In a Pew Research Survey published in June of 2024, 22% of U.S adults over the age of 18 say they use X. In a survey of US adults conducted in March, 74% of those users say they see some form of political content on the platform, and 59% say that keeping up with politics and following political issues is one of the main reasons they use it. If information about politics on X is a large way the American electorate is informed, then how does the way this information spreads and its contents impact the voting decisions they choose to make.
The 2024 presidential election was unprecedented in many ways. When the campaign started, it was the first time that two presidential nominees faced a rematch since 1956. It was only the second time in history that a president was elected, “split term,” and it was the first time a president convicted of felony crimes ran and was elected to office. Moreover, it was the first time since the modern presidential primary process started in the 1970s that a presidential candidate dropped out after winning a majority of the delegates in primary elections. When Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21st giving his, “full support and endorsement” to his Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris. What ensued was the “shortest runway of any Presidential campaign in modern history,” (NPR 2024) according to NPR.
Knowing that digital media was a major playing field and with no time to lose, the Harris campaign jumped onto X, Instagram, Tiktok and Facebook, with the handle HarrisHQ churning out political content that was unlike that produced by the Biden or Trump campaigns. A breakthrough moment occurred shortly after Harris’s endorsement when the British Popstar Charli XCX tweeted, “Kamala IS brat,” on July 21st. The tweet received 62.4 million views, 58,000 retweets, and 4,000 comments.
So what is brat?
Released on June 7th 2024, Brat is the name of singer Charli XCX’s sixth studio album. It’s branding was very prominent, featuring bright green colors and a distinctive arial narrow font. It represented a brand of women that Charli believed to be creating through her music. Most of all, it was a cultural phenomenon that took off on social media. After Charli deemed Harris, “brat” herself, remixes of songs from the album combined with live footage of Harris on the campaign trail began to take off, especially on X and Tiktok.
Brat represents a full court press on the part of the Harris campaign to capitalize on a pop culture phenomenon and expand its outreach to younger users of online platforms. It represented a stark push for relevancy and momentum going into the Fall election season.
Results of the election
Despite the voter mobilization both on the ground and through social media conducted by the Harris campaign, history would have it that Harris fell short. She lost the presidential election to Donald J. Trump on Tuesday November 5th by nearly 25 million popular votes, and 86 electoral college votes. Underperforming in many of the counties where Biden did well in 2020 and democrats swept the 2022 midterm elections, her campaign was left to ponder what went wrong and why.
While voter mobilization on the ground and electoral strategy play a large role in the outcome of the election, my analysis focuses solely on the trends and outcomes of the Harris campaign on X.