(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Joe Biden’s reelection campaign had an ambitious plan to meme the 81-year-old into a second term as president. It hired a team of almost 200 digital staffers—a large number of whom were twentysomethings conversant in modern internet-speak—and operated a range of social media accounts, including a newly created one on TikTok. At the same time, it encouraged hundreds of online content creators to make their own election-related content, trusting they’d reach people the campaign would have trouble winning over itself.
Like the Biden campaign writ large, the plan didn’t work. The president was proving unpopular even among Democrats before he dropped out of the race on July 21. But once Vice President Kamala Harris inherited the operation, the same strategy quickly started looking effective. The Biden campaign’s 30-odd social media accounts were rebranded. Its rapid response TikTok account, now @KamalaHQ, demonstrated it knew what the internet was already talking about with its first post, a screenshot of the British pop star Charli XCX’s tweet declaring, “kamala IS brat.” Within days, the number of followers doubled, surpassing 1 million. (It now has 4.5 million.) “We’re down to sprint, babes,” Lauren Kapp, the 25-year-old campaign staffer in charge of the account, said on her personal TikTok, @polisciprincess, the following weekend.
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Short on time, Harris is facing a media landscape that’s more complex and fragmented than ever. Tactics for digital campaigning are always changing, and this year candidates are navigating social media platforms that have tuned their algorithms to favor nonpolitical content. The extent to which successful digital campaigning translates into improved electoral outcomes is a matter of debate. Regardless, the Harris team is succeeding on its own terms. Digital campaign experts say things could hardly be going better.
On Sept. 24, the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School released a poll showing that 53% of adults younger than 30 had seen memes about Harris, compared with 56% encountering memes about former President Donald Trump. Of those who’d seen Harris memes, 34% said those memes had positively affected their view of her. Only 13% of those who’d seen Trump memes said the same, and 1 in 4 said seeing Trump memes worsened their perception of the former president.
Rob Flaherty, Biden’s 33-year-old deputy campaign manager and digital chief, is serving in the same role for Harris. The campaign, in his view, has benefited from having the infrastructure in place. “You had a full team that flipped on a dime,” he says. But he also acknowledges that no big new strategy emerged with the candidate shift. “We didn’t plan for this, because we couldn’t plan for this,” he says.
That lack of planning may have also been a benefit. Politicking on social media requires the kind of flexibility and risk-taking that runs counter to traditional campaigning, and digital experts often say campaigns undermine themselves by being too conservative. A prime illustration was in 2016, when Trump’s unrestrained and often conspiratorial style generated new pockets of enthusiasm, while Hillary Clinton’s campaign was critiqued for being so safe and focus-grouped that it felt insincere.
The vibe from Harris so far has definitely not been careful. Her digital team has posted montages of Harris dancing and laughing—transforming a Trump attack on her into an advantage. They’ve leaned on videos of Trump looking old and fragile. JD Vance comes in for mockery because of his awkward social interactions and his 2021 comments deriding “childless cat ladies.”
The day CNN reported that the Republican nominee for the governor of North Carolina, current Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, had called himself a “black NAZI!” and a “perv” on a pornography website, the team quickly posted several cozy images of Trump alongside him, highlighting the former president’s endorsement of the controversial candidate. And, as Harris did in the debate, the campaign has provoked Trump by questioning whether even his supporters enjoy his rallies.
All of this is effectively turning the Trumpian tactic of being gratuitously provocative online—a practice generally referred to as “shitposting”—against the Republicans. The strategy is “sending him into tizzy fits,” says Todd Belt, a professor at George Washington University who studies election memes. “This is what propelled him in 2016 and what garnered him so much free traditional media, and they are trying to take it back from him by sending him into a sort of strategic tailspin.”
The former president’s supporters are not willing to cede territory on trolling. They’ve been energized by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which he renamed X, according to an adviser to the Trump campaign who asked not to be named discussing its digital strategy. Musk’s lenient approach to content moderation, this person says, has helped return the social media environment to where it was in 2016, when Trump dominated the online discourse.
It’s clear that, more than in past elections, the campaign-sanctioned mockery now runs both ways. “The most effective way to take him down and make him look small is to take his game and play it better,” says Bridget Schwartz, who runs the @betches_news Instagram, which has 630,000 followers and often remixes and comments on content the Harris campaign shares. “In some ways, we’re playing catch-up.”
Flaherty’s team tries to hit this tone in its own posts. But it’s also focused on amplifying the organic enthusiasm coming from influencers such as Schwartz. “Our job is to facilitate the wave, it’s to encourage the wave, it’s to give the wave tools to be as effective as possible,” he says.
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In large part, this strategy is a response to the rise of TikTok. Unlike the traditional recommendation systems on Facebook and Twitter, TikTok’s algorithm places little emphasis on showing posts from accounts its users choose to follow. Instead, it makes decisions based on what it calculates will keep them engaged. As TikTok has grown in popularity, other social media platforms have adopted similar practices, ushering in an industrywide shift that gives provocative or creative individuals an advantage over well-known but boring organizations.
The Democrats’ interest in such individuals was on display at Chicago’s Democratic National Convention, when it gave press passes to more than 200 creators, who paid for their own travel and received no direct compensation from the campaign. Instead of only picking politically minded creators, the campaign looked for people who could reach audiences that weren’t already tuned in. That included Gabrielle Blair, the 50-year-old blogger behind the Instagram account @designmom, who set aside her standard fare of parenting and home decor to post dispatches from the convention. “So many DMs I was getting were, ‘I’ve never once paid attention to the DNC, and I’m riveted because I’ve been paying attention to your content,’” she says.
At the well-attended “Hotties for Harris” party in Chicago, hosted by several independent youth-focused political organizations, the decor referenced existing memes while providing the raw material for new posts. There was a “Wall of Weirdos” featuring images of Trump, his son Don Jr. and JD Vance, who was also enshrined as a gold statue standing next to a table of chained-up books, a plaque declaring him the “Most Awkward Man in America” and—in tribute to an obscene joke that spread widely in liberal circles following his nomination—a couch.
By the end of the DNC week, the campaign assessed that the influencers it invited had produced 7,000 total posts and almost 400 million impressions. It calculated this was worth $800 million of media value, though the Harris campaign declined to disclose how it reached this figure. “For us, there’s only benefit to people putting their own authentic spins on their support for the VP, because that’s what’s authentic to their audience,” Flaherty says.
There’s always risk in trying to harness this kind of spontaneity. Playing along with jokes that energize some constituencies can end up alienating others. Conversations on the internet also move fast enough that political campaigns trying to capitalize on them by signaling how plugged in they are can end up seemingly clueless instead. Annie Wu Henry, a 28-year-old strategist who ran Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman’s campaign TikTok account and now manages a group called Swifties for Kamala, says that the “kamala IS brat” bandwagon, for instance, lost its appeal once New York Mayor Eric Adams and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin got on board. “You need to jump into the jokes and then jump out of them,” she says. “It’s a balance.”
Harris is also spending heavily online. The campaign has earmarked $370 million for ads between Labor Day and Election Day, and says it could end up spending significantly more. Of that, about $200 million is going to digital ad reservations on streaming platforms including Hulu and YouTube—which the campaign claims is a record. In terms of messaging, streaming ads resemble television commercials; the primary difference between a Hulu ad and a TV spot is how it reaches the audience.
The campaign and its surrogates have also spent $106 million on Facebook and Google ads since Harris became the Democratic candidate, more than four times the amount Trump and his allies have spent over the same period, according to data compiled by AdImpact. But Flaherty says his team needs online surrogates to connect with certain hard-to-reach audiences. “We’re spending a lot of money on YouTube ads, but we’re also working with YouTubers who reach voters there,” he says.
Social media can be an echo chamber, and people trying to help get Harris elected are wary of getting too confident. There’s no proven connection between winning the internet and winning an election. Earlier this year, US Senate candidate Katie Porter looked like a prime illustration of effective digital campaigning. She drew far more engagement online than her rivals with her compelling TikTok account and was polling strongly with younger voters. In the end, though, it was older people who came out to vote, and she finished third in the Democratic primary.
Flaherty is well aware that digital buzz is not an end in itself. He measures success by how many people end up donating to the campaign and how many decide to volunteer. “Our job is not to make great memes. And our job is not to troll Donald Trump for the sake of trolling Donald Trump,” he says. “Our job is to win votes.” —With Bill Allison
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