This is a brat election

In the week since President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, the internet has been flooded with memes declaring Vice President Kamala Harris “brat.” Aside from baffling everyone not chronically online, the now-inescapable memes could prove to be a double-edged sword for Harris’s candidacy.

The meme itself refers to Brat, Charli XCX’s new album released in early June. The pop music singer herself fueled the furor for Harris Monday by tweeting, “kamala is brat.”

Brat is an energetic assembly of pulsing electronic beats, with silly and serious lyrics about complex friendship dynamics, inherited family trauma, and other decidedly cool girl ideas. The album is doing pretty well chart-wise, but certainly not well enough to garner the confused mentions on CNN and thousands of questions from liberal parents (including my own mom) to their Gen Z children. Even Fox News joined in, clunkily stating that having a “brat summer” means being “messy and bold.”

As it has turned out, fate has now aligned so that “messy and bold” has become convenient branding for the Democratic Party, as it scrambles to mount a presidential campaign for Harris at a moment’s notice. The memes are a sign of young people actually being excited for a candidate—but the jokes can just as easily come back to bite Harris if she’s not careful.

When the album was released—and before criticism of Biden had hit a postdebate fever pitch—internet users were fondly reminiscing over Harris’s quirky catchphrases about “coconut trees,” “Venn diagrams,” and “existing in the context.” Driven by the zeitgeist (the context in which we exist, if you will), college student Ryan Long posted a “fan-cam” edit of Harris to Charli XCX’s new song “Von Dutch.”

That video went viral, launching a slew of similar edits on X and TikTok. As people started talking more about a potential Harris run, and continued to stream the album, the two concepts collided. And so, Kamala’s brat summer began.

Brat’s most popular song on Spotify, “360,” is about being an internet “it girl”—which could reasonably be any woman with the right fuck-it attitude—who has captured the cultural imagination. The chorus’s lyrics, “I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia,” refer to actress and producer Julia Fox, who has been totally inescapable on the internet ever since she first appeared on-screen in 2019’s Uncut Gems.

Is Harris not similarly inescapable in this exact moment? Is she not, for all intents and purposes, in addition to being a moderate Democratic politician and former prosecutor, sort of an internet it girl?

As “360,” “Von Dutch,” and the rest of the album have steadily risen in popularity and virality, so too has Harris slowly risen to the forefront of political and cultural conversation. The two have coalesced together to form something more ephemeral and powerful than they’d ever be apart: a meme. Her inherent hokeyness plays off Brat coolness in an ironic mélange.

Today, “brat” is shorthand for anything cool that young people like. The sheer number of Harris memes indicates a level of joy and excitement from younger voters previously unseen in this election (or any election, really). And Harris has been quick to capitalize on it.

Already, Harris’s team seems to be leaning hard into her meme-ability, and that includes her brat-tiness. The newly minted KamalaHQ account on X used the same font and lime green shade as Brat’s cover art for its banner photo, and Harris followed Charli XCX on social media following the singer’s nod.

“The thing about having a candidate people are excited about is that you can actually have fun and be creative on socials, because people are going to embrace it, rather than find it embarrassing,” Annie Wu Henry, a digital strategist who has worked with Democrats including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator John Fetterman, told The New Republic’s Grace Segers earlier this week. “People don’t want to feel bad about politics. They want to have fun, they want to enjoy, they want to be excited about a candidate. There can be creativity and community.”

But separately, on her X (formerly Twitter) account, Henry warned against taking the current groundswell of support for granted.

“Young folks are incredibly aware of the unique moment and momentum occurring. This excitement to vote FOR a ticket rather against the alternative is something many have not experienced,” she wrote. “But we are also warning that the continuation of this energy cannot be guaranteed.”