Will being a meme help or hurt Kamala Harris's presidential campaign?

Kamala Harris is a meme-machine. Now that she's announced her plans to run for president of the United States, how will she stack up against the other master of the made-for-social media moment, Republican nominee and former president Donald Trump?

Today on Commotion, culture writers Charlie Warzel and Brea Baker join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to take stock of the presidential hopeful's image — and how her campaign can make the most of it.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Charlie, you talked about how Kamala's quirks are particularly well-suited for online discourse that revels in this weirdness and chaos. What did you mean?

Charlie: I think on today's internet, things that may have been liabilities before are now embraced. Younger people online really embrace and court chaos. I think that especially in comparison to Joe Biden as a candidate, who was having trouble connecting and articulating himself on the campaign trail with the usual political coherence, people were excited to embrace something different — a little more vibrant, maybe a little at times unhinged-seeming, and then to remix that to actually be unhinged.

Elamin: The idea of chaos uncorked being a currency is interesting to me. Maybe in service to that, Brea, do you want to talk about the way Kamala Harris is leaning into all these memes in these moments? Because Kamala's campaign seems to be very excited to have some material to already reference.

Brea: Absolutely…. You want there to be humour, and you don't want to be the butt of the joke; you want to be in on it. And I think she's now at a place where she's laughing with people, as opposed to it being like, "How do I come back from people laughing at me?" So that's a huge difference.

There's so much energy now. We were complaining for months about this lesser of two evils between two older white men, and now we have a Black and South Asian woman who's much younger. It's now putting the Republicans on a defense that they don't have the means ready, because right now they've been bombarding Biden and they can't use those lines on Kamala. So it's really working in her favour.

Elamin: It seems like Kamala Harris, as she arrives at this moment of being poised to become the Democratic nominee, kind of comes preloaded with all of this cultural currency — and largely, that cultural currency seems to live in memes. How do you see her campaign using some of that cultural currency?

Brea: For sure right now it's definitely fundraising. The online conversation and chatter around her is fueling numbers that are also going to serve the campaign in more legitimate ways. You can't really use a meme in official messaging, but you can use the fact that she's had an unprecedented 24 hours of fundraising that has never been matched in the history of running presidential campaigns. I think that's one major piece.

I hope, though, that they don't lean too hard into the meme because she's still right on the cusp. Right now, I think most of the momentum is coming from people being so excited to not have it be Trump versus Biden. But that will soon wear off, and if she only remains the "you fell out of a coconut tree" — like, she's kind of sounding like a life coach right now, and she has to sound like a president. She has to sound like she has a plan. Because ultimately, the Republicans have a plan. Project 2025 is a plan that is already in action. And if the memes go too long without being matched with some sort of substantive thing, then she runs the risk of being seen as not serious enough as a candidate.

Elamin: The thing that you're talking about there is what Charlie called a theory of attention. Charlie, you said that it doesn't really matter what [Joe Biden] said because after the debate, his image — the idea of his stiffness, his slow way of speaking — swallowed up anything that he had to say of substance. If we take that idea of a theory of attention and apply that to Kamala and all these memes that people have been talking about, how tough do you think it's going to be for her to get that substance out to the world?

Charlie: Well, I think she is getting some of the message out to some degree through the memes. If you listen to the coconut speech, there is something there about historical context, right? Something about memes is they're a joke; they're also Trojan horse delivery devices for ideas. And I think what the memes probably accomplish here is conveying complex policy details about what Kamala Harris wants for the country. But it does position her in some ways as someone who is having these serious and complex conversations. Maybe people don't want to elect someone who feels like a life coach as president, but I think they do want to elect a human being capable of deep and serious thoughts. So there's that element.

But what the memes demonstrate to me is that she, and now her campaign, have the ability to attract positive attention. She can go out and do things, and take the spotlight away from Donald Trump. There is an opportunity there because she is someone who can be magnetic, as opposed to the Biden campaign, which basically every time he was going out there he was creating an attack ad against himself just by his appearance and delivery.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low.