Monday marked the anniversary of a momentous day in U.S. politics: the Great Vibe Shift of 2024, when Joe Biden finally dropped out of the Presidential race, and it became clear that Kamala Harris would succeed him atop the Democratic ticket. By the time the day was out, Charli XCX, the unofficial vibes arbiter of the summer, had declared on X that “kamala IS brat,” a reference to a type of girl “who, like, feels herself but then also, like, maybe has a breakdown, but kinda like, parties through it, is very honest, is very blunt, a little bit volatile.” Harris’s campaign account quickly co-opted the vivid chartreuse aesthetic of Charli’s latest album, as did Harris’s supporters, who also made a deluge of memes referencing coconut trees, Venn diagrams, and “the context of all in which you live.” Two days after Biden’s departure, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, went on MSNBC and declared Republicans “weird,” catching liberals’ imaginations and catapulting himself to national relevance. Harris then picked Walz as her running mate, and more memes ensued, many of which depicted him as an endearing, if slightly embarrassing, Midwestern dad.
Suddenly, there seemed to be a genuine energy around the Democratic ticket—in real life, but also, crucially, online. Some, however, were skeptical—Jay Caspian Kang wrote in this column that “weird” might soon come to feel “a bit small and juvenile,” something we’d look back on as “a memento of a fun and energized period in the campaign”—and, sure enough, brat summer eventually gave way to pratfall. After Donald Trump beat Harris, a narrative swiftly formed that he was the candidate who had successfully harnessed online energy, not least by touring podcasts connected to the so-called manosphere, including big shows hosted by Joe Rogan and the comedian Theo Von.
As I’ve argued before, it’s possible to overstate the centrality of Trump’s podcast appearances to his victory. The result was very close, and the output of a welter of different inputs. If Harris had flipped the relatively few votes she needed to prevail, we might now be talking about the “brat election”—but to the victor go the post-facto narratives, especially when they concern a novel trend that the traditional media doesn’t fully understand. Harris, it’s easy to forget now, also went on podcasts, including the hugely popular “Call Her Daddy,” a step that might, in an alternate reality, have been described as an inspired foray into the womanosphere.
That said, it is reasonable to conclude that Trump performed better in this arena than Harris did. As Kang put it in a column this year, Harris’s appearance on “Call Her Daddy” felt “like a rehashing of her campaign’s talking points with fluffier-than-usual pillows on the set”; Trump “talked with Von about cocaine addiction.” It’s fair to see this discrepancy as a symptom of a broader reality: Democrats tend to suck at the internet. Whereas Trump says whatever he likes, wherever he likes, and seems mostly to get away with it—or,