Can Memes of Kamala Harris Sway the US Elections?

Back in the summer of 1992, I went to my first political rally for a youngish governor named Bill Clinton. They played Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 hit ‘Don’t Stop’ – the campaign official theme song – over the loudspeakers, and I left with a campaign button. A few months later, Clinton appeared on MTV talking about boxer shorts and playing the saxophone. He was much cooler than his Republican opponent George H.W. Bush, in a boomerish way. He didn’t speak my language, but he did not seem hopelessly out of touch. Of course, Clinton went on to preside over a period of profoundly conservative governance, somewhere to the right of most European political parties.

During that electoral season, Clinton quoted former New York governor Mario Cuomo, who quipped that one ‘campaigns in poetry, and governs in prose.’ The first US president to really live up to this maxim was Barack Obama, who also rode to a landslide on a wave of popular enthusiasm not just in the polls, but in the zeitgeist too. He commanded adoring crowds at home and abroad, and his opponents groused that they had to contend against a ‘rock star’. Like Clinton, Obama governed as a centrist with a mixed record, but he at least peppered the prose with some actual poetry. Even more, he redefined the presidency as effortlessly cool, rather than the last staging post on the outer rings of lameness. Obama quoted Jay Z, smoked cigarettes, and had Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley paint his and Michelle’s official portraits, respectively. (Clinton tapped Chuck Close.) Yet, the enduring icon of those years was Shepard Fairey’s poster of Obama’s visage, vaguely rotoscoped to resemble flypasted street art of the ‘Obey Giant’ vintage. The word ‘HOPE’ cemented the campaign’s concise brand.

Back in 2008, street art wasn’t exactly fresh, having entered its diffusion phase on countless t-shirts and stickers. Since then, the treatment became a trope unto itself – a cliché. Still, it made news when Fairey endorsed Kamala Harris toward the end of summer, issuing a Harris edition in a blue colourway, emblazoned ‘FORWARD’, the Vice President’s semi-official campaign mantra as she seeks to be the change candidate. The poster is but one augur of a candidate harnessing a groundswell of popular enthusiasm driven by the young, the tasteful and the extremely online. Cuts from the archive – cooking with Mindy Kaling, interviews and speeches previously posted as damaging gaffes – were remixed and made memeable before Joe Biden had even stepped aside. This is political manna. The current president seems more suited to the radio age, and his best earned media was the ‘Dark Brandon’ appropriation that only underscored the zombie-like tone of his campaign.

A rule of thumb among communications consultants is that candidates should be aware of the meme, but never force it. (Let’s not forget Harris’s running mate Tim Walz awkwardly invoking a rumour about JD Vance’s plush proclivities.) The Democratic ticket has been deft here, winking towards younger and leftist constituencies while being tactically evasive about the kind of policy proposals that might appeal to them. In this way, they are like all candidates a screen for projection, avatars of larger inclinations like hope or progress. This approach is well-suited to the media environment, too, one of fragmented attention and a mise-en-abyme of references. While it has been fun watching the grey hairs on corporate news trying to define ‘brat’, the ingredients of the eponymous Charli XCX record are well known. She is in her third decade of making music, and her semiotic touchstones in fashion, club music and graphic design are a mash up of avant-garde cultures dating back to the Obama years (see Sophie Xeon, vaporwave or the Syro campaign). What was effective in the summer of 2024 was her ability to align these elements to achieve mainstream success in a way that makes specificity irrelevant – ‘vibes’ is the currency of the day.

Kamala Harris likely does not know any of these references and, by the numbers, is not ‘brat’. But as a shorthand for positive sentiment, Charli XCX’s declaration to the contrary was a priceless anointment at exactly the right time. Taylor Swift’s endorsement just after this month’s debate went further, a precisely timed coup de grâce. Whether such celebrity wattage will be enough is unclear: Hillary Clinton famously had the support of Jay Z and Beyoncé, who performed in Ohio just before the 2016 election. She was trounced there, and famously lost the adjoining ‘Blue Wall’ states. But the campaign is playing to win, enlisting pop stars like Megan Thee Stallion at rallies, and dispatching Tim Walz to TikTok-friendly sit downs, such as a recent Subway Takes segment with comedian Kareem Rahma, where he sang ad jingles and touted the controversial Minnesota-style cheeseburger. Walz-inspired camo and safety orange campaign hats sold through their initial run: not urban chic, but as knowingly wearable as a Von Dutch trucker cap, certainly. With more podcast and radio call-ins in the offing, evidently Harris and Walz are finally waging a campaign where key voters live, in the digital byways of youth and pop culture.

Yet, it remains unclear what a Harris presidency would mean for the arts. Presumably, most in the art world have placed their bets on Harris/Walz –if not as a progressive ideal, but as pragmatists who would vouchsafe the rudiments of any creative life. For instance, the group For Freedoms (established in 2016), commissioned artists for high-profile billboards to display through October. Hank Willis Thomas’s stark ALL LI ES MATTER counterprogrammed the RNC in Milwaukee a few months back, just as Carrie Mae Weems’s towering portrait of a figure standing before the Lincoln Memorial was on display during the DNC in Chicago. Lincoln, a son of Illinois, is a figure of national unity whose presidency guaranteed fundamental freedoms. A Harris presidency will likely not fulfil a progressive wish list. More likely we would see modest investment in the arts, subsidized health and child care, reproductive autonomy, fairer taxes for the creative and working classes, and so on. This matters because while Harris would ‘govern in prose,’ it will certainly be better than Trump’s outsider art. The policies we might expect from her don’t resonate on the same romantic frequencies that we hope candidates might embody, they are the ‘freedoms from’ and ‘freedoms to’ that our generation has come to take for granted, but are imperiled again at the ballot box and beyond.

_{Main image: Carrie Mae Weems, 'Leading with Compassion, Not Complaints' billboard, 2024. Courtesy: Artists For Democracy}