“kamala IS brat,” tweeted singer Charli XCX on Sunday, following Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascension to the presidential nominee slot left vacant by President Joe Biden. Despite Charli XCX’s own advanced age of 31, she was speaking in slang immediately obvious to anyone under 30, especially the girls and the gays: brat is the album of the summer, with a distinctive neon green cover, full of references to Dimes Square podcaster-provocateurs, Julia Fox, party-girling hard, and—somehow, simultaneously—the lady anxiety that sets in when you’re on the wrong side of your twenties and have not yet had a child.
Harris’ team eagerly turned what they believed to be a pop star endorsement into a branding strategy; the X account “Kamala HQ” (1.1 million followers) adopted the distinctive color, font, and lowercase style Charli XCX’s brat to craft their own banner image, reading “kamala hq.“ Meanwhile, the gay guys of New York City, who received the news of Biden pulling out whilst in their natural habit (Fire Island), quickly made crop tops in the exact same style of brat. A mashup cut of one of Harris’ cringiest lines—some anecdote about coconut trees—was set to Charli XCX’s song “Von dutch.” It has received over 4 million views.
“The internet is going crazy for Harris’ campaign,” declares The 19th, a gender and politics website. Harris’ “meme stock is bullish,” adds CNN, which devoted a panel to the topic, in which a suit-wearing boomer tried, inartfully, to explain the craze to the rest. “Is Kamala Harris ‘brat’?” asks The Economist, calling 2024 “America’s TikTok election.” “Younger celebs are aiming to help Harris by tying her to their viral and loyal social media brands,” explains the Associated Press rather clinically.
“A brat should exude the je ne sais quoi of the famous-but-not-A-list women,” writes Shirley Li, giving the phenomenon an overly intellectualized treatment typical of The Atlantic. “The brat is a classic feminine archetype, right up there with the jezebel, the crone, the bimbo, the career girl,” writes Kat Rosenfield for The Free Press. “Brats are Cinderella’s stepsisters, lacking both social graces and appropriate gratitude for the privileges they enjoy.”
But what the hungry internet, full of writers looking for takes, and the Harris campaign miss is that being “brat” is not really a compliment.
“Brat” is someone who, per Charli XCX’s own description, walks around with a “pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra.” A girl “who feels like herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things.”
For the media to run with the idea that Harris has the youth vote locked down, because Charli XCX fired off a tweet (that may have been trolling) that took approximately 30 seconds to craft, betrays a certain thirst from all parties for an Obama 2.0-type campaign or for Harris to become a galvanizing Bernie Sanders-like figure. Perhaps more importantly, it contradicts the polling.
Harris is overall “doing much worse against Trump than Biden did in 2020” among youth voters, notes CNN polling analyst Harry Enten, which is backed up by Quinnipiac University polling conducted between July 19 and 21. “Moreover, young Democrats are NOT disproportionately more motivated to vote than other Democrats because of Biden’s exit,” notes Enten. A more recent New York Times/Siena College polling data complicates this narrative a bit, finding that “Harris fares better among young (18 to 29) and Hispanic voters than Mr. Biden did in any survey this year,” which may not really be saying much. Biden performed notoriously poorly among these groups, so an improvement at the margins is good for Democrats, but possibly not a game changer. (“Conversely, [Harris] fares worse among white working-class voters and voters over 65 than Mr. Biden did in all but one prior Times/Siena poll,” notes the same writeup.)
Perhaps more importantly, it’s just really not the youth vote that actually matters this time around. It’s nice to have, yes, but Harris needs to win Pennsylvania. Harris needs to win Arizona. Harris needs to win Michigan. Harris needs to win Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina. If she can gain traction with younger voters in those states, and/or meaningfully affect youth voter turnout, then that’s helpful. Otherwise, the “Von dutch” memes don’t mean squat.
“Young voters continue to feel largely negative about politics and voting, but hopefulness has increased since June,” finds Change Research in a report released Wednesday that finds young people are in fact excited about Harris and more likely to turn out as a result. But still, “the top emotions associated with voting are all negative: in a select-all question, 53% chose ‘anxious,’ 43% ‘fearful,’ 38% ‘overwhelmed,’ and 37% ‘angry.’ But hopefulness has risen from 23% to 30%” following Biden’s exit and Harris’ entry into the race.
Kamala isn’t brat. Kamala is a mediocre candidate, perceived as a kooky wine aunt who says outlandish things, capitalizing on a moment of virality amid an otherwise bleak political landscape in which young voters realize that politicians rarely deliver on their promises.
Scenes from New York: The Department of Sanitation is trying to get New Yorkers to become snitches.
QUICK HITS
- “California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order Thursday to direct state agencies on how to remove homeless encampments, a month after a Supreme Court ruling allowing cities to enforce bans on sleeping outside in public spaces,” reports the Associated Press.
- Sinaloa Cartel leaders have been arrested by U.S. authorities.
- Both Barack and Michelle Obama endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a slightly cringe call that the Harris campaign released as a campaign video.
- The French train system has been hit by arsonists merely hours before the Olympics is scheduled to start.
- Boy, Kamala Harris sure knows how to appeal to Rust Belt normies:
????????BREAKING: Kamala Harris just started her official campaign with Ru Paul and his drag queens. pic.twitter.com/EJ1ccMEcO7
— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) July 25, 2024
