Will the #KHive pave the road to the White House for Kamala Harris? Or will the coconut tree come tumbling down?
Immediately after U.S. President Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid and endorsed his vice-president to replace him as the Democratic nominee, social media users — particularly young people and people of colour — sprang into action.
From “Kamala IS brat” to coconut emojis, memes and everything in between, the past week has shown the power of organic social media movements in politics.
The Harris campaign has leaned right into it. By allowing the internet to inform its tone, Team Kamala is both echoing and updating the strategies employed by “the first social media president,” Barack Obama, who revolutionized modern campaigning nearly 20 years ago, experts say.
“It just shows how excited young people are,” said April Cisneros, communications director for the Center for Scholars and Storytellers, a youth-oriented social media research organization at the University of California, Los Angeles.
She and other researchers and academics say they’ve noticed a shift in how students and creators they interact with are viewing the election. Up to a month ago, many of them were considering not voting at all. Now, she says that’s changed.
“I think people are feeling a lot more hopeful with Kamala, and I think it shows with all of the excitement online.”
Moving quickly
Leaning into “brat” and other meme culture was partially out of necessity, given the suddenness of Biden’s announcement on Sunday afternoon.
Less than an hour after Biden’s decision was released, the campaign’s creative director Kate Conway posted a message on her team’s Slack channel.
“Please give a wave to this message if you’re online and available to do some design work now,” she wrote, according to a screenshot shared by the campaign with Global News. “We’re gearing up towards some quick pivots.”
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By the next day, the campaign had a new logo. The final design, reflecting the original Biden campaign theme while adding its own spin, came out of multiple submissions from the team that were quickly whittled down through the evening.
A Harris campaign official told Global News on background that the placards showcasing the new design were still wet when they were rushed from the printers — where staff waited overnight — to campaign headquarters on Monday in time for Harris’s first visit.
“The Harris for President creative and web teams sprang into action, rebranded the entire campaign overnight, and launched a new website in just 26 hours,” Conway said in a statement. “There’s really no overselling how difficult a task that is…. It was a massive effort.”
That work also included rebranding the campaign’s rapid response social media page. Dubbed KamalaHQ, the banner image adopted the chartreuse background and typeface of CharliXCX’s new album brat, which has been embraced online — particularly after Charli herself appeared to endorse Harris as “brat.”
The word and album refers to the wild-partying, carefree feeling of 2000s pop music that’s being brought back to the limelight, and which embodies an oft-ironic digital aesthetic and “messy” party girl ethos.
“It was shocking how fast the turnaround (of the campaign) was, but also how much the tone and flavour of posts and things changed,” said Maggie Macdonald, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky who studies social media in politics.
A spokesperson for the Harris campaign noted to Global News that the entire design leadership team is made up of women, as is the social media director for the Democratic Party, which has thrown its support behind Harris.
Analysts say Harris has captured the imagination of social media users and content creators in a way Biden — despite his team’s attempts to harness other memes and venture into TikTok — never could.
That has also included using what Macdonald calls “snarkier” language than the Biden campaign employed. In an attack on Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s views on abortion Friday, the KamalaHQ team didn’t just condemn Vance — it called him “weird and creepy.”
Hope vs. fear?
That tone of the campaign’s social media presence also reflects how young people want to treat the election with more positivity and fun, Cisneros said, rather than despairing at the state of the world or the policies being promoted by political opponents.
“Hope is a much more powerful motivator than fear,” she said. “It flips the narrative on its head.”
That will be a key challenge to maintain as Republicans escalate their attacks on Harris, with some targeting her race and gender.
Aimee Allison, who founded the organization She The People to advocate for women of colour in politics, told Global News the attacks were not surprising to see, but were also galvanizing Black women into action in a new way.
A recent Zoom meeting she held to build support for Harris’s campaign saw participation max out at 44,000 Black women logging on at once.
“This kind of energy is kind of like what I saw for Obama, plus what I saw for Hillary Clinton, plus something new,” she said.
Obama, of course, defined what it means to run a social media-oriented campaign in 2008 — both by being at the right place at the right time and by being effective at using then-new platforms like Facebook and Twitter to reach voters.
Researchers have credited smart hires, translating policy ideas into language tailored to various online communities and relentless outreach for the Obama campaign’s success.
Obama has since been criticized for ignoring some of the dangers and pitfalls of social media, including its addictiveness and prioritizing style and soundbites over substance.
In the ensuing years, other U.S. politicians have used social media to boost their campaigns and adapted the Obama playbook: Donald Trump used Twitter, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez utilized Instagram and Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman was effective on TikTok and other platforms in the U.S. In recent years, Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh and Pierre Poilievre in Canada, along with political leaders of all stripes in the European Union, have also had notable online presences.
In each of those cases, the impacts have varied along with the messages. Many — particularly Trump — have also used social media to levy personal attacks on opponents.
For the Harris campaign, so far the social media energy and tone are translating into record levels of donations.
The campaign said Sunday it raised over US$200 million in the first seven days after Biden’s exit, with two-thirds of contributions coming from first-time donors.
Whether that energy continues through November’s election remains to be seen.
“(Harris) needs more than vibes, she needs votes,” Cisneros said. “So, how can we make voting go viral?”
— with files from Global’s Jackson Proskow