Part II: The failed rebrand of Kamala Harris
From Diet Woke to Brat Summer to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is part 2 of our 3-part autopsy on Kamala Harris’s campaign. It consists of me going through literally every line of an interview that four senior Harris staffers conducted with Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer last week. I won’t waste your time by repeating their names and roles; see Part I for that.
I will, however, give you one more pitch to donate to GiveDirectly: our Substack campaign has already raised almost $500,000 for a very worthy cause to help some of the poorest people in the world.
In addition, I’ll donate half of gross annualized revenues generated by this post to GiveDirectly, as well as half of the revenues generated by the first post in this series.1 I’m already on the hook for more than $6,000 and I’m pretty sure we can get that to five figures.
^^^ This part of the program is now over as of noon Eastern on Tuesday, but holy crap, it raised an additional $27,196.50 in addition to those of you who gave directly! Wasn’t expecting that and thank you so much!
Political campaigns are branding campaigns
In the modern era, it might be best to think of political campaigns as marketing campaigns. Candidates who succeed in winning their nominations tend to have strong brands. Here are the associations that quickly come to mind for general election candidates since 2008:
Barack Obama: Hope and Change. (There are also some secondary Obama brands, as I discuss in the footnotes.2)
John McCain. A maverick. And a war hero with the gravitas and character for a dangerous world.
Mitt Romney: Laser-focused on the economy with the business experience to get things done.
Hillary Clinton: Experienced and tough. A fighter. A historic first who will break the glass ceiling and keep the country on a forward path toward progress.
Donald Trump: An outsider with unique experience and charisma who has no fucks to give and will shake up the corrupt establishment to Make America Great Again.
Joe Biden (2020 edition): A steady hand in a time of crisis who can provide a return to normalcy and a bridge to the future.
Kamala Harris:
I seem to be drawing a blank here.
Kamala Harris: ???
This is hard. Let’s get some help from ChatGPT. I asked it to describe Harris’s brand in no more than 2 to 3 sentences.
“Kamala Harris's core brand centers on being a trailblazer and advocate for justice, equity, and opportunity. As the first woman, Black, and South Asian Vice President of the United States, she embodies historic progress while championing causes like voting rights, criminal justice reform, and economic empowerment. Her leadership emphasizes pragmatic solutions and coalition-building to address systemic challenges.”
Let’s get a second opinion from Claude:
Kamala Harris positions herself as a progressive, barrier-breaking Democrat who champions social justice, women's rights, and racial equality, drawing on her background as the first Black and South Asian woman to serve as Vice President of the United States. She emphasizes her experience as a prosecutor and attorney general, presenting herself as someone who can effectively navigate complex systems while pushing for meaningful reform and representing marginalized communities. Her political brand centers on breaking glass ceilings, advocating for systemic change, and embodying a new generation of leadership that reflects America's growing diversity.
That’s wordier, but otherwise similar. It’s a brand I’d describe as Woke Light … or if you prefer, Diet Woke. There’s a heavy emphasis on racial and gender identity and the groundbreaking nature of Harris’s candidacy. And on “justice”, particularly criminal justice. But it’s a diluted form of Woke: not the in-your-face, “defund the police” kind. She has a pragmatic streak and was a tough prosecutor. She isn’t going to go all Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren on the economic stuff.
If you think I’m being unfair, read Harris’s speech kicking off her 2020 campaign. It hits on exactly these themes: she starts off talking about her racially mixed background. And Biden also emphasized these points when explaining why he chose Harris as his running mate, a decision in which her race and gender played an explicit role.
But Diet Woke wasn’t a successful brand, not even among the liberal 2020 Democratic primary electorate. In fact, Diet Woke was one of the biggest flops since New Coke: Harris dropped out two months before Iowa. And with the backlash to the Great Awokening in full force by 2024, the campaign really put the old brand in mothballs this year. Harris referred to her race only obliquely in her convention speech, and her gender basically not at all.
So what replaced Diet Woke? At first, something that fell out of a coconut tree: Brat Summer. Harris as your kooky but wise and cool aunt who took an edible before Thanksgiving dinner. This was not the invention of Harris’s straight-laced staffers, but instead arose “virally” from the hivemind of the Internet. However, the campaign — which if you read Part I, you’ll know saw itself as having gotten off to a cold start with little time to prepare — quickly embraced it:
Reading contemporaneous coverage from the Brat Summer days feels like a fever dream of cringe. Did this really happen just five months ago? In the year of our Lord, 2024?
Brat summer essentials, again according to Charli, are “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, a strappy white top with no bra”. [....]
Gevin Reynolds, a former speechwriter for Harris, said he believes it’s “extremely smart for her to lean into the meme”.
“It shows a recognition of how critical young voters are to winning in November, and a commitment to meeting them where they are.”
So far, there’s been little Brat back-lash, though pundits over the age of 35 seem confused by the topic. CNN’s Jake Tapper dedicated a roundtable to the topic, concluding that he “will aspire to be brat”. Stephen Colbert took up a Brat-themed TikTok dance during The Late Show. [...]
Memes alone do not win elections, but Charli’s tweet livened up a race that Harris’s bid had already revived. But there is more to be done. Kelley Heyer, the TikTok creator who choreographed a popular dance to Charli’s song Apple, said: “If Kamala wants to be brat, then she needs to promise to legalize and protect abortion at a federal level. And also wear apple green.”
But for a moment, Brat Summer even seemed to be working, against all odds. Donations to Harris spiked. Harris pulled into a rough tie with Trump in the polls. But then Brat Summer disappeared just as quickly as it arose:
What happened to it? Well, this is the nature of memes. What goeth viral must becometh cringe. But also I suspect — again, total “outside view” — that the campaign didn’t love it because it wasn’t the campaign’s invention and they didn’t really have control over it. The terms “Brat Summer”, “coconut” and “Charli XCX” do not appear at any point in the 90-minute Pod Save America interview even though they were some of the most memorable parts of the campaign.
To the extent there was a lasting legacy from Brat Summer, it was Harris’s choice of Tim Walz as her running mate, defying expectations from prediction markets that Josh Shapiro would be chosen instead. Walz was less of a heavyweight than Shapiro, but that was an advantage, actually: he’d be Kooky Aunt’s meme-able sidekick, her Sitcom Dad Uncle. Walz wouldn’t risk disrupting Harris’s momentum, which the campaign regarded as a precious commodity because it was never confident about its position in the race; momentum was all it had.
The Brat Summer brand had some advantages. It was refreshingly apolitical. It did seem to boost Harris’s favorability ratings. But also some liabilities. It paired awkwardly with other things, like the attack line that JD Vance and other Republicans were “weird”, which according to Pfeiffer did not poll well. Haranguing others for being weird is not brat! And Brat Summer risked becoming stale by Election Day and making Harris seem like she wasn’t serious — the Kooky Aunt portrayal wasn’t particularly “presidential”.
By the convention, the campaign was trying out a different brand: Tough No-Nonsense Prosecutor. I thought Harris’s convention speech was strong: it was aggressive and unsparing toward Trump and promised to fight against scammers and drug cartels — balanced out with a little “bio” that was careful to remove all remaining traces of Woke. Tough No-Nonsense Prosecutor also had a good turn at the debate, where Harris dictated the terms of argument.
But Tough No-Nonsense Prosecutor also sort of withered on the vine. What happened there? One problem was that debates were the best place to showcase it, but there was only one of them due to Biden’s decision to blow up the schedule. Another, as we’ll discuss later, is that it was hard to suppress memories of Diet Woke with Trump running the they/them ad in such heavy rotation. Harris’s meagerness in her interviews — lacking at first in quantity and later in quality — didn’t buttress her prosecutorial image either, nor did her unwillingness to distance herself from Biden on literally anything.
And the campaign’s internal polls still had her in a tie, at best. So by the end, Harris had devolved to the very theme that Biden had kicked off his campaign with: that Trump was an existential threat to democracy. (Her closing speech — overshadowed by a Biden gaffe — took place at The Ellipse, where Trump held his January 6 rally.) Basically, Harris had retreated to running as a Generic Democrat. Her merch and yard signs used inconsistent and largely unmemorable typography — some of the exceptions may be unauthorized bootlegs3 — with no hints of Brat Summer’s lime green:
The problem with the Generic Democrat brand is that Democrats don’t have a good brand either: in fact, self-identified Republicans outnumbered Democrats 35-31 in the national exit poll.
But let’s get back to the Pod Save transcript so we can look at all of this through the eyes of the campaign. Trigger warning: if you’re a Harris voter, some of this will have you tearing your hair out. So I’ll preview the increasingly exasperated section headings to give you a sense of what’s to come:
Harris had no (coherent) message
Harris’s inability to distance herself from Biden looks even worse in retrospect
The campaign’s unwillingness to take leadership or responsibility for the outcome is embarrassing
Much more than you wanted to know about the they/them ad because the Harris staffers can’t shut up about it
Some music from the world’s tiniest violin for a campaign literally raised $1 billion but still thinks life is so unfair 😿🎻