After dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden’s performance in the June presidential debate, senior Aly McCormick found refuge in the album that dominated the summer: “Brat.”

With pop artist Charli XCX’s chart-topping record as her soundtrack, McCormick, a political communication student, said she decided to create a video spotlighting someone she believed could be a better opponent of former President Donald Trump: Vice President Kamala Harris. She said she hunkered down over the July 4th weekend, compiling clips of Harris dancing, laughing and delivering infamous lines like, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree,” and scoring them to the album’s bouncy opening track, “360,” on the editing platform CapCut.

“I love Charli XCX, and there’s so many GIFs of Kamala dancing, having fun, and they went really well with the beat,” McCormick said.

The result is a 20-second video, featuring a lime green filter and a text overlay of “I’m so Kamala” in grainy sans serif font to reference the “360” lyric “I’m so Julia” — a design that has become synonymous with the marketing and album cover for “Brat.” After uploading the video to her personal TikTok account @flextillerson on July 6, McCormick said her video quickly went viral, amassing 100,000 likes within a few days of posting.

The day after Biden dropped his reelection bid and Harris launched her bid for the presidency in July, McCormick said she woke up to CNN featuring her video as its popularity surged once again — reaching more than 1.6 million views that day. The trend continued to gain momentum in the following days, with the Harris campaign rebranding their “Kamala HQ” social media accounts to match the “Brat” aesthetic, and Charli XCX weighing in on the growing political trend surrounding her album by posting “kamala IS brat” on X, formerly known as Twitter. 

Later that week, McCormick was featured in articles from the New York Times and NBC News, breaking down how Harris’ campaign merged its marketing strategy with the popularity of “Brat.” McCormick’s video sits at 4 million views and more than 700,000 likes, as of Sunday.

“I never expected that to happen from a silly edit I made on TikTok,” McCormick said.

Before the “Brat” trend took over her campaign, Harris was no stranger to memes. Her now-legendary “coconut tree” speech from a May 2023 White House event first went viral on social media in February, with clips from the speech dominating X feeds.

Since “Brat” and Harris had received significant attention online separately over the summer, McCormick said combining the two created a “crossover episode” that contributed to the success of her video and other content from the “Brat” and Harris trend.

“It was partially the right place at the right time,” McCormick said. “It was also recognition of a need for change and combining that with something that people generally like.” 

McCormick said the “Brat” trend helped redefine the perspective of those who criticized Harris’ mannerisms as “cringey or weird,” rebranding the vice president’s quotes, laugh and dance moves as examples of her fun-loving side.

Harris campaign spokesperson Seth Schuster said in an interview with Forbes that the campaign’s strategy was to acknowledge the memes with “a wink and a nod” on their social media platforms, like turning the banner for the Kamala HQ X account “Brat” green over the summer and changing its bio to “Providing context,” in reference to Harris’ “coconut tree” meme.

“When you have Hillary Clinton saying ‘Pokémon GO to the polls,’ it doesn’t work as well,” McCormick said, referring to Hillary Clinton’s video game reference at a 2016 presidential campaign rally. “Whereas Kamala, who doesn’t personally address it or her team does, I think that that works really well.”

Beyond their “Brat” content, McCormick said the campaign’s social media accounts also prioritize highlighting Harris’ policy stances by promoting clips from her rallies and the second presidential debate last week, like her statements about restoring abortion rights. She said she’s glad Harris’ campaign website now has an official “Issues” page, which launched the day before the debate, so that her platform is more easily accessible to voters.

Prior to the debate, Harris faced criticism from undecided voters who said her campaign had avoided defining her policies. Harris sat down for her first solo interview since starting her campaign in July with a local ABC News station in Pennsylvania on Friday. 

Harris’ campaign never formally reached out to her, but McCormick said she’s heard from friends who work in Democratic Party circles that her content creation has gotten positive feedback, with some saying she “saved democracy.”

With the election fewer than two months away, McCormick said she’s officially creating more edits of Harris to other popular songs, like a choral version of “Like a Prayer” by Madonna, for Youth for Harris-Walz — a youth-led organization in support of Harris’ campaign.

“I’m glad that people are more energized to vote because it’s ‘Brat’ election season,” McCormick said.

Students said they observed a significant increase in young people’s engagement with Harris’ campaign over the summer as a result of the “Brat” trend, but some said the marketing strategy could distract from Harris’ policy stances.

Sophomore Ben Wishna, a political science student, said he knew nothing about Charli XCX’s “Brat” before Harris’ campaign started using the album’s aesthetics in its social media marketing. He said tapping into popular internet culture is an “effective strategy” to push more young people to learn about her campaign.

“If the shiny thing on TikTok that gets you engaged in politics makes you more interested in how the government works and creates more politically involved citizens, I think that’s ultimately for the best,” Wishna said.

First-year Blain Sirak, an international affairs student, said leaning into “Brat” was an effective marketing tactic for Harris’ campaign to reach young voters but felt like a “disingenuous” strategy considering Harris’ stances on issues like the war in Gaza and immigration. 

Harris said she supports Israel’s “right to defend itself,” suggesting that she would continue U.S. military aid to Israel but has also called for a cease-fire and a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. Harris said she supports reviving the bipartisan border bill — which failed after former President Donald Trump encouraged right-wing backlash to the proposal — that would shut down the border when migrant crossings hit an average of 5,000 a day over a week, and would hire thousands of new Border Patrol agents. 

“It’s not right to give a politician this kind of cutesy, fun type of aesthetic, because it’s kind of promoting something that it’s not,” Sirak said.