamala IS brat’. Quickly, Kamala HQ twitter account changed it’s Twitter/X backdrop to brat green, and its bio to “providing context” – a reference, of course, to Harris’s infamous “you exist in the context” adage.
Charli was picking up on what had quickly become the key word of the Harris campaign – vibes. Soon, presenters on CNN were dedicating entire segments to attempting to make sense of the meme, and TikTok feeds were awash with incredibly niche dance edits that set well-known Harris quotes to songs from the album.
“When we see moments like this go out into this sort of wild, wild west of the internet and be reinterpreted by the people who are there, who are not digital strategists, right, but who are likely teenage girls sitting in their bedrooms creating these fancam edits, making these memes — we see a reinterpretation through their perspective,” Deja Foxx, a digital strategist, who, at 19, was the youngest member on staff in Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign, said in an interview with CNN. It reflects, she added, “the power that young people hold not only at the polls, but in defining the narrative.”
Five years ago today we got Pokémon Go to the polls. pic.twitter.com/lbgURLLfxa
— Adam Smith (@asmith83) July 14, 2021
Harris is far from the first presidential candidate to attempt to harness the power of social media. Obama, who has been labelled the “first social-media president,” took advantage of a burgeoning tool to attract millennial voters. Less successful was Hillary Clinton’s attempt in 2016, when she came up with such gems as telling voters to “Pokemon Go-to-the-polls”, sold t-shirts featuring pictures of her younger self emblazoned with “Yaaas, Hillary!”, or told black listeners of The Breakfast Club radio station that she carries hot sauce in her bag. The key difference between Harris and Clinton’s strategies is that the former’s is organic: the Harris’s Gen Z-ification came from the bottom up, whereas Clinton’s attempts to court the demographic came from the top down. And therefore it was sin of all Gen Z sins: cringe.
‘A pack of feral 25-year-olds’ – how Harris’ social media team capitalised on the vibes
Over the last three months, Harris's own social media team has taken the built in vibes-boost and run with it, crafting of the most innovative and playful get-out-the-vote strategies in recent political history by astutely tapping into the quirks and trends of internet culture.
Harris’s TikTok account has now become so popular that people claiming to secretly run the account has become a meme in itself: in August, the account posted a video asking Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff who runs the account, to which he replied sarcastically: “It’s obviously me.”
The truth, according to a report in the Washington Post, is that Harris has assembled a TikTok team made up entirely of Gen Z staffers, some of whom are in their first jobs, and crucially has given them creative freedom to make whatever content they believe will go viral. This is in contrast to 2016, when a single tweet from Hillary Clinton could require a dozen staffers and numerous drafts. Now, many of Harris’s TikTok videos are now conceived, created, and posted in the space of half an hour, the Post reports.
“Barring objection, we’re gonna go,” deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty told the Post. “Everything goes on a five-minute warning. You just gotta trust your people. Our f---up ratio [is as low] as if there were 19 layers of approval.”
The team, who Flaherty have described as a pack of “feral 25-year-olds,” have used viral audios from reality show Dance Moms, clipped together highlight reels from Harris’s campaign appearances and even used the popular strategy of posting videos alongside recordings of the video game Subway Surfers, designed to attract attention deficient teens.
And it’s not just TikTok: Harris also has a 13-person “digital rapid response” team active across all major social media platforms, primed and ready to respond to reactive moments on the campaign trail. The team share a calendar of all major political events and monitors them: “we are never not watching,” 24-year-old Parker Butler, the team’s manager told the Washington Post, sometimes working shifts that go past midnight.
Each of the team’s social media “strategists” focuses on a specific platform, catering to the idiocyncracies of its culture. When a potentially viral moment happens, the team race to push it out on social media.
The approach seems to be paying off. The number of plays Harris’ @KamalaHQ TikTok received for its 65 posts in the campaign’s first 20 days was more than double what the @BidenHQ’s 335 posts received in roughly five months. By September, the Harris campaign had racked up 100 million more views than Trump on TikTok, despite having half as many followers, according to an analysis of data from Zelf, an online measurement firm.
It’s also clearly got under Trump’s skin. Last month, he baselessly accused her team of paying for fake followers. The response from the Harris campaign was typically Gen Z: “Rent free” (how the Harris staffers are living inside his head, of course).
An unlikely appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast
Outside of social media, Harris has also found novel ways to reach younger voters, specifically with an appearance in September on Alex Cooper’s sex and relationships podcast Call Her Daddy. According to Spotify, it is the second-most-listened-to podcast in the world, behind only The Joe Rogan Experience.
Cooper’s podcast, featuring candid discussions about girls’ room secrets, dating experiences, and therapy-style revelations, is wildly popular with young, sex-positive women. Typical guests are the likes of Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus and Julia Fox, who sit opposite Cooper often in tracksuits and baseball caps, to open up about their personal and sexual journeys. A cursory glance at recent episode titles includes “Blow jobs, hall passes and frat daddies”, “Overcoming toxic men”, and “Threesomes, facetune and Ozempic”.
Addressing listeners at the top of the show, Cooper said she decided to speak to the VP because “overall, my focus is women and the day-to-day issues that we face.” While the 40-minute conversation was something of a softball interview, it did contain a substantive policy discussion, covering reproductive healthcare, the high cost of housing, and Republican attacks on “childless cat ladies,” and Harris’s family life.
There was backlash to Harris’s appearance, with critics from both sides of the aisle suggesting it was frivolous, or an attempt from the Democratic candidate to avoid scrutiny from journalists. There was backlash to the backlash too, though, perhaps best summed up by former Obama White House spokesperson Eric Schultz.
“In a town full of narcissists, nobody has a bigger sense of entitlement than DC journalists. And it’s particularly rich to snipe at the campaign for not doing enough interviews the very week she’s sitting down with the most revered news program in all of television,” said former Obama he said in an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes. “We don’t live in an age when everyone gets their news from three white guys at 6:30 every night,” he added.
Beyonce and Taylor Swift – winning the Hollywood elites
Another string to Harris’s bow has, of course, been her swathe of celebrity endorsements. While the Democrats have always had a one up on the GOP in terms of Hollywood support, Harris has managed to galvanise a laundry list of A-listers with unprecedented alacrity.
Billie Eilish, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston, Ariana Grande, Megan Thee Stallion, Bad Bunny, Lizzo, Tyler Perry, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Oprah, Maggie Rogers, Willie Nelson, Cardi B, Lebron James, Usher, Magic Johnson and Samuel L Jackson are quite literally just a few of a the stars who have thrown their weight behind the VP.
And that is not including her endorsement from the two biggest pop stars on the planet, Taylor Swift and Beyonce. Swift’s much-anticipated support came last month, just minutes after the presidential debate in September between Harris and Trump. In an Instagram post published to her 283 million followers, Swift said: “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 presidential election … I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.” In a mic-drop moment, she signed off the post “Taylor Swift, childless cat lady”, in reference to JD Vance’s widely-condemned slight against Harris. Afterwards, Vote.org recorded more than 400,000 people visit its voter registration site via her Instagram story.
The Harris campaign had been using Beyonce’s song Freedom as their campaign soundtrack from almost day one, so it was no surprise when Bey herself showed up at a campaign rally in her hometown of Houston last week. “For all the men and women in this room, and watching around the country, we need you,” Beyoncé told a roaring crowd of 30,000 people. “I’m here as a mother,” she continued. “A mother who cares deeply about the world my children, and all of our children, live in. A world where we have the freedom to control our bodies.”
The question, ultimately though, is whether any of this will actually make a difference at the polls. Around 41 million members of Gen Z will be eligible to vote in November, including millions who were too young to vote in the 2020 election. Their participation could prove crucial: the election is currently deadlocked, probably hinging on tens of thousands of votes in just a few swing states. The Harvard Youth Poll showed Harris with a commanding 32-point lead over Trump among likely voters aged 18 to 29.
While bright green glow of “Brat summer” has faded, organisers are hoping they have done enough to be able to convert that energy into tangible support.
