Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has embraced social media trends and viral memes to engage with young voters—a strategy that has propelled her campaign online and set an implicit contrast with the octogenarian she replaced on the ticket and her 78-year-old opponent.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]After Charli XCX posted on X “kamala IS brat”—a reference to the singer’s latest album, Brat—the night President Joe Biden announced he was ending his campaign and endorsed Harris for the Democratic nomination, the official Harris campaign account changed its header to match the color and font of the album cover. The bio for the Harris campaign’s main account—”Providing context”—is a reference to another meme stemming from a 2023 speech in which Harris quoted her mother as saying, “‘You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” before adding, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” The moment went viral and Harris supporters have claimed the coconut and tree emojis. The campaign’s TikTok account has also often used trending audio to promote Harris or take jabs at former President Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance.
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The Harris campaign is trying to meet young voters where they are. Nearly half of TikTok users in the U.S. between the ages of 18-29 say they use the social media platform to keep up with politics, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center. “Voters are quite literally everywhere,” says Seth Schuster, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign. “So it’s important that we are everywhere people are consuming their news.” He adds that in a “fragmented” and “polarized” landscape, the Harris campaign wants to be on a number of different platforms. “That is the North Star of the campaign. We have to break through this media environment” to connect with voters, Schuster says.
Kamala HQ, the campaign’s main social media account, has 1.3 million followers on X and 4 million on TikTok. According to the campaign, the account’s following on TikTok doubled overnight on July 21, when the page transformed from Biden HQ to Kamala HQ after Biden ended his re-election campaign and endorsed Harris.
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The campaign’s efforts to reach young people online extend beyond memes. In August, more than 200 content creators were given credentials for the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago. At least one content creator spoke each night of the convention. Convention spokesperson Emily Soong said in a statement that content creators would “play a critical role in making sure more Americans than ever before can engage with our convention and hear the story of the Harris-Walz ticket.” According to a DNC official, this year’s DNC hosted the most content creators ever credentialed for a convention for either major political party.
Elizabeth Booker Houston—a 34-year-old lawyer, comedian, and content creator who has more than 287,000 followers on TikTok—was one of the creators who attended the convention. Houston, who lives in the Washington, D.C. area and often posts about law and politics on her social media platforms, says she wanted to get “behind the scenes” content and encourage her followers to vote in the 2024 election. While at the DNC, she spoke with politicians, delegates, and other convention attendees, posting some of the conversations on her accounts.
Not all the creators who attended the convention typically post political content on their social media platforms. Merrick Hanna, a 19-year-old content creator based in Los Angeles who has more than 32 million followers on TikTok, usually posts dancing and visual effects videos. He was surprised when he was invited to the convention by an influencer marketing agency affiliated with the Harris campaign, but decided to take the opportunity. “I went in with the mindset that I really didn’t want to share any of my political beliefs because I don’t think that people… should be forming political opinions based on a TikTok dancer’s opinions, but I did think it was important to engage my audience even the littlest bit with politics and encourage them to vote,” he says.
According to the Harris campaign, the team is trying to reach young voters in three main ways: organizing on college campuses, meeting young people who aren’t affiliated with college campuses in spaces they tend to congregate in like concerts and bars, and using online platforms. The campaign’s goal is to connect with voters who may be hard to reach—and part of how they’re doing that is by jumping on and using viral trends to promote Harris’ platform. “The thing that we wanted to show was there are going to be some stylistic differences between the campaign before and the campaign now,” Rob Flaherty, Harris’ deputy campaign manager and Biden’s former digital director, said during an interview at the CNN-POLITICO Grill during the DNC. He said the campaign wanted to “wink and nod at what’s happening on the internet” in its social media content.
Marc Farinella, a senior advisor to the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy (no relation to Kamala Harris or her campaign), says while previous presidential campaigns have used social media, this is the first time he’s seen one lean so heavily into memes. “It’s fun, playful, joyful, optimistic,” Farinella, a former Democratic political consultant, says. “I think voters are very receptive to a campaign with that kind of personality. It connects her to pop culture, it gets the attention of predominantly young voters.”
Historically, voter turnout among young Americans has often been low—in 2016, about 39% of people between the ages of 18-29 voted in the presidential election, according to an estimate from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), a nonpartisan research organization based at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. That number increased to 50% in the 2020 presidential election, according to CIRCLE’s estimates. Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University shows that the majority of voters between the ages of 18-29 cast their ballots for Biden in the 2020 election—60%, compared to the 36% who voted for Trump. An early poll released by CIRCLE in November found that 57% of people between the ages of 18-34 said they’re “extremely likely” to vote in the 2024 presidential election, and those results were from months before Harris became the nominee.
Deja Foxx, a 24-year-old content creator based in Tucson, Arizona who has nearly 142,000 followers on TikTok, was invited to speak the first night of the DNC and attended the convention as a credentialed creator. Foxx, who is a reproductive rights advocate and worked on Harris’ first presidential run in 2019, says the campaign’s social media strategy shows that the team is listening to young people. “Not only… is this campaign strategy effective at reaching young people, but it actually signals what a lot of young people are hoping to hear, which is that we hear you and we are going to invite you into the room,” Foxx says.
While the campaign’s social media posts frequently use humor to engage young voters, they also often show the differences between what a Harris Administration would look like and what a Trump one would look like—for instance, a recent TikTok from the campaign’s account includes news headlines about state abortion bans, which were implemented after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. (Three of the Justices who voted in favor of overturning the landmark ruling were appointed by Trump during his presidency.) The Trump campaign has been using social media to try to reach voters too—Trump has met with controversial internet celebrities including Logan Paul and Adin Ross, and more than 70 influencers were invited to attend the Republican National Convention in July.
Houston, the content creator from the D.C. area, is excited by what she’s seen from the Harris campaign so far but hopes they will spend more time talking about Harris’ policies in the online engagement heading into the fall. “People want policy, and they do want to talk about the details of things, right? Not everything can be sugar—you’re going to get a tummy ache,” Houston says. “I have a lot of faith that we will see more of the substantive information about her campaign and her policies going forward.”
