If you’re trying to catch up on the vice president Kamala Harris’ rapid emergence as a possible Democratic nominee this fall, you really need to know your memes.
From “brat summer” to “coconut tree,” it’s been a timeline full of Harris-related memes for many people since the president Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race on Sunday and endorsed his second-place finish to lead the party.
Turning to the Internet to pledge their support for her candidacy, Harris supporters are mostly creating new versions of previous online bodies that were once used by Harris’s detractors to throw shade.
There are also celebrities entering the mix, with some association members seen as a wave of attention to Harris’ candidacy that could help reverse American apathy toward what had been a largely binary general election between Biden and the GOP nominee. donald trump.
It could also be a way for Harris’ campaign to resonate with younger voters, a group Democrats need to rally in November.
Here’s a meme primer to follow Harris’ newly launched 2024 campaign:
Coconuts are everywhere in mentions of Harris on Timeline, an Internet organism that began as a critique of Harris and is now being embraced by her supporters.
O @KamalaHQ account the biography text in X simply says “adding context,” a reference to a much-memorized speech in which the vice president emphatically recalled a phrase often used by her mother.
“She would tell us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’” Harris recalled in 2023 at a White House ceremony, dressed in a lavender suit. “You exist in the context of everything you live in and what came before you.”
At the time, the somewhat existential-sounding phrase was shared many times by critics who labeled Harris as “drunk” or “crazy.”
Over the past two days, online users and politicians adhered to the clip, sometimes sincerely and sometimes ironically, creating coconut themed postsin supportof your application.
Even Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii solidified his endorsement of Harris in the posting a photo of yourself climbing a coconut tree. Colorado Governor Jared Polis I just posted emojis by a coconut, a tree and the American flag in the X too.
“Kamala has a lot of word salad quotes that are deliciously absurd,” said Cory Alpert, a staffer for Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign and former Biden White House advance staffer who describes himself as “chronically online.”
“Like you know what she’s trying to say, but it doesn’t really make sense. But it’s the perfect kind of weird authenticity that works online.”
Still don’t know about “brat summer”? Let us help.
Younger celebrities aim to help Harris by linking her to their viral and loyal brands on social media.
Most notably, pop musician Charli XCX posted on X that “kamala IS brat,” a reference to her recently released album “brat” and the angry summer that followed. The post racked up more than 35 million impressions on the app, and Harris’ campaign quickly set her X banner photo to the striking Shrek green color of Charli’s “brat” album cover.
Viral mashups of “brat” and “coconut tree” together — playing Charli’s song in clips of Harris’ joke — also spread widely on Instagram, X and TikTok.
And of course there are also the green “brat” t-shirts already appearing too, as seen in X posts from Fire Island, New York.
It’s okay if you’re not a math scholar – you can still get this one.
“I love Venn diagrams,” Harris said during an event in 2022. “There’s something about these three circles and analyzing where the intersection is, right?”
The Republican National Committee posted a clip of the comment on YouTube as a way of criticizing Harris. But many of those who commented on the account’s posts expressed their own love for the set theory tool, which shows overlapping areas of similarity.
The Harris campaign also seized the moment, with its rapid response operation posting your own Venn diagram in X showing “hold Trump accountable” as the intersection of Biden and Harris operations.
Younger voters were already a little more in tune with Harris than Biden, and Alpert said those people who are already online a lot are used to reposting and sharing content quickly, so perhaps the timing of the Harris meme was aimed at many of them. .
“The cultural gap here is really stark between Gen Z and a lot of other groups,” Alpert said. “These little moments and lines that Gen Z is picking up on and following, other groups – especially Boomers – seem to find irritating or ridiculous, because they want the candidate you can have a beer with.”
Younger adults — those ages 18 to 29 — had a slightly more favorable view of Harris than Biden in a July AP-NORC poll conducted after the debate but before Biden announced he was withdrawing as the Democratic nominee, although a significant portion said they had no opinion.
Only about a quarter of 18- to 29-year-olds had a somewhat or very favorable opinion of Biden in the poll, and about 7 in 10 had an unfavorable opinion of him. In contrast, about 4 in 10 young adults had a favorable opinion of Harris, while about 4 in 10 had an unfavorable opinion and about 2 in 10 didn’t know enough to say.
A similar percentage of 18- to 29-year-olds — about 4 in 10 — had a favorable opinion of Trump in July polls, while about half had an unfavorable opinion and about 1 in 10 didn’t know enough to say it.
Schatz, the Hawaii senator who posted an image of himself climbing a coconut tree, said that while Harris is not part of Gen Z, what Gen Z wants is not necessarily a candidate their own age, but someone who is “in the mainstream of culture.” pop.” .”
“We should be winning decisively among young people, and one of the impediments, frankly, was that they didn’t see anyone talking about Democratic Party values that they found relatable,” he told The Associated Press in an interview Monday. “Politics is definitely about politics, but it’s also about vibes, and vibes, as the kids say, are immaculate.”
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Yee reported from Washington. Meg Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina. Associated Press writers Amelia Thomson Deveaux and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and James Pollard in New York contributed to this report.
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This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
