The ride down an escalator in a skyscraper that Donald Trump erected during a TV appearance that he stage-managed to build on an empire of wish-fulfillment he established was the defining event of his career as a presidential candidate, the one that gave rise to all the others.
The pivotal moment in Kamala Harris’s career as a presidential contender, the one that gave rise to all the others, came when a pop sensation from Britain she had never heard of mentioned an album in a post she did not own, using a term she did not understand.
The current presidential election pits globalism against nativism, feminism against macho, wokeness against Muskism, positivity against worry, and, of course, opposing views on immigration, abortion, and climate change. However, there is more to it than that: drastically disparate communication ideologies.
In Trump, Republicans have a classic form of showmanship: Narratives are scripted for maximum entertainment, directed by one auteur and released to the masses with a targeted set of goals.
In Harris, Democrats have a sharply of-the-moment style in which an army of people far from politics shape messages that are then channeled by the campaign, which often serves more as the story’s reactive subject than its shepherd.
Call it reality-TV ringleaders vs. the TikTok Ticket.
“What we see in front of us is practically a laboratory experiment in two different approaches to media,” said Bob Thompson, the longtime Syracuse University professor and observer of our communication culture, when reached about the subject last week.
That is accurate down to the ticket. The ur-form of top-down message, a literary best-seller, is responsible for J.D. Vance’s success. After watching multiple of his films, a group of internet users decided to support Tim Walz, which is how he became famous.(Although he did play a role in his ascent, he remains a politician.)
Campaigning using meme culture involves a sort of feedback-loop dynamic. A message is picked up by fans on their own, which the campaign then uses to its advantage. Consider Swifties for Kamala, an organization founded by Gen Z supporters who have no personal ties to either the candidate or the star. The group gained 34,000 Instagram followers in a matter of weeks, produced a ton of TikTok remixes (here’s your chance to hear political speeches sampled into “Who is Afraid of Little Old Me”), and at least two calls with the campaign, which prompted the Swifties to go out and further spread the word.
Three weeks ago, there was also the now-famous Charli XCX post, “Kamala IS brat,” which was a “I Like Ike” for the great-grandkids. Harris did not order the post, but the campaign seized the opportunity to update its social backdrop to reflect the new speed-drive realities. You can ride hot through the streets on a different frequency, so why order a campaign bus?
In this method, characters are crowdsourced rather than carefully created. The most well-known quote from Harris is “I do not know what is wrong with you young folks.” “You believe you simply dropped out of a coconut tree?” is a telling allusion to a speech she gave in 2023, where she was paraphrasing another person. And yet, a plethora of individuals who declared it to be such went on to use their influence to disseminate the term through a wave of dance remixes, lime-green t-shirts, and coconut emojis, making it one of the most well-known statements made by any presidential contender in recent memory.
The idea of an online army of pop-stan operatives stands in stark contrast to Harris’ opponent.
It is true that Trump was once a trailblazing social media user, using Tweets sent at all hours of the night to define his candidacy and, eventually, his presidency. Even those, though, felt very much of the bygone era; they were scripted episodes of a narrative that one man programmed like an impetuous network executive. Oftentimes, not even his own people knew what was ahead.
The centrality of this approach to his electoral success was underscored Friday when a new paper from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center and Columbia University concluded that Trump’s appearance on The Apprentice enabled his win in 2016. His depiction as “‘America’s Boss’ – a successful businessman; a savvy negotiator; a tough but supportive mentor; adept at reaching profitable deals in high-pressure situations” was what “increased Donald Trump’s electoral performance in the 2016 Republican primary,” the American Political Science Review wrote.
Trump’s strategy was to create a persona that he could then tightly control. In a detailed and candid essay published on Slate in May, former Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt stated that the show had accomplished nothing less than creating and launching a franchise character.
“In the show, he appeared to demonstrate impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth, even though his businesses had barely survived multiple bankruptcies,” Pruitt wrote. Having been given the role of a lifetime, Trump went on to hone and perform it on the world’s largest stages.
Trump’s transition to more modern media has not gone as planned. He watched a hilarious livestream interview last week at Mar-a-Lago with right-wing gamer Adin Ross on the Kick gaming platform. During the interview, Ross showed him how to use the chat feature, among other awkward moments. The comparison to a 23-year-old influencer made Trump appear even older, not younger, and it even sparked some amusing remarks from the gaming world.
“Trump is in a way trying to punch up with these appearances. It’s really hard to do, and I’m not sure he should do it,” said Liz Stahl, the founder of the Los Angeles-based social-media consultancy In Haus, when asked in an interview how she thought such efforts were going.
The Trump-Vance campaign’s most effective viral moment really came from an unwelcome source: a few weeks ago, a ton of memes criticizing the Ohio senator for supposedly claiming in his book that he had used his sofa to reach a different sort of congress went viral. He didn’t. However, much like the pre-internet virality that dogged previous candidates — from George H.W. Bush’s infamous 1988 “Willie Horton” spot, which claimed Michael Dukakis was freeing countless rapists and murderers, to Lyndon B. Johnson’s infamous 1964 “daisy” ad suggesting Barry Goldwater would bring nuclear war to the U.S. — the stickiness of the message was more important than the veracity of the claim.
The similar narrative was being told this past weekend when Trump performed the Titanic theme song at a Montana campaign rally, sparking a plethora of internet memes comparing the candidate’s journey to the film. The Harris campaign jumped right in. In 2024, mudslinging does not need candidates tossing dirt; all they need to do is show up without a towel when someone else does.
However, experts say it would be folly to assume a fully bottom-up approach from the Democratic candidate. “There’s no doubt that there’s a big upswell in organic interest in Kamala Karris,” said Samuel Woolley, a University of Pittsburgh researcher and longtime project director for propaganda research at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, which is one of the leading experts on the origins and implications of influencer content. “But there’s also certainly inorganic content being pushed,” he said when reached this weekend, using the term for content that is being dictated by someone other than the poster.
This is made possible by a multitude of upscale, close-to-the-vest consultancies that campaigns hire, such the liberal-leaning People First, which merely arranges or finances influencer material without revealing its role.
“Employing influencers has become a pretty normal practice in political campaigns, and Harris is doing it very shrewdly,” Woolley said.It is very difficult to identify paid content, much less prohibit it; social media companies have not been motivated to disclose or halt these arrangements, and the FEC has not been persuaded to regulate them in the same way that traditional political advertisements are regulated.
It can be challenging to track down even pure organic material because each point of origin points to a previous one (you could argue it was not born from a coconut tree). Actually, Harris’ speeches were adapted to Charli XCX tunes in reaction to a plethora of naturally occurring memes that had already surfaced on TikTok. Charli’s post was simply the beginning. (Incidentally, the way that all of this is unfolding in opposition to the legislative back and forth over a TikTok ban is its own kind of viral delight.)
This entire meme material is reminiscent of early media momentum-building techniques from the 20th century. It is different from them, though. If the Roy O. Disney song and the everyone-is-doing-it attitude of “I Like Ike” helped Eisenhower win the presidency, then “Kamala IS brat” has not shown it can withstand until election day, let alone change people’s behavior until then.
“Social media virality usually only works for a political campaign if there’s a bridge to the issues — to something substantive,” said social media consultant Stahl. “Otherwise, it’s just a lot of momentum to nowhere.” (Some of the first polls to come after the viral groundswell show marked bumps for Harris, but causality is difficult to prove.)
It would be easy to view Harris’ victory in November as the dawn of a new era, a baton-pass from one cohesive spectacle to the disorderly fragments of a thousand dance remixes — the lime-green chill of a meme replacing the blinding orange of a showman’s sun.
Conversely, a Trump win would prove the durability of the reality form.
Of course, voting is more complex than that, and drawing such conclusions would be simple. Nonetheless, such a complete shift to a new period is uncommon in American media culture, let alone a national election featuring two contenders on diametrically opposed sides of the boundary. Whatever transpires in November or the following week, a fresh palette of media hues has surfaced. Politics may never be viewed the same way again now that it has.
