By Anna Broussard | Washington Examiner
The college-protesting, trend-obsessing generation raised on Tiktok has become a powerful voting demographic for the 2024 presidential election — and Vice President Kamala Harris has been attempting to influence the younger generation.
Generation Z, whose first presidential election was in 2016, has increased in political importance. But who will win the votes in November among Gen Zers? It would seem that Harris has been more successful as she “out-memes” former President Donald Trump.
The power of social media cannot be underestimated for Gen Z. With influencer culture being a defining factor in trends that produce infectious groupthink, the appeal to Gen Z is quite simple: Campaign on what is trending. Harris has adopted this model.
At Harris’s second rally as the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, rapper Megan Thee Stallion performed for attendees. Stallion, whose top charted songs have been the origin of many viral TikTok trends, is a household name among younger generations. Unfortunately, that makes her audience reach significant.
“Hotties for Harris,” Stallion told the crowds at the rally after provocatively dancing to her vulgar music.
Stallion’s mantra for Harris’s campaign comes more than a week after President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from his reelection bid. And as support for Harris became widespread, the vice president received an oddly significant endorsement from British pop-star Charli XCX. The popular singer posted on X a viral tagline “Kamala IS brat,” and social media erupted.
The term originated from Charlie XCX’s album Brat, which features a Shrek-green background and black pixelated lettering, and has become the “summer mentality” for most Gen Zers, oddly enough. The phrase adopts a new sort of identity for Gen Z — a carelessness about everything that could be cared for is a good way to generalize Gen Z’s most recent fad.
Shortly after Charli XCX posted, Harris’s campaign X account, KamalaHQ, changed its profile to resemble the album, launching a new campaign model: Meme your way to the White House.
It is shameful that the evident identity crisis of Gen Z has evolved this way into shallow politics. It is abhorrent that Stallion, whose music features lines such as “P***y like water, I’m unbothered and relaxing,” is the headliner at a campaign rally. It is worse that Charli XCX, who is not an American citizen, has enough influence within Gen Z to start a trend favoring Harris for president.
Harris should not earn the votes of Americans through memes or politicizing pop culture icons to play a role in her campaign. Politics should be about policy. Pop culture wars between the Left and the Right should not be the defining portion of Gen Z’s political experience.
While Harris can continue to cover up her terrible policy, unlikeable nature, and failures as vice president by meme-ing her way to gain Gen Z’s votes, it will be a temporary influence at best. My generation and our record eight-second attention span has a cycle. In the end, bad trends are easily forgotten.
