Inside the online army supercharging Kamala Harris’ campaign

Jaelyn Richter, a 27-year-old therapist in the Minneapolis suburbs, was painting her basement with her husband on Sunday when she realized she had the perfect song for a TikTok video about Kamala Harris.

Sitting for an hour at her kitchen island, she pieced together a music video on her phone by splicing emoji-adorned clips of Harris dancing over the voice of pop star Chappell Roan singing, “He doesn’t have what it takes to be … a girl like me.”

Richter said she had felt demoralized about politics for years. Her small TikTok following had only ever seen videos about her personal life and Taylor Swift. But in the moment, “it just felt like something had given me life again,” she said. The video has since been viewed more than a million times.

Harris’ rise as the Democrats’ likely presidential nominee following President Biden’s announcement he would step down has triggered a flood of online energy in the form of videos and memes designed to bolster her mass appeal.

The videos, often called “fan edits” or “fancams,” have cast Harris in the kind of light typically reserved for pop-culture icons, with thumping soundtracks, fast cuts and glittering visual effects. Many feature what supporters see as her most endearing moments, such as her marching dance alongside a drum line at a 2019 event in Des Moines.

The flood of viral political content carries echoes of the online “meme armies” that have flanked former president Donald Trump’s campaigns, built by supporters who see them as a critical way to reach mainstream audiences, using what one booster called the “21st century version of political cartoons.”

But the Harris videos show how the memes have evolved for a new TikTok era, fueled in part by young Americans fluent with the culture and craft of online video editing and eager to apply their skills to what they hope will be offline political gain.

Many of the most popular pro-Harris fancams come from political novices.

Some, like Richter, said they had never made a political video; one account, whose pro-Harris video has more than 500,000 views, specializes in fancams about Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola, from the reality show “Jersey Shore.”

But the fan videos could play a crucial role in helping introduce Harris to new voters and hype up those already loyal during a hugely contracted campaign calendar, with just over 100 days before the election.

“They’re so absurd that they work,” said Annie Wu Henry, a digital and political strategist who helped run Sen. John Fetterman’s TikTok during his 2022 campaign. “The videos draw people in and keep them engaged.”

On TikTok, Harris “edits,” “remixes” and memes rank among the top political searches, and many of the videos have millions of views. Her official campaign account there had gained nearly 400,000 followers on Tuesday, according to the data firm Social Blade – about as many as the Biden campaign’s now-closed account had gained after five months online.

Trump has for years boasted a giant online audience, and his supporters have boosted him through fan edits of their own. But Alex Pearlman, a comedian and news-content creator in Philadelphia with nearly 3 million TikTok followers, said social media has been flooded with the pro-Harris videos in a way he hasn’t seen since the campaigns of former president Barack Obama, who fans promoted with parody videos showing him kicking open doors and riding skateboards.

Many Harris videos, he noted, have worked to subvert Republican attacks seeking to portray Harris as flighty or “weird.” One clip of Harris posted to X last year by the Republican National Committee’s social media team, in which she laughed over her mother’s old saying about falling out of a coconut tree, has since become one of her supporters’ main emblems; many TikTok users jokingly refer to their goal of promoting her as part of “Project Coconut.”

“These are clearly clips that worked – people stopped and watched – but now with the addition of musical tracks and different edits, they’re being put into a new context,” Pearlman said. “A still image lasts only so long. But these fan edits … can fuel a whole narrative on their own.”

Fancams began as a hallmark of K-pop superfans, who would splice together their favorite songs and stars into vibrant video collages to showcase their adoration and pride. They have since evolved into one of the more dominant genres on short-video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, encompassing not just entertainment but political advocacy. The format has become so pervasive it was parodied last year on “Saturday Night Live.”

“K-pop paved the way for people to realize that fancams are a really good vehicle for people to express their excitement about someone,” said Don Caldwell, the editor in chief of Know Your Meme, a site that catalogues internet trends. “They get a lot of reach, and anytime you can get a lot of reach you’re able to potentially move the needle on public opinion.”

Lynsey Yunker, a 28-year-old freelance social media worker in Seattle, took about 15 minutes on Sunday to stitch together a fan edit of Harris with the Chappell Roan song “Femininomenon,” saying she’d made it as “a form of self-expression” while she tried to make sense of the news.

But as it quickly racked up attention online, including more than 6 million TikTok views, she began seeing impact in the form of comments like “I just registered to vote” and “hopefully society can meme her into presidency.”

Yunker called memes “a language” for her generation, comparing them to “a modern-day version of guerrilla marketing.” But she also said the videos’ mass appeal reflect a broader shift in energy among young liberals.

“We’re so used to just feeling like there’s nothing we can do … and we have to just kind of laugh and watch,” she said. “This is the first time in a long time where we’ve thought maybe, maybe, fingers crossed, things could start turning around.”

Harris’ campaign has tried to ride the enthusiasm with its own social media activity, including by posting fancam-inspired videos to its rapidly growing TikTok account. Its most successful so far – juxtaposing photos of Harris at work with Trump playing golf, also set to “Femininomenon” – has been viewed more than 35 million times.

But some worry the campaign’s videos could backfire if their intensity turns off voters who see them as inside jokes for the terminally online. Jules Terpak, a content creator and digital strategist, said the Harris campaign needed to try hard not to undermine the trend’s sense of novelty and spontaneity, thereby spoiling the fun.

“It’s fine for Kamala HQ to tastefully lean into a meme or trend when it’s growing, but they need to be careful about leaning in too far and messing with the organic nature of the movement,” Terpak said.

Trump’s campaign, she said, had won viral success on TikTok by offering “fly-on-the-wall content” of the former president’s life. Rather than make their own fancams, Terpak said, Harris’ team could work to provide more raw material for fans online to create their own.

“Online marketers have learned over time that you have to let fans do what they’re going to do,” Pearlman said. “Otherwise you can come out looking like the out-of-touch substitute teacher saying, ‘You’re all that and a bag of chips.’”

Jamie Cohen, a media professor at Queens College in New York, said the videos seemed to flourish by offering a lighthearted counter to the divisive “rage-baiting dumpster fire” that has grown to characterize political discourse online.

For Gen Z voters, who have “only seen garbage when it comes to campaigns,” the fancams have helped highlight what he called Harris’ “endearing awkwardness” – her openness to “being herself and showing what others might traditionally think is cringe.”

What made them especially powerful for Americans, he added, was that they were not crafted by a central campaign team but by the users themselves. “I actually don’t know where this is going, and that’s part of the joy,” he said.

But the enthusiasm is not just among Americans. Ronnie Parsons, 16, used a booming rap song to make and post a Harris fan edit on Monday while bored on summer break – despite living in London, and therefore being unable to vote.

Some of his 16,000 followers were surprised by the pivot from his usual videos about TV shows like “The Boys” and “Heartbreak High.” But Parsons said he felt nervous enough about Trump’s global impact that he wanted to apply his talents toward boosting Harris’ chances. His video, which drew comments like “PROJECT COCONUT IS A GO,” has since been viewed more than 250,000 times.

“As 16-year-olds, people act like we don’t necessarily have the life experience. But our videos can reach millions of people,” he said in an interview. “I just feel like, as Gen Z, we’re being taken more seriously on social media. Even just me getting on my laptop and posting can support the movement.”