Kamala Harris Is Going All In on a Bold Campaign Strategy—and Risking the Election With It
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe Democrats are betting big on the TikTok generation and spurning traditional media in the process., Kamala Harris: Why the Democrats are betting on creators and influencers to send them to the White House.
While accepting the presidential nomination at last week’s Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris gave a speech light on specifics yet energized with passion, cementing her status as the ‘just vibes’ candidate of this election cycle. Meanwhile, there were many cellphones in sight to capture the moment.
This year, for the DNC’s first in-person gathering since Hillary Clinton’s nomination, the Democratic Party offered credentials to more than 200 influencers and ‘content creators’ operating across the most dominant digital platforms of our day: YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok. (The latter app is still on track to be ‘banned’ from the United States by the beginning of next year, but no one at the convention seemed to have that doomsday clock on their mind.) Reporters there from traditional media sources—including this one—complained about the less-than-ideal working conditions offered to them, while digital natives dressed up for yacht parties hosted on Lake Michigan.
The ‘uncommitted’ delegates elected to the convention by protest voters angered by the Biden–Harris administration’s material support for the bloodshed in Gaza were refused a speaking slot, although at least five influencers earned chances to address the audience on issues like reproductive rights and climate change. Journalists and influencers were both subject to passes with varying tiers of access and had to fight to claim the scarce seating allotted to press.
The current moment of media transition, and whom it will favor, was made pretty clear throughout: Democrats, the party that prided itself on supporting institutions and norms of accountability during the Trump years, are embracing this video-centric moment and the journalistic haziness that comes with it. The name of the game is no longer TV appearances, social media graphics, and tweeted platitudes. It’s vertical video all the way down, filtered through the adoring hosts behind the cameras. At this point, influencers are far more trusted by their audiences than journalists and news anchors are by theirs. Maybe these creators shouldn’t be, considering how opaque they tend to be on questions of who’s actually funding their hustle and their travel and their messaging—and whether that may present any conflicts.
The Democratic Party is no stranger to the super-online realms, having consistently courted virtual scenesters since the Clinton years—everyone from Silicon Valley’s first internet visionaries, to the unvarnished and voicey bloggers of the early 2000s, to the short-form video stars Joe Biden relied upon to maximize his reach in 2020, a year when electioneering was constricted by a lethal pandemic. (Remember his custom Fortnite map?) Still, while digital creators may once have worked as just another part of the general publicity apparatus, this time they may be the entire story.
Having decisively won the youth vote in 2020, Biden lost favor with the key demographic as Gen Z commentators disapproved of his hawkish approaches to fossil-fuel drilling and Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Harris doesn’t want to lose the polling and favorability boosts she has been enjoying since her late entry into the race offered a fresh reset opportunity with liberal and lefty voters—and also earned her a coronation from Charli XCX herself as a fellow brat. Coupled with the fact that Harris is a dynamic speaker, not quite as old as many others in her party, and still vague on what exactly she wishes to do should she become commander in chief, there’s plenty of room for her to pick up the slack with the disaffected youth who get their news mostly on social platforms. (The Conscious Lee, one of those influencers unhappy with Biden over Gaza, made it to this DNC with a kaffiyeh on.) So it’s no wonder she’s planning to start her own Twitch channel.
So much has changed since the previous ‘real’ DNC in 2016, especially online. Traditional media enjoyed a short-lived ‘Trump bump’ in metrics and money, then continued to crater. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram faced down international scrutiny over the misinformation and foreign influence operations that saturated their websites, causing the latter two to pull back from news-sharing altogether. The COVID lockdowns spurred plenty of digital organizers to shift to livestreaming outlets like Zoom, prepping them for even more cross-state mass mobilization once Biden dropped out. TikTok emerged and skyrocketed, shifting the entire culture and becoming a key forum for youth politics.
The life span of the world wide web has seen alternative text-based media give way to microblogging, which then gave way to primarily visual media, which then gave way to lives fully lived online, in front of a phone camera, directed on your face, meant to please the almighty algorithms. The libertarian intellects of Web 1.0 lost their place to cringe culture; subsequently, zoomers crowded out millennials on the information superhighway. When a more youthful vice president finally took cultural primacy over her older, quieter, much more publicity-shy superior, younger generations were even more primed to pounce on that moment.
That leaves a lot of room for hyperactive joy and community-building iconography, which both Harris and Tim Walz have been able to play into with pizzazz and panache, as my colleague Scott Nover notes. With it, however, comes a more uncertain question of what our ‘mainstream media’ really will look like going forward and how the fourth estate will challenge those in power. Dispatches from the DNC indicated that its youngest, most digitally literate attendees held the Clinton dynasty in awe while knowing nothing of Monica Lewinsky. They were provided ‘messaging and campaign details so they [could] serve as catalysts for that information,’ per CBS News. They were also personally offered assistance from the convention planners in meeting Democratic Party officials. Kamala Harris made time to speak with three different influencers at the DNC, and she still hasn’t done a TV, magazine, or newspaper interview as a candidate.
There’s reason to worry here that the so-far press-avoidant Harris campaign will be content to ride vibes based solely on programmed influencer discourse alone: The punditry, much like the Biden brain trust, did not hold her in the highest regard during either her 2019 primary run or her vice presidency. This election also remains existential enough that Harris likely would not like to alienate, well, anybody who’s open to the idea of voting for her—so why risk pissing them off?
But the youth also remain attuned to what’s still happening in Gaza, the realities of systemic racism and police brutality, the reason their planet is literally on fire, and what it feels like when the people they campaign for disappoint them in such regards. When they inevitably begin to question Harris further, will the campaign’s digital strategists be ready to meet that moment?
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