Kamala Harris Clinches the Crucial Brat Vote, Thanks to Charli XCX

Maybe it’s time to add a “Harris 2024” bumper sticker to the Brat Summer Starter Pack, right alongside “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, and a strappy white top with no bra.” British singer Charli XCX has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in her bid for the presidency in the wake of President Joe Biden withdrawing his reelection campaign Sunday.

“Kamala IS brat,” Charli tweeted Sunday evening, shortly after Biden’s announcement and subsequent endorsement of Harris.

Ever since Charli released her album Brat on June 7, the term has been used to describe the rejection of the “clean girl” aesthetic that has prevaled in recent years, and moreover, an attitude that Harris appears to be eager to embrace, framing herself as not only in with Gen Z, but a real, feeling, getting-stuff-done human being among the staid suits of DC. Barack Obama may have been emblematic of “hope,” stunning the masses with revolutionary ideas like “web design” and “social media accounts” back in 2008, but Harris is taking things further, with her campaign promptly swapping its social media header images to reflect Charli’s album cover art, lime green background, lo-fi lowercase Arial font and all.

As a Brit, Charli can’t vote in the upcoming election, but she’s a powerful surrogate in courting the Gen Z vote nonetheless, and her definitions of “brat” can further serve to characterize Harris as an outlier among her fellow candidates.

“You are just that girl who is a little messy and maybe says dumb things sometimes, who feels herself but then also maybe has a breakdown but parties through it,” the singer elaborated on the concept of “brat” on TikTok. “It is honest, blunt, and a little bit volatile. That’s Brat.”

And then there's the coconut tree of it all: Harris isn’t new to social media stardom, most recently evidenced by endless memes using a line from a May 2023 speech recounting her mother's expression, “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” followed by braying laughter before quickly gathering herself and continuing to speak in earnest. The content of the speech—about considering context and the needs of others while taking care of yourself—matters less than the humanity it represented and the cascade of takes, littered with coconut and palm tree emojis that continue.

You can't miss the memes: There’s the fan edit of Harris clips set to Charli’s songs “Von Dutch” and “360,” the latter changing a lyric from “I’m so Julia,” a reference to actor Julia Fox, to “I’m so Kamala,” and the one combining the audio with Britney Spears’ “Gimme More,” among them. The brats have spoken, and Harris’s newly slime-green campaign welcomes them and their viral meme-making abilities, a stark contrast to the gauze-wrapped ears Donald Trump's supporters donned proudly at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last week.

Even in 2019, ahead of being announced as Biden’s running mate the first time around, Harris showed signs of being the internet’s favorite politico, leading the pack over Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and her own future boss, Biden, in terms of number of social media interactions. In a three-month period spanning November 2018 to February 2019, Axios clocked 16.5 million interactions on posts with articles about Harris, roughly three times Biden's 5.7 million. Obama may have been the first president to truly acknowledge the power of the internet, but Harris is breaking new ground in embracing its cultural potential.