Aweek has always been a long time in politics, but this might have been the longest week in Kamala Harris’s life. While Joe Biden is still technically the US president, he already feels irrelevant. All eyes are on Harris now. The speed with which she has gone from being one of the most unpopular vice-presidents in modern history to sitting at the top of the Democratic ticket, with an army of enthusiastic fans behind her, is astounding. Biden’s trajectory has been widely compared to a Shakespearean tragedy; Harris’s sudden reversal of fortune, meanwhile, is like something out of a fairytale.
A quick recap: Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris on Sunday. The Democratic establishment then threw its weight behind her on Monday. So did hundreds of thousands of donors; Harris’s campaign raked in a record-breaking $81m in just 24 hours. By Tuesday, she had earned enough support from delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president next month. On Wednesday, Democrats approved rules meaning that any Democrat who wants to compete against Harris for the nomination only has days to do so. Then, on Friday, Barack Obama endorsed the vice-president. Her coronation is almost complete.
Importantly, Harris doesn’t just have the consolidated support of party elites. She’s also got large swathes of social media cheering her on. The woman has undeniably mementum. “kamala IS brat,” the British pop star Charli xcx posted on X on Sunday. It may not be on the level of an Obama endorsement but Charli’s approval thrust Harris into the middle of the pop-cultural zeitgeist. Charli xcx’s new album, Brat, has undoubtedly been the meme of the summer – the album’s lime-green aesthetic plastered everywhere.
In fact, soon after Charli’s approving tweet, @kamalahq changed its backdrop to brat green. Cue a lot of campaign staff trying to explain to high-ranking Democrats like Nancy Pelosi what on earth is going on. (“Well ma’am, Ms xcx, has defined a ‘brat’ as ‘just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it’. Yeah, I know that sounds confusing. But trust me when I say it’ll help us get out the youth vote.”)
Harris’s campaign hasn’t just embraced the brats, it’s leaning hard into all the Kamala memes that have been flooding the internet over the past few weeks, including a lot of coconut-related content. That is not a racial slur, I should make clear to British readers, but rather a reference to a speech the vice-president gave in 2023.
