How Campaigns Can Kill Political Memes

Most memes age like milk.

Ephemeral and ironic, the viral jokes are usually created to capture a moment in time or express a feeling in the air, at the speed of the internet.

That’s why, for every “Distracted Boyfriend” or “Is This a Pigeon?” meme — ones that have endured long enough to enter the basic lexicon of social media — there are hundreds of others that serve their purpose and shuffle off to the meme graveyard. (Remember Left Shark? Ken Bone? This Could Be Us But You Playin’?)

Political memes are no different, a fact made abundantly clear by the life and quick death of the “Brat” meme surrounding the campaign of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris.

While speaking the language of the internet can help make a candidate appear savvy and knowing, embracing memes and jokes too strongly risks crossing the dreaded line into cringe. But candidates who are able to toe the line can reap the benefits of an outpouring of organic enthusiasm that is unique to digital culture.

Last month, excited online supporters of Ms. Harris ran the candidate through a chartreuse filter, in the mode of the zeitgeisty album by Charli XCX. Fan cams, edited images and jokes seeped into popular consciousness from the bottom up, as many effective memes do.

Then, a few things happened that often spell death for a meme, according to Don Caldwell, the editor in chief of the internet encyclopedia Know Your Meme.

First, the public figures implicated by the meme showed their awareness of it. The day President Biden suspended his re-election campaign and endorsed Ms. Harris, Charli XCX posted “kamala IS brat” on X. The Harris campaign swiftly adopted the color and typeface of the “Brat” album art, and other politicians followed. Public acknowledgment, Mr. Caldwell, said, is often fatal — a clash of high and low that simultaneously denatures the meme and can make the politicians look desperate.

Second, the news media tried to explain it — a process that culminated in Jake Tapper leading a segment on CNN about “Brat,” in which the panelists discussed the meme in the manner of early 20th-century anthropologists among uncontacted tribespeople.

“Is the idea that we’re all kind of ‘brat’?” Mr. Tapper, 55, asked.

It’s unclear how much very-online Democrats will affect the election. But so far, their meme-making and jokes seem to reflect genuine enthusiasm about Ms. Harris’s candidacy. (Even memes that had been used to mock her earlier — for example, her inescapable line about falling out of a coconut tree — have been retrofitted into a kind of ironized support.)

“We’re leveraging organic viral trends and online energy for V.P. Harris’s presidential bid to do two big, and election-winning things: bring the conversation about the stakes of this election to the places a lot of our voters are getting their news from and two, transfer the enthusiasm we’re seeing online to grow our grass-roots supporter network,” Seth Schuster, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, wrote in an emailed statement.

(The Trump campaign did not return a request for comment.)

But to avoid overexposure, and the potential dampening of that enthusiasm, Ms. Harris’s campaign as well as her supporters might ask themselves: What exactly is the appropriate life cycle for a political meme in 2024? It can be a tricky balance to keep in an era in which, as Mr. Caldwell said, “memes blow up and die out faster than ever.”

In 2016, online supporters of Donald J. Trump generated an astonishing quantity of memes as Hillary Clinton’s campaign made clumsy top-down appeals to digital culture, most famously when she implored voters to “Pokémon Go to the polls.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis’s hyper-online strategy in the 2024 Republican primaries, which involved a meme war between his campaign and Mr. Trump’s, resulted in a series of missteps, and Mr. DeSantis’s much-anticipated presidential run flamed out earlier than expected. The right-wing slogan “Let’s go, Brandon,” a coded dig at Mr. Biden, also took a turn when liberals online, began to embrace “Dark Brandon” (though the meme lost its steam on the left when Mr. Biden himself referred to this persona).

More recently, the assassination attempt against Mr. Trump produced a historical — and viral — image, and a flood of joking memes, though perhaps not a single definitive one.

Jeff Giesea, an entrepreneur and writer who rose to minor prominence during that first groundswell of digital support for Mr. Trump, said he expected the imagery surrounding the assassination attempt to be nimbly “revived and used through the campaign.”

Speed and novelty, he said, were two essential elements in out-memeing a political opponent.

“You’re in the media cycle and by the time you’ve hit them with one meme, the cycle changes and you stay on offense,” said Mr. Giesea, who once wrote a paper for NATO titled “It’s Time to Embrace Mimetic Warfare.” “If you recall that time, there was a sense of vertigo. The media was like, What’s going on here?”

Mr. Giesea compared the experience of being one step ahead of your opponent online with the OODA loop, an information processing model developed by a military strategist named John Boyd, in which acting faster, less conspicuously and less predictably than an adversary can throw them off balance.

“The Harris campaign are faster and more agile,” Mr. Giesea added. “They are responding and adapting more quickly to the changing media environment.”

This summer, the Democrats’ second viral move to connect with voters has been calling the members of the Republican presidential ticket — Mr. Trump and Senator JD Vance of Ohio — “weird.” Originating with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who is on the short list of Ms. Harris’s vice-presidential contenders, the term carries with it a devastating touch of Midwestern understatement, as well as a Trumpian pithiness.

(Indeed, Mr. Trump has tagged several public figures as “weird” over the years, including the journalist Megyn Kelly, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and the former Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer.)

“Weird,” as others have noted, was quickly rolled into Democratic messaging, and put some Republicans on the back foot, claiming the term was no better than a schoolyard insult.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a former Republican presidential candidate, called it “dumb and juvenile” on X. “This is a presidential election, not a high school prom queen contest,” he said.

Emma Mont is an administrator for Organizer Memes, a group of former Democratic field organizers whose goal, she said, was to “teach people how to win at the internet.” She thinks “weird” has staying power.

“It has a little more life in it,” Ms. Mont said, “because there is so much excitement that Democrats are finally no longer being nice to people who are not nice to us.”

Mr. Giesea agreed. Unlike “deplorables” — the insult Ms. Clinton infamously used to describe Mr. Trump’s supporters — “weird” has not yet been co-opted or reclaimed by Republicans. Instead, the jab has “spread rapidly and held its form,” Mr. Giesea said.

Ms. Mont added that because “weird” originated with Mr. Walz, a Democratic politician, the term doesn’t lose its potency when it’s acknowledged by other public figures. The only thing that could really rob it of its power, as would be the case for any joke, would be to explain it.

Which, of course, is the job of the news media. Internet creators have known for years that a straight-faced news write-up of a meme is an exercise in cringe. (As do the people who write them.)

But at other times, the media can play an unintentional role in ensuring a meme goes down in history. Recently, an absurdist meme about Mr. Vance — it involves his relationship to furniture — went truly viral only after The Associated Press published, and then removed, an article debunking the meme with the headline, “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.”

“That one will last forever,” Ms. Mont said. “It’s just so funny.”