Joe Lamberti/AP Photo
Will “brat summer” last until the fall?
Among loyal Democrats, President Biden’s recent decision to step aside prompted the sigh of relief heard round the world. After nearly a month of intensifying concerns about his age and his flailing in the polls, he ended his bid for re-election and swiftly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in his place.
Almost immediately after Biden’s announcement, social media feeds were flooded with content about Harris.
She has become the epitome of the “brat summer” trend after the popular musician Charli XCX tweeted, “kamala IS brat” (referencing her recent album). Clips of Harris’s viral coconut tree line and edits of her dancing to “Not Like Us” have exploded across social media. @KamalaHQ on X, previously @BidenHQ, has nearly tripled its follower count. Old campaign ads from her 2020 primary run and videos from her time as California attorney general are resurfacing with millions of views.
So if TikTok is any judge, Harris’s quirky sound bites and overall liveliness and relatability are a breath of fresh air for young people. But it isn’t just on social media. Vote.org reported a surge of nearly 40,000 new voter registrations after Biden dropped out, breaking the record for the largest number in 48 hours. The number is now up to over 100,000. A CNN survey shows Harris with a four-point lead over Trump among registered voters aged 18–34, an 11-point improvement from Biden. According to a poll by The Economist and YouGov, there was a nearly 10 percent increase in young people’s enthusiasm for voting in the election in just one week. The campaign has also raised over $200 million in small donations in less than a week, presumably a fair amount of it from younger folks.
The highest youth turnout in decades helped carry Biden to victory in 2020. But the campaign was struggling with young voters who felt disillusioned by his age, his support for Israel’s war on Gaza, and their current economic woes—until now.
The switch to Harris has already sparked a palpable sense of excitement. But whether the Harris campaign can capitalize on her viral moments to get young voters to actually vote remains to be seen. In the immediate term, political operators agree the effects of the Harris switch have been enormous. “It’s night and day,” explained Brian Rolling, founder of MurMur Impact, a group that helps young people use digital media to spread progressive messages. “What we’ve been hearing from Gen Z swing voters—and even some of the national voters—is that they didn’t want a rematch of the 2020 election. Now we don’t have that rematch, and I think the energy is through the roof.”
In some ways, this isn’t surprising. Gen Z’s almost entire political experience so far has revolved around Biden and Trump —the oldest and second-oldest major-party nominees in American history, for two elections in a row. Even the oldest Gen Z members weren’t able to vote for president until 2016, when Hillary Clinton was 69 years old. Harris is their first time having a candidate younger than 60 (at least until her birthday in October).
That’s why many people online are calling this Gen Z’s “Obama moment.” Harris has the potential to make history as the first Black and Asian American female president, similar to Barack Obama’s achievement in 2008. “As a young Black woman myself,” explained Claudia Nachega, the deputy executive director of the Young Feminist Party, “that makes me incredibly hopeful.”
However, while the buzz around Harris has dominated discourse on social media, there is no guarantee that momentum will last until the election—or that young people’s love of coconut memes will translate into votes. Baybars Charkas, president of the Penn State College Democrats, said he feels enthusiastic yet skeptical. After all, it’s only been about two weeks since the assassination attempt on former President Trump, and “it feels like that happened four months ago,” he said. Young people may be excited now, but they also have notoriously short attention spans, and viral attention is famously fickle.
“What ultimately gets a candidate across the finish line is a campaign that prioritizes voter contact,” explained Winnie Wong, the co-founder of People for Bernie 2016 and an organizer behind Occupy Wall Street.
For young people, that often requires peer-to-peer conversations, according to MurMur Impact’s research. As institutional trust reaches record lows, young people may feel suspicious of official campaigning. Hearing from other people their age, whether on social media or in person, can get the message across.
That’s why the content organically cropping up about Harris is encouraging for the campaign. The Biden team struggled to get young influencers on board, with criticism from both the left and right, not to mention his age, making him widely unpopular online—despite campaigning on issues broadly supported by Gen Z. Even when young people were willing to speak positively about the president, Biden himself wasn’t as publicly available, a damage control strategy to prevent further poor performances.
Over the last week, the change has been dramatic. “At no other point in the last two months, even with the other unprecedented political events, have we seen such a drastic overnight shift in political share of voice and sentiment,” explained Ben Darr, founder of CredoIQ, a social media intelligence platform for political organizations. According to the organization’s data, the influx of progressive content and views has skyrocketed.
Young activists, content creators, and organizations that were critical of Biden’s policies on Palestine, such as Gen-Z for Change and College Democrats of America, have thrown their support behind Harris.
“Before, when Biden was running, we were in a pretty tough spot organizing college students,” explained Hasan Pyarali, the chair of the CDA Muslim Caucus. But, after Sunday, there’s been a “rush of energy” in college chapters across almost every swing state. The organization is planning a mass mobilization effort and canvassing to reach young people this fall.
Harris must take advantage of these networks to mobilize and persuade young voters, organizers say. Grassroots actions, like the Zoom meeting that grew to 40,000 Black women and raised over $1 million in a few hours, should be attended by organizing staff who can guide participants on how to continue to support the campaign.
“They have to create campaign organizing infrastructure to capture the crescendo of grassroots energy and then continuously create momentum until election day,” explained Wong. She suggested an app or built-out website with information on Harris’s policies, guides to getting involved, and reminders about the campaign and voting that will keep young people excited and engaged, even after the coconut tree trend fades.
The Harris campaign has already started to do this by organizing a “young voters for Harris” call last week—which nearly 3,000 people attended—and creating a Linktree with sign-ups for a weekly youth newsletter and phone banks.
Charkas, the student at Penn State, emphasized that the campaign must work with young organizations and activists to “get Kamala Harris in front of as many young people as possible.” By being authentic and accessible, Harris has an advantage over both Trump and Biden: her youth and likability. The campaign already seems to be playing into this, renaming the HQ account “Kamala,” rather than a more formal “Harris.”
But there’s more to politics on social media than savvy influencer techniques, according to James Nord, the CEO of a social media marketing company that worked with the Biden campaign in 2020. Harris must be both entertaining but also able to float above the jokes, and actually convince voters she has concrete policy plans.
“The memes will get you far. But what will get young people to actually show up and vote are issues,” said Pyarali. The people I spoke to highlighted housing, health care, reproductive rights, affordable education, climate change, and a cease-fire in Gaza as their top priorities this fall. This is critically important for Harris in particular because as the Prospect has reported, she has little national record of her own. Her Senate career was entirely under the Trump presidency, and Joe Biden obviously set priorities in his administration.
Nachega of the Young Feminist Party pointed to Harris’s record of sponsoring the Green New Deal and pledging to pass the Equal Rights Amendment as a “good sign that she speaks the language that young people want to hear.” Harris has also previously voiced support for Medicare for All (though she backtracked later) and been more understanding than Biden towards pro-Palestine college protesters.
She broadly highlighted some of these issues in her “vision for the future” in her first campaign ad and recent speech to members of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, a historically Black sorority. But, while emphasizing the achievements of the Biden administration and her path forward, Harris must also address the thorns in the president’s record—especially inflation and immigration, issues which Trump is using to draw in young voters, as I wrote at the RNC last week.
While coconut trees or “exist in the context” memes elicit laughter now, they do not put money in young voters’ pockets or make housing and health care more affordable. Trump professes he will end inflation, stop taxes on tips, and solve the immigration crisis that Harris as “border czar” allegedly fumbled. In response, organizers argue, she must persuasively pin the concerns about prices on corporate greed to champion the working class and distance herself from blame.
“She cannot even hesitate for a moment to name and shame the culprits that are responsible for this crisis” and “go after the bad actors,” Wong argued. Pointing to her past job as the chief law enforcement officer in America’s largest state, California, could be one way of doing this—though as the Prospect’s David Dayen has written, she actually failed to get homeowners relief during the foreclosure crisis.
By the same token, Harris would be wise to avoid throwing away the benefit of the doubt so many youth organizers have granted her by embracing Biden’s radioactive position on Gaza or picking another Israel supporter like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as a running mate.
Ultimately, there is more to winning the votes of Gen Z than simply not being Joe Biden. The true test of Kamala’s campaign will be over the next few weeks—if she can harness the attention of viral moments into a confident, concrete vision for the future and keep young voters energized until November.
