“Kamala is Brat.”
With a single tweet from pop superstar Charlie XCX, a digital comms strategy was born. As “Brat Summer” began to take hold, the critically-acclaimed hyperpop album’s impact spread far and wide. It was no surprise that as soon as a relevant politician got an opportunity to latch onto it, they did. That politician was Kamala Harris.
Months later, one thing is clear: this appeal to pop culture did not work for Vice President Harris. But why?
It was a perfectly timed effort to wade into one of the most popular trends of the year, yet it failed to convince voters to go to the polls. The failure of the Brat campaign strategy may be easier to understand than you think.
5| It Didn't Make Much Sense
A primary issue that the Harris campaign faced when choosing to jump onto the Brat pop culture phenomenon was that they never truly identified what was “Brat” about the campaign to begin with. Brat, as it was pushed by Charlie XCX, was a vibe describing participation in the club and party scene. What Brat represented was a care-free club aesthetic and energy steeped in a party culture that has long been fostered by the pop and electronic music scenes – scenes that are, at the surface, seemingly progressive.
When you pair that energy with the corporate Democratic messaging of the Harris campaign, you have a problem. It became clear rather quickly that no matter how hard they might have tried to jump on the bandwagon, the Harris campaign was always going to be an insider trying to pose as an outsider. The energy of her campaign and policies just… didn’t match the theme.
The Harris campaign was posing as a hip, trendy movement when the reality could not have been further from the truth, and they did little to actually justify the label – instead opting for aesthetically pleasing but ultimately shallow TikTok edits and the occasional viral Twitter moment.
All of that assuming that there was even much to be gained from the trend at all…
4 | It Felt Forced…
For campaigns, especially those in Democratic circles, riding the trends and coming across as “hip” is a critical part of what many deem to be an effective social media strategy. (How could we ever forget “Pokemon go to the polls?”) The Democratic Party knows that it has a problem: To win, they need the youth vote, but to mobilize the youth they have to engage them. Riding the pop culture wave was how the Harris campaign tried to win this vital group over.
The issue though, is that the real engagement from these interactions is shallow, despite what the engagement numbers might indicate. Yes, a Brat Summer Kamala Tiktok edit or tweet can pop off in spectacular fashion. However, that high is cheap and fleeting. When the election comes around it leaves many young voters knowing little more than that the campaign is cool enough to know the trending topics and… well… that’s it.
Rather than growing roots in the spaces they need, campaigns are opting to have very shallow and superficial campaigns more focused on being flashy than on explaining their positions.
That’s because…
3 | Surface Level Politics Net Surface Level Appeal…
No matter how much the Harris campaign tried to be Brat, their effectiveness was ultimately undermined by the campaign’s refusal to seriously engage in policy discussions with its base. It was easy to be surface level, but being surface level meant that they never grew the roots they needed to effectively mobilize the voters that they needed to get to the polls.
Millions of people who were part of the Biden coalition did not come out to vote on November 5th. You can absolutely account for racism and sexism being part of the reason why that happened, but it is evident that the social media strategy of the Harris campaign also played a role. They went for a vibes-based campaign, and the result was what we should have expected.
That’s because for all that engagement…
2 | Engagement Does Not Equal Success…
There is no doubt that the “Kamala is Brat” strategy paid off big in one realm: analytics. The engagement numbers for the social media efforts of the campaign were about the best you could hope for, with impressions skyrocketing into the millions.
Those numbers likely told a very good, but ultimately flawed story. The campaign likely saw the engagement they were receiving and felt confident that they were on the right track. With millions tuning into every post, there was likely little thought given to whether or not they needed to move beyond Brat. What should’ve been a rule was just not taken into account: Social media engagement does not equal voter mobilization. It is easy to catch someone’s attention, but that is a very different demon than getting them to wake up on election day and go to the polls to cast a vote for you.
For the Harris campaign, engagement was the indicator of success, even if other indicators were sending off warning signs throughout the campaign. It led to a false sense of security that was shattered when millions decided that even if Kamala was Brat (whatever that meant), they weren’t bought in.
So voters stayed home. That’s because at the end of the day…
1 | People Want Substance and To Be Taken Seriously…
The core issue of the failure of Brat in the Kamala campaign was that it contributed to a much more problematic image that was becoming more tied to the campaign by the day. To many, the campaign was not taking its base seriously.
Voters from across the political spectrum felt like they were screaming at a wall, and they felt like they weren’t taken seriously in the process. When your base has legitimate concerns and grievances, and your only response is canned lines and pop culture references, you will miss the mark every single time. At the end of the day, voters want to know if their political leaders are going to fight for them and take them seriously. As much as Brat may have supercharged the campaign’s online presence, it failed when combined with the larger structural problems of the campaign.
People don’t want to hear about Brat when they’re struggling to put food on the table, when they can’t pay their bills, when they are witnessing humanitarian disasters, or when a white nationalist is on the verge of entering the White House – they want solutions. At the end of the day, no amount of vibes-based pop culture politics is going to beat good old-fashioned retail politics. A shallow aesthetic will never trump real solutions to people’s problems.
Unfortunately, that lesson was learned in the worst of ways.
So – What are your thoughts on “Kamala is Brat”? What would you have done differently?
Sound off below!
