A recent invite-only Zoom showcased the new opportunity Democrats suddenly have with Vice President Kamala Harris and how easily they can squander it if they’re not careful. The challenge, simply put, is to turn coconut tree emojis into votes.
Meeting that challenge requires abandoning traditional political messaging and giving up much of the careful control that defines modern political communications. Priorities USA, the Democratic powerhouse independent expenditure group that hosted the call, says it has been planning for this moment for years. Harris’ arrival lets Priorities fully implement its plan for the first time. If everything works out, Priorities will turn people like Meredith Judd into key players in the sprint to November.
Five days before she logged onto the Priorities Zoom, Judd was another young Democratic-leaning voter unenthused by President Joe Biden and his campaign. The problem had been plaguing Democrats all cycle — the president’s age and the war on Gaza had quieted the young digital army that had helped carry Democrats to victory in 2020. Losing Judd’s attention was especially poignant, if par for the course. She has participated in politics for years, prides herself on following the news and really, really does not like former President Donald Trump. But on that Sunday, she was sharing in a general feeling that there was no point in getting involved.
“I think that our generation, kind of in between Gen Z and millennial, we’ve noticed with our friends, people losing a lot of hope for Biden and thinking that he didn’t really stand a chance to win against Trump,” Judd, 26, said.
Then Biden dropped out, endorsed Harris, and suddenly, there was Judd, back in the room for Democrats. She recalled her husband getting the news alert on his phone while they were hanging out near their home in Manhattan. It was time to celebrate, she said, and time to post.
“I had never made a single political video before this,” Judd said. She meant the post as a joke, a mash-up of Harris’ famous “coconut tree” audio and laugh with the intro to Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do.” The caption: “Mark my words, this sound will make Kamala win the presidency.”
The post was a hit on TikTok, racking up views and likes and shares very fast. That’s when Priorities reached out to Judd, finally spooling up in earnest an expensive plan that had been limited by Biden’s enthusiasm gap. The idea is to let creators like Judd know that by doing their own thing with the Democrats providing help where they need it, they can turn their newfound enthusiasm into real political work.
“It was our goal to build out the right team to be able to engage these creators when they were comfortable,” said Danielle Butterfield, executive director of Priorities and an architect of the group’s creator organizing strategy that has been underway all cycle.
For the first time all year, creators are reaching out to the group for help on how to make content about the likely Democratic nominee instead of looking for ways to talk about voting for the Democratic ticket without mentioning the guy who was then at the top.
“The brat and the coconut is all a way to get people to start paying attention to politics in a way that they weren’t necessarily paying attention before,” Butterfield said. “And we know that we have to sustain and grow that energy all the way until November.”
The Zoom call last week was part of what that looks like, according to Priorities. Organization staff reached out to many creators, like Judd, whose Harris-themed memes blew up and caught Priorities’ eye. Other attendees had worked with Priorities in the past on paid efforts. It’s possible some who appeared may end up creating for a paid Priorities campaign, too, but the Zoom was not a recruitment call or a job interview. It was half organizing, half high-level message strategy.
Priorities’ Senior Content Manager Julia McCarthy spoke both halves fluently, ably tailoring the kind of presentation familiar to campaign staff or seasoned reporters into the creator lexicon. (NOTUS viewed the part of the call where McCarthy presented to the creators under the stipulation that the participating creators not be named.) She put up a slide titled “The Ladder of Engagement.” A “we are here” arrow was at the top, next to a big box marked “memes.” That represents the organic enthusiasm everyone had seen on their feeds. The next step was to hit the meme-activated with verified and poll-tested messaging. Priorities presented the creators polling data showing the issues Harris was most trusted on and her strongest contrasts with Trump. Posts that help tell Harris’ story and put her in context against Trump would help move audiences down the ladder from memes to understanding “Kamala vs. Trump,” the last rung before “voting action.”
Priorities posts some of its own work that can easily be reposted but emphasizes that creators are the ones who make the best decisions about what to create. Impact comes from audience engagement, and creators know how to engage their audiences. In the chat running alongside the Zoom presentation, creators seemed to catch on fast.
“I hope someone makes a TikTok audio of that ‘childless cat lady’ Vance clip,” one wrote. Another creator popped up to say such a post already existed and said where to find it.
There were signs on the call of how difficult creators have found engaging with Democratic presidential politics this year before Harris came in. “The community is concerned about Kamala’s stance on Palestine and I think it’s legitimate,” one chatted. “Do you have any guidance on navigating that?” Another creator chimed in that Harris had called for a cease-fire in the Gaza war.
Butterfield said the question showed the Priorities program is working.
“I think that talking about candidates always feels a little bit more scary,” she said. Butterfield added that the group had good engagement on efforts to organize creators into campaigns attacking Trump or focusing on abortion or other issues, even in the weeks between the debate and Biden’s withdrawal. Those efforts required getting serious information to social media users who may be there for the silly memes. The post-coconut step online for Harris requires the same focus.
Priorities has been around for a long time and routinely pumps tens of millions of dollars into elections for Democrats. It has been doing the same thing this year — but with a very public shift in strategy to digital-only, trying to find and communicate with voters who don’t get touched by traditional campaign spending (aka TV advertising.) Up until Harris came in, Priorities had been focused on negative messaging about Trump and positive messaging about issues where Democrats are in step with voters, like reproductive rights.
Sometimes, that has meant paying creators to post stuff that Priorities wants posted. Sometimes, it means paying for more traditional-style ads that run on YouTube videos or streaming services. But some of the most powerful work comes from working with creators who want to make stuff on their own. This idea seems simple, especially to the growing group of Americans who get almost all their information from social media and understand how it works. But it can still feel revolutionary in the world of politics.
“There’s certainly campaigns that want to script their creators or have much more of a say on what exactly they’re saying,” Butterfield, 34, said. “These young voters, they’re spending so much time online, exposed to so many different marketing messages … our generation is just very good at sniffing out bullshit.”
Even as the ranks of the publicly coconut-pilled have grown and every outlet had to publish a Charli XCX explainer after Harris’ candidacy broke the internet, some professional Democrats have begun to panic that maybe it’s too much excitement, too fast. Others have warned that the coconut trees and bright green image-washes are just a tasty online “sugar high” that will fade into the regularly scheduled drudgery of the pre-brat news cycle.
Butterfield says the memes matter if there are people working to make them matter. Priorities’ work with creators is more organizing than advertising, she said. The group wants to make sure factual, verifiable information pops up in feeds on behalf of Democratic candidates, for example, so it provides that to interested creators. But Butterfield says, for the most part, they let the creators decide what to make, in keeping with a shift in how she says people view advertising.
“When I first started working in advertising, I was taught the goal was to stand out and to be different than everything else than the person’s watching,” she said. “That has now evolved to be, actually, you want your marketing to fit in with everything else that a person is seeing online.”
The shift requires taking some risks.
“We have to be able to give up full control in order to let authenticity drive,” she said
Since the call with Priorities, Judd’s feed has become very political, including one post reposting Harris campaign content, another offering a list of Harris-related things “giving me hope this week” and a post teasing Trump directly.
“It’s still very new,” Judd said of efforts to turn memes into political action. “Like, yes, you know the 18-24 demographic is really large, but it’s not all the votes Kamala Harris is trying to get. So I think there’s a balance between playing into it but then also still appealing to the older audience who just, like, really doesn’t understand it.”
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Evan McMorris-Santoro is a reporter at NOTUS.