‘Kamala is brat’: The viral pop meme driving the Harris election campaign

Within a day of Kamala Harris launching her presidential bid in the United States, her campaign account on X, KamalaHQ, had gained more than 500,000 followers.
Could her account’s header image, the words “kamala hq” sprawled across a chartreuse backdrop in deliberately low resolution, have something to do with the surge in online support for Harris?
The campaign rebrand mimics the cover art for English singer Charli XCX’s recent album called brat. The rebrand came soon after Charli herself endorsed Vice President Harris in a three-word X post that rattled cyberspace on Monday and that Harris’s campaign quickly appropriated: “kamala IS brat.”
Brat is Charli’s sixth studio album, released on June 7.
In the album, Charli unpacks womanhood, jealousy, generational trauma, confidence and vulnerability in 15 upbeat hyperpop tracks. It offers a laid-back, nostalgic synth-pop experience and features several other successful female artists, such as Italian-American model Julia Fox and New Zealand singer Lorde.
The album cover is a bright-green square with “brat” written on it in a simple, low-res font.

In a TikTok interview, Charli described a brat as “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things some times”. It’s a sentiment that’s resonated with many.
Her album has fared well, hitting the third spot on the Billboard 200 list at one point. One of the tracks, 360, has more than 93 million streams on Spotify. Such is the success of the album that some commentators have called this the “brat summer”, and hundreds of thousands of TikTok videos feature the album’s songs.
The concept behind brat has taken the internet by storm, and several online users have appropriated her album cover’s style, writing often humorous or outrageous messages against a bright green, or brat-green, backdrop.

Brat summer manifests itself in all things bright and green, ranging from bratwurst:

… to the late Queen Elizabeth:

The Harris campaign has leaned into the brat summer trend — no holds barred.

On Monday, the campaign’s fast-exploding X account announced the creation of an Instagram campaign page, kamalahq. The pinned post on the Instagram account is a photo carousel that includes a screenshot of Charli’s tweet as well as a brat-green square that says, “welcome to kamala hq. this is the official rapid response page of vice president Harris’ presidential campaign.”
The post is captioned, “And when we put this to bed the internet will go crazy,” a reference to a song on the album titled Girl, so confusing, which went viral after Charli released a version with Lorde.

Harris’s campaign is also using trending music by other artists. Its TikTok account posted a carousel to Femininominon — a play on the words ‘feminine’ and ‘phenomenon’ — a song by American singer Chappell Roan, 26.
Charli’s audience is young — a demographic Harris desperately needs to tap.
Until President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday, many American voters were upset by the prospect of a continued gerontocracy as they decided between Biden, 81, and former President Donald Trump, 78.
A February poll conducted by BBC and the research agency Ipsos found that 59 percent of US voters believed both Biden and Trump were too old for another term as president. An additional 27 percent of respondents felt this way about Biden, but not Trump.
Democrats seemed to be in particular trouble: A CNN poll from April showed Biden trailing Trump by 11 percentage points among voters aged 18 to 34.
It did not help that Biden recently made a series of public gaffes and gave a disastrous debate performance against Trump, in which he appeared to lose his train of thought.
Harris, 59, is widely expected to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination and, in a contest against Trump, would be the younger of the two candidates.

Charlotte Emma Aitchison, who is professionally known as Charli XCX, is a 31-year-old English singer and songwriter. Her mother comes from a Gujarati Indian family and was born in Uganda. Her father is Scottish.
She started experimenting with music and posting her tracks on MySpace, a popular social networking site in the early 2000s.
Charli rose to fame around 2014 when she collaborated with Australian rapper Iggy Azalea on one of the best-selling singles that year called Fancy. The same year, Charli wrote a song titled Boom Clap for the soundtrack of the film The Fault in Our Stars.
Charli has largely been apolitical on her social media and has not commented on world affairs or politicians. But about two months ago, the singer shared a link to donate to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund on Instagram.
Charli’s endorsement of Harris inspired a series of memes, seemingly in support.
One user posted an edit featuring several video clips of Harris against a remix of the brat track Von dutch.

However, others were upset, expressing disappointment over Charli’s endorsement, citing Harris’s backing of Israel’s war on Gaza among reasons for their discontent. More than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war.

The first meme to stick to Harris’s presidential bid was the “coconut tree” meme. The coconut tree is a reference to a speech Harris made last year, quoting something her mother said during her childhood.
“She would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,’” Harris said.
Soon pictures of coconut trees and coconut and palm tree emojis started making the rounds on the internet.