Anika Begay
Politics
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August 14, 2024
Online jokes aren’t just for fun. They represent a new political energy within the Democratic Party.
For a brief, magical period in July, the Internet was focused. No distractions. No digressions. No interruptions. There was one task ahead of us: publish jokes about JD Vance having sex with a couch.
Now, Vance hasn’t had sex with a couch, as far as we know. Yet, one misleading tweet has spawned an enduring joke. Maybe because it’s not the less credible thing we’ve ever heard—RFK Jr., of course, left a dead bear in Central Park—but it’s more likely because we live in the age of memes. Since Kamala Harris became the nominee, this has been a meme election.
It’s easy to dismiss memes as mindless internet fodder, but in this race, they serve a vital purpose: They create a permission structure for those who are often cynical or politically disengaged. In particular, they’re a way for younger, left-leaning people to express enthusiasm for a Democratic campaign that, refreshingly, feels both unifying and may be headed in the right direction.
These days, everything Kamala Harris does becomes a meme: her call asking Tim Walz to join her list, an exasperated look at her husband, a past conversation with Mindy Kaling. While the best memes are born from quick-witted, witty internet users, they wouldn’t remain memes if it weren’t for the candidates who embrace them. The day Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, Charli XCX posted “Kamala IS brat” on X, formerly Twitter. The tweet didn’t just go viral: Harris’ team capitalized on the cultural touchpoint. The official KamalaHQ X account used the “BRAT” font in its cover photo and changed its description to “provide context” in an explicit reference to the “coconut tree” meme. Harris’ willingness to embrace memes suggests that perhaps she’s as devoted to Gen Z voters as she claims to be. We choose politicians not just based on who we like, but also who we think we like, so Harris is right to show admiration for young people, who have shown up at varying rates in past elections: In 1996, just 39.6 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 cast ballots, but in 2020, that number jumped to 55 percent. The wide range suggests there’s an opportunity: Young people may show up, but there’s no guarantee they will. And while I’m impressed with Harris’s campaign, I also recognize that lightheartedness is her only option. As a black woman, she doesn’t have the luxury of displaying extreme public anger unless she wants to be labeled with racist and sexist labels like “angry black woman” or “shrill.” But fortunately, she has a warm laugh, a knack for striking the right tone at her rallies, and a skilled social media team.
Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, has also jumped on the meme bandwagon. He’s drawn comparisons to pop star Chappell Roan, since both are Midwesterners and have become America’s darlings in a matter of weeks. His team has also leaned into the comparison: Roan’s “Midwest Princess” brand became the inspiration for a new Harris-Walz camo hat, for example. In a speech last week, he referenced Vance’s couch sex joke, saying he’d love to have a discussion with him: “If he’s willing to get off the couch” (followed by the ultimate dad tag, “See what I did there?”). While many pundits criticized him for the comment, the reference served an important purpose: He was telling meme creators to continue their pro bono political work. Candidates themselves don’t have to do much for this, so why not take advantage of the free marketing?
Besides the fact that saying someone fell out of a tree or that sanitary products were approved in high school bathrooms isn’t a dig at all, Harris and Walz’s embrace of memes also demonstrates their ability to turn vulnerabilities into strengths. When Harris’s coconut tree video first surfaced, it was mercilessly mocked by right-wing pundits. Now, a coconut emoji in an Instagram handle is the ultimate show of support for Harris. Tim Walz might have turned people off by being a boring old white guy, but he turned his age into a joke when he responded to a tweet about how much older he looked than Harris.[I] supervised the cafeteria for 20 years,” he said. “You don’t leave that job with a full head of hair. Trust me.” In doing so, he also gave Gen Z permission to coin the term “Big Dad Energy” and turn him into the TikTok “dad” of their dreams.
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But memes have also lit a fire under many people who never paid attention to politics in the first place. This tweet from writer Emma Vigeland demonstrates exactly this phenomenon:
Posts like this have given others permission to get excited about the election, and perhaps even to read more news to understand the nature of the jokes. In this sense, memes act as a binding agent for Harris’s broad coalition: You have to like a candidate to share a sincere post, but you only have to vaguely approve of them to share a funny meme. I’m happy to vote for Harris, or perhaps “relieved” is more accurate, even though she wouldn’t have been my favorite candidate in an open primary. Still, if I see a funny coconut joke, I’ll put it on my Instagram story. Lefties, centrists, and even anti-Trump Republicans can all bask in this same enthusiasm.
The real question, then, becomes: Will any of this matter in November? I think so, as someone who has always disputed the claim that the Internet is not “real life.” I am a creature of the Internet, I exist, and I vote. While online culture does not represent the entire country, neither does the demographics of an Omaha city council meeting, or a Cleveland restaurant, or the offices of The New York Times. There is no one group of people that captures all Americans. How a campaign activates people online matters. As Ezra Klein discussed in an episode of his podcast The Ezra Klein Show after Walz became the vice presidential pick: “There’s a certain segment of liberal-leaning pundits or campaign strategists who act as if attention isn’t a thing, who act as if the whole layer of mediation between what a candidate says and how they’re heard doesn’t exist, and that the only thing that really matters is their demographics.”
In Harris’s short campaign, we’ve already seen online enthusiasm correlate with real-life political engagement. An estimated 15,000 people came out to see Harris and Walz in Detroit, according to AP News. Trump and Vance can’t keep up with either the crowd or the online hype. In Trump’s defense, he’s barely trying. But JD Vance is trying very, very hard to be funny, and he’s failing. If Vance were a better politician or had a better PR team, he probably could have turned the couch joke on the Democrats. It’s a preposterous and baseless attack, and could easily have had his fans putting couch emojis in their bios by now.
We don’t need him, though. We don’t need any of Vance’s jokes. In his first campaign speech, Walz thanked Harris for bringing “joy” back to the election. And when I scroll through my feeds, I see that, too. I see it in memes from lefties, Gen Zers, and people who a month ago were saying they were turning off their phones until after November. Memes may seem like a lighthearted uselessness, but I would argue that they’ve actually brought us together. I want Medicare for All; some of Harris’s billionaire donors want her to fire FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan. But one thing we can all agree on is this: Coconut memes have lit up our feeds and made us all pay a little more attention.
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