Dr. Rosalynd Southern
Senior Lecturer in Political Communication at the University of Liverpool. Her work focuses on how digital and social media are used for political communication by politicians, parties and ordinary citizens. She has published work on the use of social media by parties and / or candidates during elections, online incivility towards women politicians, and the use of online humour to talk about politics.
Email: R.Southern@liverpool.ac.uk
Dr. Caroline Leicht
Tutor in Media, Culture and Society in the School of Sociological & Cultural Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on gender, media and politics, with a focus on gender and representation in new media and non-traditional news media.
Email: caroline.leicht@glasgow.ac.uk
U.S. Election 2024
64. Reversion to the meme: A return to grassroots content (Dr Jessica Baldwin-Philippi)
65. From platform politics to partisan platforms (Prof Philip M. Napoli, Talia Goodman)
66. The fragmented social media landscape in the 2024 U.S. election (Dr Michael A. Beam, Dr Myiah J. Hutchens, Dr Jay D. Hmielowski)
67. Outside organization advertising on Meta platforms: Coordination and duplicity (Prof Jennifer Stromer-Galley)
68. Prejudice and priming in the online political sphere (Prof Richard Perloff)
69. Perceptions of social media in the 2024 presidential election (Dr Daniel Lane, Dr Prateekshit “Kanu” Pandey)
70. Modeling public Facebook comments on the attempted assassination of President Trump (Dr Justin Phillips, Prof Andrea Carson)
71. The memes of production: Grassroots-made digital content and the presidential campaign (Dr Rosalynd Southern, Dr Caroline Leicht)
72. The gendered dynamics of presidential campaign tweets in 2024 (Prof Heather K. Evans, Dr Jennifer Hayes Clark)
73. Threads and TikTok adoption among 2024 congressional candidates in battleground states (Prof Terri L. Towner, Prof Caroline Muñoz)
74. Who would extraterrestrials side with if they were watching us on social media? (Taewoo Kang, Prof Kjerstin Thorson)
75. AI and voter suppression in the 2024 election (Prof Diana Owen)
76. News from AI: ChatGPT and political information (Dr Caroline Leicht, Dr Peter Finn, Dr Lauren C. Bell, Dr Amy Tatum)
77. Analyzing the perceived humanness of AI-generated social media content around the presidential debate (Dr Tiago Ventura, Rebecca Ansell, Dr Sejin Paik, Autumn Toney, Prof Leticia Bode, Prof Lisa Singh)
In the weeks after the disastrous Biden-Trump debate in June 2024, a clip of Kamala Harris, the then-VP, reemerged on social media and was subsequently memed across platforms. In the speech, Harris says ‘You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? [laughter]. You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you’. Users commented on the comedic delivery and the slightly surreal nature of the quote. At this point in the campaign, the prospects for the Democrats seemed dire, with headlines about Biden’s health a daily occurrence. The Harris meme provided some light relief among the doom and gloom. However, the meme seemed to die relatively quicky, until a few weeks later when it appeared that Harris was being lined up to replace Biden on the ticket. The coconut tree memes sprung forth once again, bringing Democratic supporters and other progressives together in a borderline carnival atmosphere. People added coconuts and palm trees to their screen names, a visual representation of community, and coconut tree memes were layered with other current pop culture moments (as we will discuss below). It appeared that the internet was determined to meme Harris into the Democratic nomination.
This was cemented on July 22nd when Charli xcx – the popstar of the moment who had just released her highly successful (and already highly-memed) album ‘brat’ – tweeted ‘Kamala IS brat’. This went viral – receiving a third of a million likes and sparking a new set of Harris memes. It was seen by many as a comment on the slightly chaotic, authentic and somewhat ‘messy’ nature of some of the Harris clips. As Charli xcx herself had explained, being ‘brat’ could be summed up as “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party … Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown … is very honest, very blunt, a little bit volatile”. The description seemed to capture elements of Harris’s projected internet persona.
Other candidates were also subject to memes. In a less-flattering meme, the Republican Vice Presidential pick JD Vance was subject to a “shitpost” (a sub-type of meme), claiming that he had confessed in his bestselling autobiography ‘Hillbilly Elergy’ to having pleasured himself with the aid of an item of living room furniture. This was not true but fit well with the attack line being pursued at the time by Governor Tim Walz (the eventual Democratic VP pick) that the Republicans were ‘weird’. The JD Vance “couch meme” was picked up and spun further by an already frenzied online army of Harris supporters who were keen to keep up the energy and momentum that the coconut tree and brat memes had seemingly created for the Democratic campaign.
There is nothing new about politics and memes, which have now become a mainstream means of discussing politics. However, what appears different about these two examples is that these were referenced, albeit cautiously, by the formal campaigns. Kamala HQ – the official campaign Twitter account – changed their header to instantly recognisable ‘brat’ branding (peridot green with blurry ariel font) and updated their bio to ‘providing context’ in a clear nod to the coconut tree speech. This strategy was a continuation of the Biden era with Biden referencing the ‘Dark Brandon’ meme about himself via his own social media. At the Democratic convention, two speeches – one by Walz and another by Elizabeth Warren – referred to the JD Vance ‘couch’ meme. Warren was more subtle saying she would not trust Trump and Vance to ‘move [my] couch’ but Walz added a ‘see what I did there?’ after his joke in case anyone was under any illusion as to what he referred to.
It is notable that the campaign understood the importance of only ‘nodding’ to these memes – nothing kills a joke online like a politician co-opting it. Nonetheless, the Democratic campaign seemed to understand the importance of harnessing this online energy and of embracing this way of mobilizing their base. These memes, and their subtle referencing by the formal campaign, did appear to drag the Democratic campaign, or the mood of it at least, out of the doldrums and re-energise the voter base over the summer. Adopting the language of calling their opponents ‘weird’ also had the hallmark of an online flame war but one which, for a time at least, appeared to work in their favour. Although the latter portions of the campaign lacked this energy and shifted to a far more serious tone, it is likely that parties will continue to attempt to tap into and reference online user-generated content as it relates to themselves and their opponents. This free labor and free mobilisation, although largely firing up the base rather than converting undecided voters, as the results of the election showed, is now firmly part of the modern campaign. Memes and politics are here to stay, and it will be interesting to see how formal campaigns deal with them going forward.