Kamala HQ’s TikTok page is a perfect example of running a Presidential campaign page in a world driven by the attention economy — quick, snappy posts with bite-sized explanations of some of the Vice President’s policy proposals, edits of Kamala Harris on the campaign trail to trending sounds, and frequent memes deriding former President Trump’s incompetence and emphasizing Harris’ qualifications. The most common meme and edit format has been a combination of clips of Harris speaking over songs from “brat,” the megahit album of the summer by British artist Charli XCX.
As smart as this campaigning method is, Selwa Khan, a Gen-Z voter of Egyptian and Guyanese descent and organizer at the University of Albany, isn’t quite convinced. She cannot ignore the inaction of Harris and the Biden administration amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza. “If she was less of a war criminal, I would give her a round of applause,” Khan said, “because it’s genius.”
Harris remains in staunch support of Israel, marking the one year since Oct. 7 with remarks at the White House grieving the “1,200 innocent souls… who were massacred by Hamas terrorists,” accompanied by a perfunctory mention of the “suffering of innocent Palestinians in Gaza,” but not the 186,000 and more estimated killed by Israel’s strikes as well as disease and famine.
The “brat” memes and quick comebacks from the Kamala HQ accounts have proven to be incredibly popular online, and they’re working. In a national poll of 18-to-29-year-olds by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School, 53% of the participants encountered memes about Harris online in the last month, and 34% of them said that those memes made them more likely to approve of her.
Harris has been a well-memed public figure for a while, but her campaign has only recently taken advantage of that quality. The announcement of her candidacy and her campaign has injected new energy into Gen-Z voters, as several states saw an increase in voter registration after her announcement. These memes are taking advantage of the platforms that reach young voters the most, like Instagram and TikTok, and Harris needs Gen-Z to gain a winning advantage in this upcoming election.
While campaigns have tried to use memes in the past (like Hillary Clinton’s notoriously cringey “Pokémon Go to the polls”), this volume and skill in memeification is novel. Harris’ campaign is banking on her brand of personality as a relatable, youthful candidate, rather than her policies. The appeal of funny memes and fan edits is that they can go organically viral incredibly quickly and come from anywhere or anyone. But what used to be an organic phenomenon of virality is now regularly being capitalized on by a campaign that would rather have you giggle at inside jokes and memes than be appropriately appalled by Harris’ endorsement of an ongoing genocide.
Gen-Z voters also care about issues like climate change, gun control, student debt relief, and the increasingly unaffordable cost of living in the United States, especially as more of Gen-Z is entering the workforce. Like Khan, they may not all be falling for this method of using virality and the rhetoric of fandom and celebrity to garner the youth vote.
This rebranding began with President Biden’s disastrous debate performance in July. After he finally stepped down, the wave of the Kamala Harris memes came out of nowhere. Once Charli XCX herself tweeted “kamala IS brat,” brat was completely co-opted by the Harris campaign. Kamala HQ even changed its header on X to the lime green background and font that became the brand and look for Charli XCX’s album rollout.
This pattern of adjusting messaging based on celebrity endorsements also happened with Taylor Swift. After the presidential debate on Sept. 10, Swift endorsed Harris and Walz on Instagram, spurring a wave of voter registrations online, as well as new edits on Kamala HQ’s TikTok page to Taylor Swift’s music. Notably, the Harris campaign has also used Chappell Roan’s song “Femininomenon” in their edits and meme posting, despite Roan refusing to endorse Harris for the Biden-Harris administration’s support of the genocide in Gaza.
Another famous meme that demonstrates Harris’ campaign’s strategy of faux-relatability is the coconut tree. “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” Harris laughs while quoting a story her mother used to tell her, before suddenly becoming more serious. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” It was the sentence that launched a thousand memes, as users online quickly ran with it. One tweet in particular had this “coconut tree” speech spliced with clips of Harris dancing and laughing. The caption read: “why did I stay up till 3am making a von dutch brat coconut tree edit featuring kamala harris and why can’t I stop watching it on repeat.”
Sofia Diaz, a student at Wellesley College from Texas, noted that while she is aware that Harris proclaims a commitment to abortion rights and combating climate change, she has not been very clear on the action she will take. “I feel like she’s been all talk [but] no show on those issues,” Diaz said.
Still, the memes reign supreme on our timelines, almost as a distraction from this inaction. As much as mobilizing young voters is important, we should not just fall for the brand of relatability and shared culture that Kamala HQ seeks to manufacture. Instead, we must focus on using every means possible to hold Harris and the Democrats accountable, especially to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
While memes have been present on the Internet for its entire existence, the meme formats and fan edits that the Harris campaign is using today are much closer to the memes that are shared within fandoms. The campaign benefits tremendously from the slideshow-style and CapCut-edited formats on TikTok, in particular. CapCut is an editing software that is integrated with TikTok, which is why many fan edits (short videos of celebrities and/or characters to music) can be easily found and made on TikTok specifically.
The Harris campaign is using a tried and tested format that fandoms use online all the time. This melding of the practices of fandom and political campaigning is perhaps most concerning, where politicians like Kamala Harris that are meant to serve us are instead being worshiped by voters with labels like “girlboss” and “diva.”
Many of my interviewees deemed this meme usage to be cringe for various reasons, but acknowledged that it was effective to some extent. “The fact that she is so memeable makes her more relatable,” stated Diaz, who noted the abundance of content makes her seem “silly and likable.” “It’s smart and I admire it because there’s no way Biden’s team could have done that.” Yet Diaz is acutely aware of the danger of glossing over her dangerous track record, not just on Palestine, but also immigration, as Harris, in line with the Biden administration, has leaned towards more and more restrictive policies and being “tough” on the border.
“I’m not saying don’t vote for her,” Diaz added, “because I seriously don’t want Donald Trump in office—he would be incredibly more dangerous for our country—but I do think our generation should look past all of the memes and be critical of every politician. There are a lot of things that Kamala stands for that I support, and I will vote for her, but just because she’s ‘brat’ doesn’t mean I’m with her 100%.” For Diaz, this calculation becomes that much more difficult, as Gen-Z voters dissatisfied with Harris who are living in historically Republican states feel more of an obligation to “vote blue no matter who.”
Likewise, Khan is also concerned about how this particular meme usage reflects fandom practices specifically. “I would accept you spending till three in the morning making an edit of maybe Timothée Chalamet,” she said. “But somebody running for president is not a celebrity. That is a person you need to make an informed decision about, and I feel like nobody’s making an informed decision.”
Even Kimi*, a 2024 NYU graduate, felt similarly uncomfortable about the idolization of Kamala Harris. “What’s really frustrating, to me, is the swing from ‘Settle for Biden’ four years ago, to ‘Kamala is Brat’ now,” she said. “I thought that our main takeaway from ‘Settle for Biden’ was that we shouldn’t idolize politicians, not just ‘vote blue no matter who’ or ‘anyone but Trump.’ It’s not hard to be better than Trump, and definitely not worthy of idolization.”
Both Kimi and Khan attest that the memes are working. Kimi sees the TikToks on her For You page very often, so much so that she has become familiar with Harris, even now knowing her favorite curse word (mother****er, if you were wondering), her personality, and the discourse around her, but not necessarily her policies.
“When the memes came out, I was like, ‘Okay, this is somebody who’s tapped into what young people want.’ That was very cool,” said Khan, who is a political science student and is working on an honors thesis about immigration law. “Then when it actually comes to policy, she’s no longer really tapped into what people want.”
Khan is very vocal about her politics on Instagram and TikTok, and posted a TikTok discussing how Harris’ immigration policy is not nearly as progressive as it should be. Khan was met with intense vitriol and condescension from her own colleagues. A fellow College Democrat member commented several times on her TikTok, calling her a fearmonger for daring to critique Harris. “You should try actually governing,” read one of the comments. “It’s hard. Enjoy your la la fantasy land of virtue signaling and preaching to people 24/7 who slightly disagree with you.”
“I have been Muslim my whole life,” Khan said, “and I have not had to deal with Islamophobia like I have from centrist Democrats [this year], specifically Democrats who are not for ceasefire and Democrats who are overwhelmingly for Kamala.”
Harris’ campaign has honed in on its messaging of bipartisan unity and hope, including endorsements from Republicans like former Vice President and war criminal Dick Cheney. Harris’ actions (or lack thereof) have resulted in the alienation of many younger and progressive voters, and yet the Harris administration continues to proudly declare how many Republicans—whose policies Harris would never have agreed to prior to running for the office of the President—support her.
There is a notable gap between the general “good vibes” that Harris’ campaign wants to focus on and her actual policies. This was the first time that Democrats have dropped the abolition of the death penalty from their platform since 2004. On Sept. 24, Imam Khalifeh Williams, a Black man on death row, was executed despite millions of Americans petitioning, calling, and emailing the Governor of Missouri’s office. There was not a peep from establishment and centrist Democrats, much less Kamala Harris herself, who has campaigned against the death penalty for several years.
This discrepancy is also particularly apparent in Harris’ rhetoric around gun control. While her campaign pages have highlighted some of her statements regarding gun control, Harris has made some notable blunders. In an appearance on “Oprah,” the Vice President declared that she was a proud gun owner: “If somebody breaks into my house,” she said, “they’re getting shot.”
Harris has stated several times that she wants an assault weapons ban, background checks, and red flag laws, but this statement came off as wildly insensitive. For Gen-Z, gun control is one of the most important issues, considering that they have grown up in a United States where school shootings and gun violence is a horribly regular occurrence. In 2024 alone, there have been 30 school shootings, along with 385 total mass shootings. But Harris just laughed it off. “I probably should not have said that,” she quipped.
Of course, Harris is not the only Presidential candidate using memes and internet lingo to her benefit, especially considering how much of the discourse around President Trump’s ridiculous comments got us here. The memes from Trump even take advantage of harmful stereotypes; for example, his racist and xenophobic comments about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets quickly became a running joke online, with people even making songs from the remixed comments.
There is a certain callousness to the real-life struggles of marginalized communities present in these memes, as Palestinian-American TikToker Leen pointed out. “People are so quick to jump on the latest funny trend without stopping to consider its implications, its broader context. This might be funny if what we were referencing was fiction. It’s not fiction,” she said. “It’s the man running for the most powerful elected position in the world spewing racist vitriol that will almost certainly negatively impact immigrant communities.”
Harris’ proponents suggest that at least with her as President, we can move her more to the left and to take stronger action against Israel. This was the same assurance used with Biden, but Harris has already proven that she has no interest in listening to progressive Americans. During a speech at a rally in Detroit, Michigan, the state with one of the largest populations of Arab and Muslim voters, she spoke condescendingly to protesters for Palestine.
“If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that,” she said. “Otherwise, I’m speaking.” Predictably, this moment (reminiscent of her “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking” directed towards former VP Mike Pence on the debate stage) became a meme that elicited praise for Harris’ calm and quippy handling of the interruption.
“I really hated seeing the videos of Harris’s so-called clap back at pro-Palestinian protestors at her rally,” Kimi said. “As if pro-Palestinian protestors could be equated to Mike Pence. […] As if she was such a girlboss for silencing and disrespecting people with genuine concern for human rights and American international relations, and who otherwise might be turned to vote for her.”
Khan believes that in a time where young people have turned out for Palestine like never before, they have a responsibility to hold Harris accountable. “I think that it’s very embarrassing, lowkey, that people are squandering that responsibility because Kamala posted a brat meme,” Khan said.
In a message to Gen-Z voters posted on the Kamala HQ TikTok account, Kamala Harris said, “Your generation is killing it. I mean honestly, you are one of the reasons that I am so optimistic and excited about the future of our country. Your generation, I mean you guys, you’re brilliant, you care. You are impatient in every incredible good way, you’re not waiting for someone else to step up and lead. You are saying you’re gonna step up and get it done. And I mean isn’t that the spirit of our country that makes us strong? I thank you all.”
Harris is primarily virtue signaling, and doing it well, but these are just empty platitudes, devoid of much real engagement with social and political issues Gen-Z cares about. Until she understands that the impatience she claims to admire is because of inaction from the Biden administration—regarding the ongoing genocide, climate crisis, housing crisis, COVID-19, and regressive policies on abortion and immigration—she will not be the leader Gen-Z wants or needs.
When President Biden was campaigning for the presidency in 2020, many Gen-Z voters settled for him, hoping that he’d live up to his promises and that we could move him further left. But that has not been the case. Now, our responsibility is to organize for Palestine and all the issues we actually care about. We cannot fawn over a campaign that gives us empty promises and co-opts our ways of speaking and engaging with each other—but does not really represent us.