Democrats have been struggling for years to replicate the meme magic that was Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. The hope-filled Obama years still resonate with a generation of Democratic communicators who yearn for the days when Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster ignited a cultural moment and positioned the young and cool Obama as a breath of fresh air against Republicans’ aging Sen. John McCain.
After years of tryhard flops including Hillary Clinton’s cringeworthy “Pokemon GO to the polls” and President Joe Biden’s overexposed “Dark Brandon” moment, Kamala Harris is emerging as a force no Washington consultant could ever hope to cook up: an honest-to-goodness meme candidate. Whether she’s holding vinyl records, falling out of a coconut tree, or harnessing the cultural cachet of pop star Charli XCX’s brat summer, Harris’ viral candidacy is packing arenas and raising hundreds of millions of dollars.
It may also be the one force powerful enough to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.
Plenty of pundits and influencers have commented on how Harris’ optimistic, meme-rich campaign feels a lot like Obama’s 2008 effort. Star Wars icon Mark Hamill commented on X that he hadn’t seen “this kind of enthusiasm since Obama’s first run in ‘08.” Vanity Fair mused that memes—and the millions of young voters they engage on TikTok, Instagram, and other social platforms—could be Harris’ “great strategic advantage” in a campaign that will hinge on bringing infrequent voters out to the polls.
As Harris has surged on social media, she’s also built up a polling advantage that has Republicans struggling to adapt. That’s because, ABC News found, each new Harris meme led to a huge bump in her online visibility relative to Trump.
In the week before Biden endorsed her candidacy, Harris averaged just 74,000 daily mentions on X. One round of coconut tree memes later, Harris was generating 1.7 million daily views—more than both Biden and Trump.
Harris’ team understands better than any campaign since Obama’s that modern politics is an attention-driven industry. Trump figured that out in 2016 and buried Clinton’s dry, policy-driven campaign in an avalanche of memes so infectious even some Democrats couldn’t resist sharing them.
Back in 2016, an army of very-online right-wing extremists on 4chan vaulted Trump past his primary campaign rivals in part by turning him into a viral sensation. Memes about riding the “Trump Train” and praising an armor-clad “God Emperor Trump” became so omnipresent that Trump himself embraced them as a core element of his campaign messaging.
The MAGA movement became so adept at using viral moments to attack rivals and control the media cycle that Politico later dubbed the 2016 campaign “World War Meme.” Now Harris is building her own, more positive version of that machine. It appears to be working.
It matters that the Harris team is built, in large part, of younger Democrats who are fluent in how to make content go viral. While it might be funny to see the Harris team sending out texts from “Kamala HA-rris”—a jab at how Trump has awkwardly tried to turn her laugh into a sexist attack line—those relatable meme communications also give disaffected and first-time voters an easy on-ramp into supporting the campaign.
Two thirds of Harris’ record $310 million July haul came from voters who had never contributed a dime to the Democratic Party before. Many of them first heard about Harris not through traditional fundraising channels, but through the Harris campaign’s targeted memes strategy.
But worry not, because Republicans haven’t completely fallen out of the meme game. Vice presidential nominee JD Vance is a meme machine of his own—but not in the way Republicans were hoping for.
Since his bust of a debut at the Republican National Convention last month, Vance has become defined by a series of embarrassing memes that raise some important questions about the Ohio senator’s personal life: Does Vance wear eyeliner? Did he spend part of the workday looking up dolphin porn on X? Most importantly, did he engage in … let’s call it intimate relations with a couch?
Unlike Trump, who seemed to deflect any attempt to parody his ridiculous nature, the memes stick to Vance like glue. Coverage of Vance has focused so heavily on Democrat-amplified memes that it has actually prompted Vance to declare that Democrats are engaging in “name calling and schoolyard bullying.” That might be a more effective complaint if it wasn’t coming from the running mate of notorious bully Trump, who once mocked a reporter with a disability and is famous for conjuring up offensive nicknames for nearly every person he meets.
Republicans have spent more time over the last month defending themselves from effective, media-grabbing memes than at any other point in the campaign. It couldn’t come at a worse time, because the sprint to November marks the time when most Americans finally start paying attention to the race. In one corner they see Harris, whose good-vibes campaign mimics the strategy that made Obama a political superstar. In the other they see an exhausted Trump and a vice presidential pick who keeps saying he doesn’t have sex with furniture.
Memes are, by their nature, fleeting wonders. But Harris’ ability to generate punchy new content on a near-daily basis stands in stark contrast to the lumbering machine the MAGA movement has become.
Team Harris shows no signs of slowing down as they continue to define the media conversation through effective, feel-good messaging designed for a generation hooked on sharing content across platforms. Democrats are finally learning how to meme again—and it might just be the key to making political history in November.