(Bloomberg) -- Vice President Kamala Harris’ sudden candidacy for president inspired an explosion of memes across TikTok, Instagram and X, delivering priceless publicity in the short months before the election. So far, her campaign has winked at the internet’s inside jokes in its own messaging, hoping exuberance will translate into votes.
The strategy — which involves referencing coconuts and playing with the lime green “Brat” aesthetic of pop singer Charli XCX’s viral album — is risky, experts said. Leaning too hard into a meme can drain its fun, alienate people who don’t get it, or distract from the more important messages on policy and the seriousness of voting. But Harris needs all the attention she can get.
“Vice presidents are not at the forefront of most American minds,” said Erik Nisbet, a professor and director in the school of communication at Northwestern University. “This is an opportunity now to introduce her to a wider audience, especially among those we call ‘low-information voters’ who don't often pay a lot of attention to politics.”
Harris’ campaign accounts have amassed millions of views across Instagram, TikTok and X this week by engaging with a mix of memes, video clips and jokes in which she is the star. In the era of easy short-video editing, a dancing Harris from an old video can be overlaid on an image out of the “Brat summer” viral aesthetic, which celebrates femininity and youthful, messy party culture. Harris, who has more than 15 million followers on Instagram and 20 million on X, has been sharing some creative mashups, like a series of clips of her stepping out of Air Force One in different-colored suits, and screenshots of news articles against the sound, popularized on TikTok, of a cash register bell and someone saying “I can’t stop winning.”
“I think what some of these memes are doing is really just injecting some fun into the election to connect with specific demographics,” after a particularly stressful few weeks for Democrats, said Sherri Williams, an American University journalism professor who studies race, representation and media.
Social media users have also been calling her campaign “Project Coconut” in reference to a speech she made last year reminding people that they are a part of families and communities; the relevant line — “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” — has also been recycled and remixed to various beats.
Not all of the attention is positive. Right-leaning accounts have leaned into Harris’ background to label her a “DEI candidate” and implying she’s not qualified for the top job. In a fight to become the first female president, “the amount of vitriol and misogyny and misogynoir is going to also be historic and unprecedented,” Williams said.
Politicians often take to social media to try and win over younger voters, and with good reason. More than 170 million Americans log onto ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok every month alone, many of them from the ages of 18 to 27. Meta Platforms Inc.’s Instagram and Snap Inc.’s Snapchat are also heavily used by young voters. But it’s no guarantee of offline action, experts say.@kamalahq
“It's important not to forget that young people tend to make memes and older folks on average are the ones who are more likely to vote,” said Zeve Sanderson, executive director of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics. “I think it's really tough to be able to draw a line between online engagement or activism and offline behavior, especially something like voting.”
There are at least some signs that all of Harris’ social media popularity could be benefitting her campaign. The vice president raised a record-breaking $81 million in the first 24 hours after launching her presidential campaign, including $1.5 million raised during a single Zoom call led by 44,000 Black women on the night President Biden dropped out of the 2024 election.
Social media has long been viewed as an effective tool for fundraising and building awareness, but its ability to sway voters is more mixed. Donald Trump, for example, used Facebook extensively during his last two presidential campaigns, amassing more than 34 million followers on his official Facebook page before being banned from the site in 2021. Trump’s account has since been restored. Research later showed that Trump’s Facebook use during the 2020 election may have helped him win some voters, but the effect was marginal, and overall Instagram and Facebook use did little to change people’s political opinions.
Popularity on social media simply isn’t a direct proxy for support offline or at the polls. Katie Porter, a US representative and former candidate for Senate, who is among the most savvy politicians on TikTok, grew her account to more than 500,000 followers and has some videos with more than 3 million views. Still, in March, she lost the primary for US senate in California.
“It's really about people not just being in a moment and sharing funny memes, but actually moving from memes to networking to mobilization to on-the-ground action,” said Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s school of information.
Harris may be winning the moment, but sustaining that momentum throughout a grueling presidential campaign is much harder. Her campaign also faces the risk of running the memes into the ground, according Nikita Walia, brand strategist and BLANK Strategy founder.
“From what we’ve seen with past memes, when brands do something to get involved it makes it really uncool,” Walia said. “I think the campaign should engage with it, like things here and there, but they shouldn’t become Brat central because that distracts from the more serious issues at hand.”
March For Our Lives founder David Hogg thinks Harris can get away with it. On Wednesday the gun control activism group backed the vice president in its first political endorsement, demonstrating Gen-Z support for her campaign.
“We're really starting to understand the power that humor has in politics and realizing that we can't just constantly talk about how there's this great threat to democracy,” Hogg said. “Everybody knows that, right? We need to change. We need to diversify our message to make it also one of authenticity and humor.”
--With assistance from Ella Ceron and Akayla Gardner.
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