{"id":689,"date":"2024-11-11T11:51:56","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T11:51:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/?page_id=689"},"modified":"2024-11-15T17:30:56","modified_gmt":"2024-11-15T17:30:56","slug":"reversion-to-the-meme-a-return-to-grassroots-content","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2024\/section-6-digital-campaign\/reversion-to-the-meme-a-return-to-grassroots-content\/","title":{"rendered":"Reversion to the meme: A return to grassroots content"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Dr. Jessica Baldwin-Philippi<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Associate Professor in Fordham University\u2019s Communication and Media Studies department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jesse\u2019s work focuses on digital and data-driven campaigning in the US. She is the author of Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship<\/em> (Oxford UP, 2015), and she has published in Political Communication, New Media & Society, <\/em>and International Journal of Communication<\/em>, among others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Email: jphilippi@fordham.edu<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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U.S. Election 2024<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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64. Reversion to the meme: A return to grassroots content<\/a> (Dr Jessica Baldwin-Philippi)
65. From platform politics to partisan platforms<\/a> (Prof Philip M. Napoli, Talia Goodman)
66. The fragmented social media landscape in the 2024 U.S. election<\/a> (Dr Michael A. Beam, Dr Myiah J. Hutchens, Dr Jay D. Hmielowski)
67. Outside organization advertising on Meta platforms: Coordination and duplicity<\/a> (Prof Jennifer Stromer-Galley)
68. Prejudice and priming in the online political sphere<\/a> (Prof Richard Perloff)
69. Perceptions of social media in the 2024 presidential election<\/a> (Dr Daniel Lane, Dr Prateekshit \u201cKanu\u201d Pandey)
70. Modeling public Facebook comments on the attempted assassination of President Trump<\/a> (Dr Justin Phillips, Prof Andrea Carson)
71. The memes of production: Grassroots-made digital content and the presidential campaign<\/a> (Dr Rosalynd Southern, Dr Caroline Leicht)
72. The gendered dynamics of presidential campaign tweets in 2024<\/a> (Prof Heather K. Evans, Dr Jennifer Hayes Clark)
73. Threads and TikTok adoption among 2024 congressional candidates in battleground states<\/a> (Prof Terri L. Towner, Prof Caroline Mu\u00f1oz)
74. Who would extraterrestrials side with if they were watching us on social media?<\/a> (Taewoo Kang, Prof Kjerstin Thorson)
75. AI and voter suppression in the 2024 election<\/a> (Prof Diana Owen)
76. News from AI: ChatGPT and political information<\/a> (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<\/a> (Dr Tiago Ventura, Rebecca Ansell, Dr Sejin Paik, Autumn Toney, Prof Leticia Bode, Prof Lisa Singh)<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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While memes have long simmered in the background of digital politics, the August 2024 exaltation of political memes and meme culture more broadly felt a return to 2012, an election cycle already christened the meme election<\/a>. Then, gaffes like Romney\u2019s \u201cBinders Full of Women\u201d and Obama\u2019s \u201cYou didn\u2019t Build That\u201d made for heavily memed, politically salient content. While fun, memes were always considered incidental to success, but they can tell us about culture, salient messages, and campaigns\u2019 and candidates\u2019 willingness to embrace those. Across party lines, the memes of the 2024 election represent a broader connection to grassroots, less campaign-controlled actions than in years prior.  Although some of the generic conventions of memes from 2012 continue over a decade later, their style and content has shifted. On the right, memes were less connected to viral moments, and used lots of AI-generated imagery. On the left, they skewed toward non-political internet culture, both in what was grassroots supported, and within the more built-out organizational infrastructure of digital campaigning. Broadly, campaigns embraced grassroots content that was more vulgar and negative too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Organizationally speaking, 2024 election memes came from supporters, with campaigns then following suit, rather than top-down campaign-produced memes. The Trump campaign, hamstrung by the candidate\u2019s own absence from Twitter until late August of 2024, was buoyed by the active #MAGA contingent on Twitter, tweeting AI-generated images of Trump<\/a>, ridiculing Biden\u2019s age and poor debate performance, and celebrating Trump\u2019s campaign stop at McDonalds. Once Trump was back on the platform, he routinely retweeted these supporter-created posts, as he had in 2016. The Harris campaign\u2019s grassroots memetic support that immediately followed her move into the candidacy was massive, multi-platform, and also driven by a Twitter based fan community: the K-Hive<\/a>. Although the campaign embraced and winked at the memes, they were not actively driving their uptake or directing topics of the memes. That was left to supporters, who ultimately acted similarly to fan communities on the internet, creating content that showed their support and engaging with each others\u2019 work. That was in contrast to the approach the campaign had taken to creating Biden-oriented memes<\/a> while he was still at the top of the ticket. These memes, while popular among Biden fans on Twitter, did not have the same virality of the grassroots content, affirming that the more grassroots content is valued more heavily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In terms of content, many memes followed the long tradition of amplifying campaign gaffes. The political right mocked Harris\u2019 laugh, and Biden\u2019s long pauses routinely. The left jumped on Trump\u2019s outlandish statements, most notably his lies about Haitian immigrants, \u201cthey\u2019re eating the dogs; they\u2019re eating the cats,\u201d and J.D. Vance\u2019s derogatory reference to liberal women as \u201cchildless cat ladies.\u201d But there was more going on than the long tradition of finding a way to humorously criticize your opponent, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the grassroots right, rather than memes about viral topics or a particular, catalyzing gaffe or event, there was a constant, steady stream of AI-generated art depicting a general love of Trump or mocking of a broad set of liberal policies. Many of these images trafficked in hero imagery: a strong leader above the masses, occasionally riding a lion. Some of them responded to Democratic criticisms\u2013especially salient were responses to the liberal condemnation of his lies about Haitians eating pets, featuring Trump cuddling up to cats and ducks\u2013but were shared widely outside of that memetic moment and context, with the animals becoming part of the broader pro-Trump. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the grassroots left, many of the most popular memes were relatively removed from policy or political imagery. Kamala\u00a0is brat<\/a>, being\u00a0coconut-pilled<\/a>, and\u00a0reclaiming her laugh<\/a>\u00a0all gained immense attention and brought energy to a lifeless campaign, and they also demonstrated a particular imagery of internet culture more than of political culture-what\u00a0Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner<\/a>\u00a0have called a combination of \u201cmicheviousness\u201d, oddity, and antagonism.\u201d Even the campaign-led efforts from the Biden campaign before Harris became the nominee reflected this internet imagery. The Biden campaigns\u2019\u00a0\u201cDark Brandon\u201d content<\/a> was a vehicle for the campaign to engage in critiques that were more crass and antagonistic than other Biden\u2019s voice.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Memes on both sides covered topics that previous campaigns would have distanced themselves from or been scared to be associated with. Anti-Harris memes across the entire time of her candidacy were often vulgar and explicitly sexist, accusing the Vice President of trading sexual favors<\/a> to further her career. While almost any campaign would have distanced itself from such content, Trump\u2019s Truth Social account re-posted it. Even the Democrats were less afraid of memes that skewed vulgar, like J.D. Vance having sex with a couch<\/a>. Despite blurred lines between disinformation and internet humor and the parodic, these memes were not simply ignored by the campaign, but embraced with a wink by Governor Walz in a stump speech<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, the memes of 2024 looked different from the memes of 2012, with campaigns allowing the grassroots fan-supporters to take the messaging lead, and not only relinquishing control, but embracing the less controlled state of campaign communications.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Jessica Baldwin-Philippi Associate Professor in Fordham University\u2019s Communication and Media Studies department. Jesse\u2019s work focuses on digital and data-driven campaigning in the US. She is the author of Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford UP, 2015), and she has published in Political Communication, New Media & Society, and International Journal of Communication, among […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":1017,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-689","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nReversion to the meme: A return to grassroots content - Election Analysis - United States<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2024\/section-6-digital-campaign\/reversion-to-the-meme-a-return-to-grassroots-content\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reversion to the meme: A return to grassroots content - Election Analysis - United States\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Dr. Jessica Baldwin-Philippi Associate Professor in Fordham University\u2019s Communication and Media Studies department. 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