There’s a lot more to the Kamala Harris memes than you think

“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” says Vice President Kamala Harris in a now infamous clip. An overlay of the lime green album art for Charli XCX’s “Brat” flashes on the screen, while a remix of “Von Dutch” scores increasingly frenetic clips of Harris hysterically laughing and confessing her love of Venn diagrams. (As Harris has said on numerous occasions, “it’s just something about those three circles.”)

This particular Harris “fan cam”-style edit, which now has over 3.7 million impressions on X, was the brainchild of Ryan Long, a 22-year-old college student. Riffing on the video style popular among K-Pop stans, Long got bored and stayed up until 3 a.m. one night, building on a niche, irony-pilled meme that would soon breach containment.

This was a different world -- one where President Joe Biden would soon declare that only “the Lord Almighty” could make him step down. Less than three weeks later, Biden has said he won’t seek re-election and has endorsed Harris for president. Her campaign has raised a record-breaking $81 million in its first 24 hours, with 880,000 donors (60%) making their first contributions in the 2024 cycle. Now, this is a world where professors tell Long they plan to teach his video in their composition classes, and Jake Tapper declares live on CNN, “I will aspire to be brat.”

“There was something just so appealing when I was making the edit about the idea of a potential Harris presidency, like getting someone who isn’t a million years old in office,” Long told TechCrunch. “Because of her Venn diagrams quote, Kamala goes viral on gay Twitter every couple of months. She has turned into this like, pseudo-gay icon.”

Long was early to these memes, posting his contribution on July 3. Now, these unsettling Kamala-isms have become their own shorthand to express support for Harris’ candidacy -- people have started putting the emojis of a coconut and a palm tree on their social media profiles, referencing a strange anecdote Harris tells about her mother.

“Everything is in context,” Harris said in a speech more than a year ago. “My mother [...] would give us a hard time sometimes, and 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?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and all that came before you.”

Harris is right -- we do exist in the context of what came before us. And what came before her campaign launch were weeks of memes inviting people to ironically stan the vice president, pushing aside any hang-ups about her political history to revel in the hope that we might be able to vote for someone who won’t mistakenly introduce Zelenskyy as Putin.

“Previously the views I saw about Harris were making fun of her being a cop, like her history as attorney general in California with truancy laws,” Jess Rauchberg, a communications professor at Seton Hall University, told TechCrunch. “Now we see that same style of memeification, but it’s an endorsement.”

A PhD candidate in political science at UC Davis and prolific internet jokester, Alex Cohen has enjoyed posting Kamala memes this week, even though he says he still has major policy disagreements with the vice president.

“I think a lot of this is ironic,” Cohen told TechCrunch. “I’ve posted a ton of Kamala memes over the last few weeks, and it’s not like I’m sincerely like, ‘Oh she’s the greatest candidate, I’m so excited to have her as president.’ I do think she could maybe win the election, and that’s really, at this point, what it’s about.”

Though her record as a prosecutor has made her unpopular on the left, Harris’ potential candidacy is perhaps the first time that Democrats have felt hopeful in a campaign cycle defined by Biden’s catastrophic gaffes and former president Donald Trump’s momentum.

“This stuff is funny because we’re seeing it as a change,” Cohen said. “We’re seeing her as a younger candidate bringing some new energy and ideas to the ticket in a way that people haven’t had in a while, because we’ve had such old political leaders. But if it turns out that she’s not willing to break with some of the really unpopular policies that the Biden administration is pursuing, then the memes suddenly are not very funny.”

https://twitter.com/ryanlong03/status/1808510079382982870

Brat summer

Kamala Harris has found an unlikely ally in Charli XCX, a British experimental pop artist.

“kamala IS brat,” Charli XCX posted on X, racking up almost 300,000 likes.

That might sound like a jab, but it’s probably the single most impactful thing that anyone could have posted about Harris as she announced her candidacy for president. Former president Barack Obama hasn’t endorsed Harris yet, but if he did, it wouldn’t matter as much as this three-word statement from a British party girl.

Charli XCX's sixth album “Brat,” which dropped in June, has become a pop culture phenomenon. Everything is “Brat.” If last summer’s color was Barbie pink, this summer’s hue is the lime green of the minimalist “Brat” album cover. So when Biden HQ transferred its campaign accounts over to Kamala HQ, the X and Instagram accounts immediately incorporated “Brat” into their branding. And somehow, a group of gay men on Fire Island had already made cropped Kamala “Brat” t-shirts within hours of Biden’s announcement.

“Brat” is club music, but it’s not vapid. There are tracks about dancing all night at a rave (“Club classics”) that mesh seamlessly with ballads about how dancing all night actually doesn’t mean you can escape your demons (“I might say something stupid”). There are ego-inflating diss tracks (“Von Dutch”) alongside songs about grief and regret (“So I”). The whole album reflects the experience of going to a fun party, only for your anxious, intrusive thoughts to pull you out of the moment. But Charli does this on purpose. It’s like trying to enjoy your summer -- your “Brat” summer -- only to witness a series of unprecedented political crises.

“I think people are excited about Charli XCX and excited about ‘Brat’ summer because it offers different ways to explore their identity and explore what it means to exist in the world and the uncertainty that the 2024 election really brings,” Rauchberg said.

Rauchberg added that racial diversity is still lacking in both pop music and politics -- another similarity between Charli and Harris is that they are both mixed race with an Indian parent.

“I predict Harris is going to leverage that racial connection to bring appeal to young voters, an increasingly diverse, young, Gen Z voting pool where people are coming from mixed ethnicities and racial backgrounds,” she said. Like their political representation, young people have an appetite for entertainment that subverts the status quo. “Thinking about other pop stars who are coming up and having their moments -- Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter -- yes, they’re part of this larger entertainment industry, but there’s something different from, let’s say, Taylor Swift.”

Alongside Charli XCX, Kamala HQ has embraced the cultural dominance of the emerging queer pop star Chappell Roan. At least 10 days before Biden dropped out of the race, people had already been playing off of Roan’s song “Femininomenon,” spinning the title into “Kamalanomenon.” It’s not a coincidence that the official campaign account is now making the same jokes on TikTok.

In the short term, these memes are performing well -- the “Kamalanomenon” TikTok already has 1.8 million likes. But some political meme experts worry that if the campaign leans in too hard, the memes won’t be funny anymore.

“They’re actually very fortunate as a campaign that this grassroots silliness has emerged instead of actually thinking about, not just policy, but how poorly she performed as a candidate [in 2020],” Alex Turvy, a sociology PhD candidate and social media researcher at Tulane University, told TechCrunch. “It does feel like they’re playing a dangerous game with even touching those memes … You can’t breathe on this stuff or really easily it falls apart.”

https://www.tiktok.com/@itsmeemmad/video/7394639939855551786?q=project%20coconut&t=1721756457924

A precedent for political memes

With each passing election cycle, people spend more time online, which means that political memes become more relevant. But according to Turvy, this cultural instinct to turn political moments into jokes is nothing new.

“There is a huge history on both sides of the political equation,” he said. “Even before the social internet, you had stuff like the lockbox, Al Gore’s saying, or like George W. Bush’s verbal gaffes over the years.”

Cohen remembers another moment in the 2004 primary, when Howard Dean was endlessly mocked for letting out a maniacal laugh in a speech after the Iowa caucus.

“A meme totally tanked his campaign, and I think that was one of the first big political memes,” Cohen said. “He let out this big scream of enthusiasm, and that got remixed and turned into a ton of memes in the early internet.”

Cohen himself played a role in the internet’s mocking of Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign. As an undergraduate, Cohen and a large group of students in an absurdist Facebook meme group wrote the viral “Jeb! the Musical,” a parody of “Hamilton.”

“Obviously, Jeb, ‘please clap,’” Cohen said. “His entire candidacy became a meme.”

Even Biden’s campaign relied heavily on the Dark Brandon meme, which was reappropriated from the far right. The meme depicts Biden with glowing red eyes, ruthlessly fighting his enemies for the good of the American people.

“That just came off as really cringey. It didn’t really work,” Cohen said. “I think part of it is because that was an attack line, and then they tried to lean into it, but when your candidate is an 81-year-old man who doesn’t exude that energy in real life, it doesn’t really work.”

On the other hand, Harris does embody the chaotic energy that we see in the fan-cam edits where she dances at pride parades to the beat of a Charli XCX kind of song.

“Kamala has said a lot of very weird things and used a lot of strange expressions in ways that people find amusing,” said Cohen. “The coconut tree thing is a perfect example of that. I think that's why they capitalize on it now.”

According to Turvy, it’s gauche on the left to “act like your MSNBC parents and be so stressed about the fascist orange man.” But by Kamalaposting, they can lean into an almost cathartic ambiguity.

“It’s ambiguity as a political expression,” he said. “It’s impossible to discern genuine versus ironic support, and so the ambiguity itself becomes this form of expression, and in this case, I think it’s dealing with some of that pent up frustration and doomed feelings around Biden… The line between sincerity and trolling, critique and complicity and all that stuff is, on purpose, blurred.”

These contradictions represent the political moment. Charli XCX uses upbeat, danceable club music to explore her discontent and insecurity. Kamalaposting gives young liberals a way to exorcise their political fears by making incomprehensibly esoteric memes and ironically stanning a lesser evil.

“Maybe it’s a symptom of this deeper malaise, like a feeling of helplessness, or irony poisoning… a desire for a way out,” said Turvy. “Play is a way out.”

https://youtu.be/7qavWD4TL5k