So Cormack, who teaches at Stevens Institute of Technology and just on civic engagement, was surprised when they expressed excitement. They were “all on board” — with Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice president, who had yet to become Trump’s direct challenger.

No matter. They thought the VP was, in a word, hilarious — and worth their attention.

Harris’ 2023 “” video had already gone viral. In it, she recounts her mother giving her sister and her “a hard time sometimes,” saying, “‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’” Harris cracks up, then continues with her mother’s lesson: “‘You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.’” 

Cormack’s students not only knew the video — they could recite it from memory. She thought to herself, “O.K., there’s .”

What Cormack witnessed was the ascension of Harris in the minds and social media feeds of young people. It was the prequel to a new phenomenon: the candidate-as-meme, at a time when both candidates desperately need young people to pay attention to them. Whether it translates into votes from this stubborn demographic in November remains an open question.

At the moment, it seems to be working for Harris, 59, whose social media effort is driven by an army of volunteers creating a firehose of memes on her behalf.

By the time Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, Harris had actually been young people’s feeds for weeks. Fans posted cleverly cut treatments of her speeches, her , (in and out ), even her love of .

As early as , one X user posted, “I’m ready to fall outta the coconut tree for you, girl. Stop playin.”

‘It’s hard not to love her’

For one fan, the attraction began much earlier.

Ryan Long, 22, a senior at the University of Delaware, discovered Harris in November 2016, when she won her Senate seat. She popped up on his cultural radar in earnest four years later, when she became Biden’s vice president. Her appearances often took on a life of their own, he recalled: She’d say “a lot of silly and amusing things” in official settings. “I’ve always found her so, so funny.”

Harris’ self-professed geek tendencies soon prompted him and his housemates to decorate a whiteboard with the saying, “I love Venn diagrams.” It stayed up for about a year. The hilarity of the “Coconut Tree” video made it “really popular on ” about a year and a half before it hit the mainstream, he said.

Long admitted to not typically following politics. But by the beginning of July, when a poll in his X feed suggested that Harris had a better chance of beating Trump than Biden did, he got excited.

“It was a silly, unrealistic excitement,” he said. But that night, he spent about three hours cutting together his favorite bits of Harris footage.

why did I stay up till 3am making a von dutch brat coconut tree edit featuring kamala harris and why can’t I stop watching it on repeat

— ryan (@ryanlong03)

���DzԲ�’s of Harris speaking, laughing and dancing has garnered about 4.3 million views on X and helped create a template for the genre. “She is a fresh face at a time that there [is] so much disillusionment in politics, especially among young people,” he said. 

Now that she’s the Democratic nominee, she offers the potential to bring a lot of young people along for the ride, Long said. 

In that sense, she is much like Trump, who “has this huge cult of personality. He’s able to make riffs, say things off the cuff, make people laugh, make people excited, make people sad, make people just feel their emotions. And I think Kamala Harris does that for a whole other subsection of voters.”

By comparison, Biden’s push to reach young voters via social media and all but non-existent to many.

For his part, Trump has benefited from the efforts his own devoted fans, who have reveled in his ties to and his after the attempt on his life last month. The campaign has also gotten a boost from a small on the right who have become a “shadow online ad agency” for his campaign, spending the past year producing similar content for the GOP nominee. The group, which calls itself , operates anonymously, its memes “riddled with racist stereotypes, demeaning tropes about L.G.B.T.Q. people and broad scatological humor,” The New York Times last December.

‘Authentic and true’ narratives attract Gen Z

To be sure, the reaction to Harris on social media has been unprecedented. Jessica Siles, a spokesperson for the Gen-Z-led advocacy group , said she had stopped counting how many conversations she has had with people about what it means to be “brat.”

That adjective comes compliments of British singer Charli XCX, who on July 21 , “kamala IS brat,” defining the term as “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some like dumb things sometimes.” She’s honest, blunt — and a bit volatile.

It all adds up to a kind of authenticity “that young people really resonate with,” said Siles. 

Even U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona tried to get in on the act, posting on X in the lime green color of the moment that “Defending public education is part of the essence of brat summer.” To some, it appeared, as the kids say, a little cringe. One critic, invoking the iconic scene from “30 Rock,” , “How do you do, fellow kids?”

Defending public education is part of the essence of brat summer.

— Secretary Miguel Cardona (@SecCardona)

Most Gen-Zers were indeed kids the last time a meme-worthy candidate ran for president. Siles, 24, was just 8 years old when Barack Obama ran his first presidential campaign. She said seeing a candidate talk about who they are unapologetically while boasting impressive career accomplishments “is just super refreshing to young voters.” 

Gen Z grew up with these. “So I think we’re kind of uniquely qualified to be able to tell who’s posting something authentically or not,” she said. Young people don’t take the time to create, edit, post and share videos of “people they’re not truly excited about.”

Harris began resonating with Siles after she watched a video of the vice president talking about her mother’s cancer. Siles remembered that it “showed a different side that we don’t always see of elected officials and politicians that I thought was really powerful.”

In the three days after Harris announced her candidacy, Siles’ organization got more applications to join and start new chapters than in the prior two months.

The group, whose chief of staff is all of 16, earlier this year by making mischief in the race: It scooped up unused Web domain names for groups such as GenZforTrump.org and guided viewers to that targets young voters in battleground states. It also launched a digital ad campaign on Instagram and Snapchat.

David Paleologos, director of the in Boston, said there’s no question that social media has trained young people’s attention on Harris, who needs the votes: Exit polls from 2020 suggest that Biden beat Trump by 24 percentage points among voters ages 18-29. Harris hasn’t quite reached those margins among potential young voters in the recent polling, he said, but she’s close — up by about 20 points. 

In order to reach 2020 levels in the next three months, she’ll need a social media strategy of “messaging memeology,” Paleologos said, which strings together “a seemingly haphazard sequence of posts that paint a picture, much like the colorful stones in a mosaic.”

However, he said, one risk of that is staying power: “It only lasts until the next meme about someone else captures that young person’s short attention span.” Research also shows that young voters are the least participatory in elections.

Just like clockwork, since she announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on Aug. 6, the have .

‘I hate how I can feel the propaganda’

To be sure, not all young people are totally sold on the coconut memes or the high energy. In , a 19-year-old user from southwestern Missouri who goes by the username “Meatball” looks into the camera and confesses, “I hate how I can feel the propaganda of the Kamala campaign working on me.” 

In the video, posted July 24, she continues, “Part of me is like, ‘Yass queen, purr! Brat Summer! Kamala Harris!’ And then I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that’s a politician, actually. That’s the vice president of the United States.’ Like, I’m still going to vote for her, but I don’t like feeling like I want to vote for her.”

In an interview via text messages, Meatball, who asked to withhold her name for safety reasons, said she posted the video after getting “countless” Harris-related videos on her “For You” page — a few from Harris’ official account. “I wanted to see if anyone else was experiencing this disconnect between wanting to participate in something fun and not trusting politicians,” she said.

It’s safe to say they do: In three weeks, her video garnered 1.8 million views and more than 289,000 “likes.” 

But Meatball said she wishes older generations understood that Gen Z’s opinions “aren’t less thought out just because we share them in unconventional ways” like TikToks. “Meme culture is complex and has been developing since the creation of the internet chat room. Just because an older person doesn’t understand what we’re saying doesn’t mean we aren’t saying anything at all.”

Long, the Delaware student who posted the X video of Harris, predicted the memes and videos will have a big effect. 

He has worked in e-commerce marketing and has seen the power of social media to convert views into sales. “I think the same principle applies for elections: It’s going to turn people out. It’s going to get them excited.”

But some justices said the public deserves to know when the official is using their account as a private citizen.

“What makes these cases hard is that there are First Amendment interests all over the place,” said Justice Elena Kagan. 

In the lawsuit, , a California couple, said two Poway Unified School District board members violated their free speech rights when they blocked them on Facebook and Twitter, now X. Even if the accounts were personal, the parents argued, the members used them to discuss official school business.

“What you have is both of the petitioners using ‘we’ and ‘our’ when they talk about what the [school] board is doing,” said Pamela Karlan, who represents Christopher and Kimberly Garnier, parents of three children in the San Diego-area district. “Anybody who looks at that is going to think this is an official website. It looks like an official website. It performs all the functions of an official website.”

The board members insist that as private citizens, they had a right to restrict content. They objected to the Garniers repeatedly posting the same comments,and argued that the couple’s lengthy responses alleging racial discrimination and financial management were distracting and made it difficult for others to engage online. 

Their attorney compared the board members’ social media accounts to personal property.

“The state itself did not control or even facilitate their operation of the pages,” said Hashim Mooppan. He added that his clients, Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff, a current board member, and T.J. Zane, who left the board last year, “wielded no greater rights or privileges than any other private citizen denying access to their own property.” 

Despite concerned parents and community activists packing school board meetings in recent years, the majority of public comment on schools, and on government policy in general, takes place online. That’s why the court’s decision will have implications far beyond education. The court on Tuesday also heard a similar case from Michigan that essentially asks the same question: When does a public official’s social media activity amount to “state action?” The cases are among five the court will hear this term that on the role free speech plays in the digital sphere.

“I don’t think it’s immediately apparent which way they’ll go,” said Kristin Lindgren, deputy general counsel for the California School Boards Association, which submitted a brief in support of the board members. 

Lindgren, who listened to the three hours of oral arguments Tuesday, said the three liberal justices appeared more sympathetic to the public’s right to know if their representative is acting in an official capacity, while the conservative majority focused on the board members’ freedom to discuss district issues as private citizens. “I don’t think the court wants to remove a public official’s private First Amendment rights to speak off the cuff.”

Regardless of the court’s ultimate opinion, she said it’s clear that both board members and the public need guidance on the issue.

Appearance matters, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the said when it ruled in favor of the Garniers. The opinion said the board members, “clothed their pages in the authority of their offices,” and that First Amendment protections “apply no less” to the internet than they do “the bulletin boards or town halls of the corporeal world.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of the court’s conservatives, said it may come down to whether constituents can get their information elsewhere. 

“A lot of this will depend on whether it’s reposting or exclusive posting,” he said. “That’s the kind of practical information that people are going to need.”

The disclaimer issue

Justices devoted much of their time to the question of whether a public official must inform constituents when they’re speaking privately or in an official capacity. 

“Government officials can operate in their personal capacity and in their official capacity,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, agreeing with Mooppan, the members’ attorney. But she added, “Why should they get to choose whether or not they’re doing one or the other without making a clear disclaimer? How do we know which you have chosen?”

Karlan noted that the Poway district even requires board members to “identify personal viewpoints as such and not as the viewpoint of the board.” But O’Connor-Ratcliff, she said, didn’t do that and predominantly used her Facebook page to communicate about school activities such as visiting classrooms during instructional time. “The only reason she has the power to do that is because of her official capacity.”

Mooppan countered that requiring officials to post such disclaimers is too heavy a burden and would have a chilling effect.

“Some of those people aren’t going to do it, and they’re gonna lose their First Amendment rights,” he said. “That’s the exact opposite of how the First Amendment normally works.”

The court’s opinion is likely to hinge on the extent of a public official’s authority, said Katie Fallow, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. For example, individual school board members don’t speak for the entire board.

But the second case, , focuses on a city manager, who has more power to act individually. In that case, the Sixth Circuit ruled that the public official was acting completely on his own. 

Fallow predicted the Supreme Court is unlikely to adopt the Sixth Circuit’s “very narrow” view.

“The court seemed to be indicating that it would use a test that considered whether a public official was using a private social media account to carry out the duties or exercise the authority of government,” she said. “The question is how broad and flexible that test will be.”