From the White House to Your For You Page: @KamalaHQ
Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ unique campaign strategy is engaging young voters through social media trends.
by Lizzy Calvo ★ OCTOBER 11, 2024
design: Ailani Wong
What's the first thing you think of when you hear the word coconut? If you thought of Vice President Kamala Harris cackling as she says, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”, then congratulations- we’ve probably been on the same side of TikTok these last couple months.
With less than a month to go until the 2024 presidential election, candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are honing in on their respective campaign strategies, trying to win over undecided voters. For Harris’ campaign, this has meant branching out from traditional campaign tactics in order to focus on young voters, one of them being a push of social media content.
Harris’ social media history
This past week, an interview aired between Harris and Alex Cooper, who recently became the highest-paid female podcast host after she signed a deal with SiriusXM for $100 million, as reported by Bloomberg. The episode was a special installment of the Call Her Daddy podcast, where Cooper almost exclusively asked questions related to women's rights and abortion care, an issue young female voters are exceedingly concerned with.
Clips of the interview were posted to TikTok by both Harris’s official account @kamalaharris and her campaign update account @kamalahq, amassing millions of views the same day the interview went live. But posting interviews and campaign trail clips is not the only way Harris’ campaign has utilized her social media accounts, she’s also found ways to become a trend herself.
Before her 2024 campaign, Harris was no stranger to virality. On November 7 2020, the day President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris learned they won the election, Harris posted a video to her social media of her on the phone with her running mate saying, “We did it Joe, you’re going to be the next president of the United States,” a quote that most young Americans with a social media presence would go on to repeatedly hear, as it was meme-ified for the next four years.
Earlier this year, the “coconut tree” meme was born. The viral clip was taken from a speech where Harris references her mother, recounting a sweet phrase she would say to Harris and her sister in their childhood. But out of context, the Harris family mantra quickly became a TikTok sound. Fast forward to July 21st, the day President Biden dropped out of the race, Charli xcx, pop party girl and face of this year’s indie sleaze revival, tweeted “kamala IS brat,” referencing her album of the same name that blew up on social media.
Alongside the enduring “coconut” sound's popularity, Harris’ new brat status led her campaign on a clear path: to create trendy content that panders to Gen Z’s ultra-specific humor.
How @kamalahq leverages comedy
Rylee Dang, a senior at Syracuse University studying Public Relations and Political Science, is a first-time presidential election voter. Dang describes the experience of interacting with Harris’ content as a confusing one. "It almost feels like niche content,” she said. “It’ll come across my feed and I think it's a comedy thing, but then I see it's posted by KamalaHQ.”
Although it makes sense for the Harris team to produce content that feels like it should be part of a political campaign, in actuality, the way their content challenges viewer and voter expectations may be its greatest strength.
To a certain extent, @kamalahq is banking on the fact that most people won’t realize the post they’re viewing is from her campaign. Instead, they'll find the content entertaining and funny, remembering Harris in a positive light. And when people realize who made the content, it becomes even more interesting by showing Harris as something we don’t often see politicians as: human.“The messaging in the content is doing a good job of showing she’s not staunchly a politician, she’s also a person,” Dang said.
How do the Harris and Trump campaigns' uses of social media compare?
Despite the unique approach that @kamalahq has taken by aiming for trendiness, their account is not unparalleled by the Trump campaign in terms of utilizing social media as a resource to swing undecided voters.
Luke Radel, a political commentator for Citrus TV News and a junior at Syracuse University, commented that both Trump and Harris’ use of social media has been impressive in comparison to previous election cycles. “They've both been reaching out to younger voters, I think, in a much more effective way than has been done in the past,” Radel said. “I always think of the nightmare of Hilary Clinton saying, ‘Pokemon Go to the polls.’ We’ve come a long way in eight years in terms of using social media to reach out to young voters.”
President Trump also has a TikTok account under his name, @realdonaldtrump, and a secondary TikTok account called @maga in addition to an X page called @TrumpWarRoom, both of which aiming to serve as rapid response accounts, similar to @kamalahq.
The distinct difference is Trump’s target audience. @maga and @TrumpWarRoom create content for Trump's pre-existing supporters - allowing those who want to stay up to date on his campaign to repost his content and publicly express their backing of the Republican ticket.
However, TikTok trends don’t fall along party lines the same way they might on “X.” Content is pushed to anyone and everyone on their ForYou page. Any social media user would have to go out of their way to consume @TrumpWarRoom content by following the account, but @kamalahq comes to them. And because @maga almost entirely focuses on critiquing the Biden administration, it falls short in one important area where @kamalahq does not: the ability to create content that does not come at the expense of someone else.
A great example of this is the kinds of videos @kamalhq produces that focus solely on Harris, as opposed to commenting on President Trump. On October 9th, @kamalahq posted a video showing Harris through different points of her career, ending on a photo of her as a child asking, “I’m running for President?”. Starkly different from the kind of content produced by @maga, Harris’s social media posts prove that they can do it all, making a range of videos with both humor and heart.
Polls show that young voters ARE responding to the social media content these campaigns are creating. According to a Harvard Youth Poll conducted last month, 53% of young adults reported encountering memes about Harris, and of that percentage, 34% said it positively influenced their opinion of her. Conversely, of the 56% of voters who saw memes about Trump, 26% reported a negative impact on their perception of him.
By being able to make fun of herself, Harris has created a likable and relatable image. Whereas Trump’s attempts miss the mark, making him the punchline in a joke he and his social media accounts are not the ones telling.
The Harris campaign’s ultimate impact
Radel touched on the importance of Harris’ campaign in motivating young voters to not just vote for Harris, but to vote, period. “You think of the election as Trump vs. Harris, but it's really a three-person race. It's Trump, Harris, and the couch, and the couch is very attractive to a lot of people. It's very comfortable.”
And what better way to motivate Gen Z to get off that couch and take an interest in politics than translating content into their native language and sprinkling in some humor? Dang argued that for many undecided young voters, memorability may be the x-factor Gen Z is looking for. “Even if the lasting impression is just ‘Oh I saw this video and it was funny’ when it comes down to voting day, if you’re an undecided [young] voter who just doesn’t care about politics, you’re going to go with the name that you remember.”
As the election draws closer, one point is clear, and one has yet to reveal itself. Harris’ campaign is taking never-seen-before strides in the political landscape to connect with young voters and create a more approachable image. But when it comes to whether or not it will win her the election? We’ll just have to wait and see.