Presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz debuted merchandise last week that contains references to hyper-online phrases or moments. The Harris campaign may be chronically online, but its strategy is working: The Harris-Walz ticket comes across as energetic and fun, which Donald Trump hasn’t yet been able to rival.
First there was Harris’s “brat” rebrand — a pop-culture nod to singer Charli XCX’s new album, Brat. Charli XCX describes a brat as: “You’re just that girl who is a little messy, and likes to party, and maybe says some dumb things some times.” She said in a now-viral tweet that Kamala “IS brat.”
If Harris’s pop-culture twin is Charli XCX, Tim Walz’s is Chappelle Roan, an eccentric singer who dresses like a drag queen and whose breakout album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess the internet has tied to midwesterner Walz. Roan, from Missouri, sells a popular camouflage cap with the orange words “Midwest Princess.” Naturally, the Kamala-Walz campaign released a camo cap with “Harris-Walz” embroidered in orange block letters. The design is also printed on a beer koozie.
The Midwestern-princess-inspired hat reached $1 million in sales after 24 hours. TikTok videos of Harris laughing and dancing to the tune of “Brat” have amassed millions of views.
The campaign also released a “Childless cat lady” T-shirt and mug, in reference to Republican vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance’s comment that “we’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” There’s also a “Free on Wednesdays” tee, memorabilia from President Joe Biden’s campaign. Biden blithely challenged Trump to a presidential debate in late June, saying, “I hear you’re free on Wednesdays,” as Wednesday was the only weekday Trump wouldn’t be involved in a court hearing.
When the race was between Biden and Trump, young voters were choosing between two rather unfathomable candidates — Harris is different. Best of all, Harris’s newfound popularity doesn’t seem that manufactured by her campaign. Online, it presents as a spontaneous reaction to a candidate younger, more spry, and easier to stomach than either of the previous two. Trump turned pro-TikTok this year, mainly because his vendetta against his professed “enemy” Facebook is stronger than his concern about Chinese propaganda, and the platform has become a key part of his campaign. Trump has 9.9 million followers, and Harris has only 4.3 million — but Trump has yet to catch a similar “vibe” (sorry to Noah, who’d like that term to be retired).