Baranyai: Young people suddenly engaged in U.S election and results are hilarious

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The Harris honeymoon is riding the wave of a “brat summer”; fancams on TikTok are promoting “project coconut”; and the over-30 crowd is just trying to keep up without sounding too cringe.

As the presumptive Democratic candidate, U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris has injected youth and vitality into the ticket. She is buoyed by a groundswell of volunteers and new donors. Young people are getting inspired and involved, bringing fresh voices and momentum to the campaign.

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Witness the explosion of fancams splicing together people’s favourite clips of Harris dancing, laughing and repeating her mother’s refrain: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”

When British pop star Charli XCX tweeted “kamala IS brat,” the endorsement was delivered in a pitch audible only to Gen Z ears. The campaign ran with it, rebranding the KamalaHQ page on X in the style of the singer’s slime-green album cover.

The digital team running KamalaHQ (formerly BidenHQ) is entirely younger than 25, the Washington Post reports. The account called the former president “Duckin’ Don” after his elaborate equivocations about whether he will debate Harris, a provocation only slightly more dignified than supporters’ tweets depicting the Republican nominee in a chicken suit.

An election season of name calling seems inevitable, with the Democrats trying to beat the notoriously thin-skinned “Trumpletoes” at his own game.

More impactful are their campaign ads, contrasting Harris’s record with that of her opponent. Harris used the same strategy during the 2020 Democratic nomination. “He’s a world leader, in temper tantrums,” the narrator begins, over footage of the former president shoving his way to the front of a group of NATO leaders. “She prosecuted sex predators; he is one.”

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Four years later, the contrast between prosecutor and felon is even sharper. As in the pussy hat days, women are reinvigorated, not only by a strong female candidate, but the repugnance of the alternatives, who seem intent on alienating half the population.

J.D. Vance has distinguished himself as a forced-birth extremist, bent on ramming his personal faith down other people’s ovaries. The Republican pick for vice-president comes across like a squishy Harrison Butker. His rhapsodic devotion to traditional heteronormative family structures goes the radical extra mile, suggesting additional votes for parents, instead of basic democratic equality.

With his 2021 comments disrespecting “childless cat ladies” as people with no “direct stake” in the country, Vance has succeeded in picking a fight with some of the biggest fandoms on the planet, from Dolly Parton to Taylor Swift. The onslaught of cat memes was fast and furious.

High-ranking Democrats are now focused on depicting the Republican nominees and their preoccupations as “weird.” It’s more satisfying, however, to simply watch them hoist themselves on their own petard.

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Young people are good at this. The fancams virtually write themselves.

One might splice sound bytes of the presidential candidate bragging he’ll be a “dictator on Day 1” over the guillotine assembled by the Jan. 6 mob. Or juxtapose footage of the former president urging insurrectionists to march on the Capitol, with his recent assurances to Christian conservatives: “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

TikTok nation already has spliced the candidate’s rambling discourses on death by electrocution or shark attack, with reaction shots from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Let’s see a mashup of the candidate singing the praises of the “late, great Hannibal Lecter” with a highlight reel of Anthony Hopkins playing the fictional serial killer, or a chilling Mads Mikkelsen serving up tongues en papillote.

These men will say more alarming things. Gen Z will have their phones ready.

write.robin@baranyai.ca

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