Kamala Harris isn’t yet the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, but her status online is already clear: she’s a meme.
In the latest evidence of his viral presence among Generation Z, British pop sensation Charli XCX called him out by name in a weekend tweet in which she referred to the vice president as a “childish kid.”
And Harris’s campaign is leaning toward that.
Shortly after the artist tweeted “Kamala is Brat” on Sunday night – naming Harris after his latest album – the US vice president adopted the album’s green colour for her “KamalaHQ” account.
Charli XCX was acknowledging what was already trending online, where viral memes were showing video clips of Harris dancing and joking around to Charli XCX tracks.
The singer has described a brat as “a girl who’s a bit messy and likes to party and maybe says stupid things sometimes, who feels like herself but then also feels like she’s maybe broken… It’s a brat, you’re a brat, she’s a brat.”
Her tweet on Sunday further fueled a trend that could help Harris reach out to young voters who could play a decisive role in the November 5 election.
It’s a contrast not only with 78-year-old Republican rival Donald Trump, but also with Harris’ 81-year-old boss, President Joe Biden, who quit the race over the weekend and endorsed his vice president for the top spot in his place.
A spokesperson for Charli XCX declined an interview request.
The ‘brat’ trend joins another viral meme of Harris – the audio of the 2023 speech, which was previously panned by critics but has now been adopted by Generation Z as a kind of existential philosophy.
“‘You feel like you just fell out of a coconut tree?'” Harris asked in the speech, quoting something her mother said, before laughing and then getting serious again. “You exist in the context of everything you live in and everything that came before you.”
The internet hive mind has adopted the coconut emoji as an unofficial campaign symbol for Harris. According to TikTok, TikTokers have used the “coconut tree” speech sound in at least 3,000 videos.
Harris’ membership in Alpha Kappa Alpha — the first black Greek-letter sorority at Howard University in Washington, D.C. — is also sparking viral engagement online.
“Hearing the opposition we have 22,190,813 members in D9 who will vote for Kamala!” A video on TikTok shows two women, one in pink and the other in green. D9 refers to a group of nine historically Black fraternities and sororities.
Of course, Harris also has many detractors online. Critics have circulated clips aimed at painting her negatively, including compilations of her laughing uproariously when Trump himself called her “Laughin’ Kamala.”
Young voters, who overwhelmingly vote for the Democratic Party, have so far been unenthusiastic about the presidential race between Biden and the 78-year-old Trump.
“Gen Z is very hard to understand unless you’re Gen Z,” said Chris Mowrey, a Democratic social media influencer with 340,000 TikTok followers, referring to the generation born between 1997 and 2012.
Moments spent online can carry over to the ballot box, Mowrey said: “Young voters vote largely based on personality and emotion.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
