The Triumphant Comeback of the Kamala Harris Meme

The same unflattering supercuts and Photoshop jobs once used to denigrate Harris have now been flipped into celebratory artifacts of her candidacy.

Kamala Harris is a highly memeable presidential candidate. She dances in a loose and enthusiastic manner. She has an idiosyncratic speaking style. She laughs easily, including at herself. This has not always worked in her favor.

When Harris said, in a May 2023 speech, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?,” a Republican YouTube channel snipped the clip from its context and tossed it to commentators, who used it to compare Harris to a daffy talk show host or to joke that she sounded high. Videos of Harris dancing at campaign events were labeled “cringe.” The stickiest anti-Kamala meme of the 2020 election — that the former prosecutor Harris “is a cop” — united leftists, Black Twitter and Republican trolls in an internet-wide project of framing Harris as either a reactionary or a hypocrite.

Now these images have been reversed. Since President Biden bowed out of the race and threw his support to Harris, the familiar old Kamala memes have risen again. It’s their interpretation that has changed.

In the hands of her online fans, Harris’s word salad has been replated as hypnotic internet speak. Her confounding coconut tree quote — “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” she went on to say — now circulates as a symbol of the giddy high produced by her dizzy rise in a destabilized campaign. Her dance moves have been set to Charli XCX songs and filtered through Charli’s lime-green “Brat”-era branding, bathing Harris in her chill hot-mess pop star glow. Even “Kamala Harris is a cop” has been reclaimed, with an exaggerated wink, by supporters eager to fashion it into a winning general-election pitch.

The measure of a candidate’s charisma used to be, “Would you have a beer with her?” Now it’s more like, “Are you willing to spend your evening editing a fancam-style video that sets her idiosyncrasies to pop music so effectively that they produce a pleasant narcotic effect?”

All of it feels like a fun house mirror to the online energy that vibrates around the other party’s presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump. The Trump fandom stands ready and willing to spin any potential weakness, up to and including a felony conviction, into a triumphant meme. The MAGA stan proves his loyalty and ingenuity by processing even the gravest concerns into pro-Trump grist, thus maximizing his satisfaction at triggering the left. It once seemed as if the Democratic Party could never produce a candidate who could inspire an internet response quite that powerful and strange. Now, improbably, it has.