Can Harris ride memes all the way to the White House?
Don't worry, we will not be subjecting you to another punny Kamala Harris lede.
If you've spent even a few moments on social media since President Joe Biden announced he would drop out of the presidential race, odds are you've already seen a post or seven about the vice president. From gleefully zany chartreuse-green memes, to two- or three-year-old viral clips and fresh soundbites from her first few rallies, Harris has earned a flood of mentions on social media in the past week and a half.
The Harris campaign has embraced the enthusiasm, winking at the memes and getting playful with its own social media presence. But do memes and mentions translate to what matters most in an election — dollars and votes? In many ways, the wave of online engagement is indicative of a key strategy for the Harris campaign: positioning her as the young, fun candidate in this race and attracting the support of younger voters. While it may all seem silly and trivial, these memes signal genuine support from some key demographics, and by many metrics, they seem to be contributing positively to the Harris campaign's launch.
"It's a little more than just being like a fun meme," said Shayla Cava, a 28-year-old Etsy shop owner who started selling Harris "brat" T-shirts — tying her to the hit album from singer Charli xcx — after the vice president announced her run. "Even the album artwork itself is kind of this counterculture statement on the music industry feeling entitled to women's bodies. So I think it actually does lend itself really well to Kamala's campaign. Because of that, it's not just a coincidence, you know; I think it actually aligns with a lot of her ideas."
So just how much attention has the vice president been getting online? It's tough to say, exactly, but at least on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the number of posts mentioning Harris has surged. After Biden stepped aside, not only did mentions of Harris overtake the number of posts mentioning former President Donald Trump, but they also exceeded the number of posts mentioning Biden when he was an active candidate, according to data collected by Itai Himelboim, who directs the University of Georgia's Social Media Engagement and Evaluation Suite.
From June 1 through July 20, Harris averaged fewer than 74,000 mentions on X each day. But as soon as Biden stepped aside, the number of posts mentioning her on X exploded to an average of more than 1.7 million per day between July 21 and 31. For comparison, that's even more than the 1.2 million mentions per day that Biden averaged between the debate and his withdrawal (inclusive) as he faced intense scrutiny over his mental fitness for office.
What's more, Harris was mentioned on X even more than Trump every day for about a week after Biden dropped out of the race — an impressive feat given that the former president is one of X's hottest topics. Before the debate kicked the news cycle into high gear, Trump was averaging around 200,000 more mentions per day than Biden.
Individual posts, particularly ones that included Harris memes, also sometimes had a significant reach, with some viral posts being viewed millions of times. Even some posts from Republicans attempting to poke fun at the vice president inadvertently became embraced as part of the deluge of memes celebrating her.
Given the diversity of the memes, it's hard to design a search that can capture their volume. But a look at the number of posts mentioning the word "coconut" in conjunction with the candidates' names offers a sense of how the number of Harris jokes has surged. (The coconut posts reference a viral video in which the vice president reminisces about her mother asking her, "You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?")
The coconut joke index spikes at the start of July, when buzz first built around a Harris presidential candidacy in the wake of Biden's terrible performance in the debate, and again in the second week of July. Still, X users made only about 700 coconut jokes per day before Biden's withdrawal, after which they exploded to a high of more than 10,000 in a single day. Though the tropical memes have fallen off since, they remain significantly more common than before Biden withdrew.
Harris's rapid response campaign account (which was previously the Biden campaign's account) has also seen a huge increase in followers since Biden's withdrawal, according to social media analytics company Social Blade. Its following has tripled from roughly 400,000 the week before Biden dropped out to more than 1.2 million as of Aug. 7.
Harris's newfound social media strength represents perhaps the first real challenge to Trump's longstanding talent for getting "earned media" — media coverage gained by virtue of your actions and statements rather than paid-for advertising. An entertainer before he was a politician, Trump has made a career out of taking up all the oxygen in the room, emerging from a crowded Republican primary in 2016 by dominating his opponents in earned media.
"Social media craves authenticity," said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, an information studies professor at Syracuse University who researches social media. "That's why Trump has done so well with Twitter and growing that visibility during his first campaign in '16, because he understood how to really effectively talk to people in his own voice, with his own authentic self."
Stromer-Galley said the memes of Harris have a similar flavor, embracing the vice president's laugh, dance moves and offhand quotes that demonstrate a kind of authenticity. If Harris can match Trump, or beat him at his own game, it could have significant implications for a race that has tightened since Biden dropped out.
And while we can't attribute the following solely to coconut tree memes, the digital conversation around Harris has undoubtedly contributed to a surge in her poll numbers and fundraising. In the first week of her presidential campaign, Harris brought in more than $200 million in donations, and a significant portion of those donations have come through digital organizing. A Zoom call organizing Black women voters raised $1.5 million in three hours. A fundraiser dubbed "White Dudes for Harris" on X raised more than $4 million before being temporarily suspended by X owner Elon Musk.
And though the effect is small, research has shown that a strong social media presence can translate into greater campaign donations. "I've been watching all kinds of groups cropping up on Instagram, on Messenger, on X, and they're self-organized," Stromer-Galley said. "I haven't seen that, really, since [former President Barack] Obama."
Polling, meanwhile, shows Harris doing better than Biden against Trump, and she's also gotten significantly less unpopular since her entrée into the presidential race. On July 20, Harris's average net favorability rating (her average favorable rating minus her average unfavorable rating) was -16.0 percentage points, but as of 11 a.m. Eastern on Aug. 7, it's just -5.8 points.
And she's doing even better with younger voters. In polls from May 5 through July 16 that provided breakdowns by age, Harris's average net favorability rating among 18- to 29-year-olds was -12.0 points. In polls since July 22 (the day after Biden dropped out), her average net favorability among this cohort is +2.7 points. Compare this to Biden, whose average net favorability rating was -24.2 points among 18- to 29-year-olds before he dropped out.
Again, we can't attribute this movement solely to a deluge of catchy TikToks, but it would be foolish to assume social media isn't playing a role. About half of American adults say they regularly consume news on social media, including a third of adults under 30 who say they regularly get news from TikTok, according to polling from Pew Research Center last year.
"The demographics of the people who tend to vote for the Democratic Party tend to skew younger, so they need to attract, in particular, the younger audiences, which are much harder to reach through traditional media," said Pinar Yildirim, a marketing and economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
All of this suggests the internet's embrace of Harris as a memeable figure are helping build excitement among the Democratic base and some key demographics, like young voters. But it will take a lot more than a cryptic endorsement from a pop star to win this election, and you can expect to see Harris and her campaign take a much more traditional approach to messaging when it comes to TV ads and stump speeches. At the end of the day, the 2024 election won't be won online, but at the ballot box.
Mary Radcliffe and Cooper Burton contributed research.
