The triumphant comeback of the Kamala Harris meme

Kamala Harris is a highly memeable presidential candidate. She dances in a loose and enthusiastic manner. She has an idiosyncratic speaking style. She laughs easily, including at herself. This has not always worked in her favor.

When Harris said, in a May 2023 speech, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” a Republican YouTube channel snipped the clip from its context and tossed it to commentators, who used it to compare Harris to a daffy talk show host or to joke that she sounded high. Videos of Harris dancing at campaign events were labeled “cringe.” The stickiest anti-Kamala meme of the 2020 election – that the former prosecutor Harris “is a cop” – united leftists, Black Twitter and Republican trolls in an internet-wide project of framing Harris as either a reactionary or a hypocrite.

Now these images have been reversed. Since President Joe Biden bowed out of the race and threw his support to Harris, the familiar old Kamala memes have risen again. It’s their interpretation that has changed.

In the hands of her online fans, Harris’ word salad has been replated as hypnotic internet speak. Her confounding coconut tree quote – “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” she went on to say – now circulates as a symbol of the giddy high produced by her dizzy rise in a destabilized campaign. Her dance moves have been set to Charli XCX songs and filtered through Charli’s lime-green “Brat”-era branding, bathing Harris in her chill hot-mess pop star glow. Even “Kamala Harris is a cop” has been reclaimed, with an exaggerated wink, by supporters eager to fashion it into a winning general-election pitch.

The measure of a candidate’s charisma used to be, “Would you have a beer with her?” Now it’s more like, “Are you willing to spend your evening editing a fancam-style video that sets her idiosyncrasies to pop music so effectively that they produce a pleasant narcotic effect?”

All of it feels like a fun-house mirror to the online energy that vibrates around the other party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump. The Trump fandom stands ready and willing to spin any potential weakness, up to and including a felony conviction, into a triumphant meme. The MAGA stan proves his loyalty and ingenuity by processing even the gravest concerns into pro-Trump grist, thus maximizing his satisfaction at triggering the left. It once seemed as if the Democratic Party could never produce a candidate who could inspire an internet response quite that powerful and strange. Now, improbably, it has.

The mantra of Harris’ online converts – “I’m coconut pilled” – riffs on the symbology of “The Matrix” to signal that their perspective has undergone a reality-altering shift, one with enough chaotic power to upend the presidential race. Part of Harris’ viral energy feels generated by the topsy-turvy motion of the campaign itself. The pent-up excitement at Biden’s decision not to seek a second term, after months of mounting concerns, accrues to her. It helps that the Harris memes booted up shortly after Biden’s disastrous debate. It makes it feel as if the internet manifested her candidacy. Her boosters are now tipsy with their collective power.

The undercurrent to many of the anti-Kamala memes was the accusation that she occasionally appeared smugly unintelligible. One viral supercut, which showed Harris passionately delivering the catchphrase “what can be, unburdened by what has been” over and over again, was circulated by the Republican National Committee before it was reclaimed by Harris supporters. The mild incoherence of her phrasing only makes it more interesting as a hook on TikTok, where fans chop up and remix a candidate’s speech like DJs working a goofy soundboard. Now, in a bizarre reversal, right-wing influencers are trying to imbue Harris’ nonsense with meaning. One has floated the theory on X that the “unburdened” line is “a Marxist and Luciferian incantation, and that’s easily seen.”

The redemption of the “unburdened” meme is also a reaction to the legitimately concerning gibberish generated by the elder statesmen in the race over the past few months. Harris now presides over a post-coherence landscape, one where her occasionally meandering phrasing feels refreshingly low-stakes. It’s a quirk, not an existential threat to American democracy. The “unburdened” supercut shows a candidate who can memorize a line and capably deliver it on command – not something that could be said of Biden, in the end.

Biden always fared poorly on TikTok, the platform that he hoped to ban from American phones even as his campaign dutifully opened an account. The use of a warmed-over “Dark Brandon” meme as Biden’s avatar – where he’s styled as a secret mastermind, lasers shooting from his eyes – failed to capture the audience’s imagination. Instead it was captivated by videos of Biden seemingly wandering, stumbling and freezing during numerous presidential appearances.

The campaign sought to dismiss these depictions as the distortions of a disinformation machine and flooded the app with its own videos. In many of them, anonymous youthful Biden surrogates made concerned faces and soliloquized talking points. The campaign seemed to think that it could fix its TikTok problem by posting lots of TikToks, but TikTok’s fixation on his possible cognitive decline was an early signal of a deeper issue – one that Biden, and many of his supporters, only seriously acknowledged after it was showcased on live television during the first presidential debate.

Shortly after Biden stepped down Sunday, James Medlock, a pseudonymous social democratic Twitter power user, reposted a leftist meme of Harris that first circulated in 2019. In the image, Harris is Photoshopped into a police uniform and superimposed in front of the thin blue line flag. She is made to laugh and handcuff a Black child.

”Remember,” Medlock wrote on X, “now we pivot to not mentioning Kamala’s sterling left wing voting record and her cool Marxist dad, and instead loudly say she’s a cop who will lock up all the criminals. It’s time to win this election.” Another user Photoshopped a picture of Donald Trump in the child’s place. Then someone Photoshopped Charli XCX in instead.

When internet users make Kamala Harris appear to arrest Charli XCX, or splice her coconut tree line into a Taylor Swift track, it’s not clear how firmly their tongues are in their cheeks, or where their sincere politics lie. But their sincerity is not required. With Harris, a meme alliance has emerged between the Democratic Party’s irony-pilled leftists and its #resistance-core centrists, and now this ragtag crew has come together to try to lift her into the White House. For very online members of the left who view Harris as insufficiently radical, the playfulness of her memes is protective. The ironic distance stands in for their own political distance from their new favorite candidate.

On the internet, the project of electing an establishment Democrat like Harris can feel almost subversive. Or at the very least, mildly entertaining.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.