Can Memes Win an Election?

On Brat, Kamala, and the subversive power of Jokes

Hunched over a pre-war dining table, a comms director in DC called over her daughter urgently and asked, “what is brat?” Her social media analytics dashboard showed a precipitous rise in mentions of “Kamala Harris”. The sentiment analysis was unclear: was this good or bad?

The sample posts showed the vice-president-turned-presidential-candidate dancing to the raving synths of charli xcx’s 360 under an odd chartreuse tint. The daughter explains, “it’s a meme. charli xcx is a popstar. brat is the name of her last album.”

Rebecca Jennings and Carly Ayres both penned great pieces this week dissecting this strange internet synthesis. Jennings asked whether this would be beneficial for her campaign and Ayres pondered on the longevity of the trend and how its acknowledgement by the Kamala campaign could play in its disfavor by making it cringe.

In some ways, they are asking a new version of the question that Metahaven asked in 2012 in their seminal book on memes, “Can Jokes Bring Down Governments?”: can memes win election?

No, memes do not win elections. (not yet?)

(1) If memes won elections, Trump would have won in 2020. His campaign utilized all the tricks from the digital propaganda book from negative depictions of Hunter Biden, memes about the sky-high inflation, and constant jokes about Joe Biden’s sleepiness. The republican meme engine was raging and still they lost.

Biden only had “Dark Brandon” and won.

(2) Who consumes memes? By and large, memes are consumed by people who spend a lot of time online. Statistics show that young people 18-29 are the ones who spend most of their time online (62%).

However, when we look at voter turnout, the meme-consuming population is almost inversely correlated with the voting population. In the 18-29 group, less than 50% of individuals vote, while the less online 65+ group has a turnout over 70%.

There is a tendency in our extremely online echo chambers to assume that what we see, everyone sees, which can lead to bi-coastal cultural myopia (tm). It is important to remember that “brat” only sold 77K albums and only got 46M streams in its first week. Compare that to country star Morgan Wallen’s last record which sold 501K and 500M streams in its first week.

Do we believe this “meme” will lead to more voting and, if so, who it will drive to the polls? What percentage of the 18-29 group how many Americans relate to “brat”?

It might also be just a “joke”, but, again, how many Americans outside of urban centers get it? Plus, i’m sure Kamala already has California and New York on lock electorally.

(3) “Just a joke” may be an understatement. As Metahaven reminds us, “the joke is an open-source weapon of the public.” It is an “incredibly dangerous political weapon”. The Arab Spring demonstrated how memes (the digital manifestation of jokes) could play a role in the toppling of dictators, acting as a disruptor of the symbolic order.

In the West, the internet and social media have driven impactful campaigns of social mobilization and activism, such as Occupy, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

However, these campaigns were underpinned by strong grassroots movements and poignant social issues.

What exactly is the message or meaning behind the “coconut”? What is a “brat”?

Metahaven denotes five characteristics of memes. (1) fecundity: the appeal/potential for virality (2) longevity: how long it lasts (3) copying-fidelity: its capacity to remain legible through its mutations. (4) humorous intent (5) originating in an “internal knowledge community” or an in-group.

What i’d add is that memes are “dialogic images” with conflicting messages, they tend to be “polysemic”, containing multiple meanings. They are fluid, dispersed rhizomatically online, and protean in their meanings. This makes them great for the internet but bad for politics.

Though published in 1961, Boorstin’s “The Image” aptly describes our situation, we live in the age of the “Graphic Revolution.”

In the Graphic Revolution, the dissemination of imagery accelerates, and images take over much of the political attention space, as long-form text falls by the wayside. The example in the book is the first televised presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, wherein Kennedy’s youthful appearance and energetic demeanor led to a significant boost in polls after the debate.

Memes have short half-lives, they’re fickle. They do not stick to the mind like images do. When we think of 2008, we think of the Obama HOPE posters, the slogans. Though they were “viral”, they were not memes, they were images and ideas. Sturdy concepts the public could hold on to, providing a feeling of stable certitude.

Images win elections, not memes.

Lastly, we must ask a crucial question. If a meme is a digital image with loose authorship, distributed rhizomatically through digital networks, ingrained in an “internal knowledge community”, usually characterized by non-sense or joke-like characteristics, then what is “Brat”? “Brat” is an album by charli xcx, “Brat” is a carefully orchestrated social media campaign, “Brat” is a brand design by nyc-based studio special offer, “Brat” is not a meme, “Brat” is an ad.

Seeing the facile virality of the campaign and how easily we forget the origins of the content we share makes me believe that perhaps we should end “Bratsummer” early and reopen the schools.