In her last campaign, undertaken at a time of millenarian expectations on the left, the phrase “Kamala is a cop” probably hurt her. But at a moment when the Democratic Party wants to memory-hole calls to defund the police, some who were once turned off by Harris’s record as a prosecutor are thrilling to her law-and-order case against Trump. Her pop culture fluency is delighting Democrats who’d either never known or forgotten that politics can be fun.
Well before there was serious talk about Biden dropping out, queer influencers had started memeing Harris into icon status; on the Hard Fork podcast, the journalist Casey Newton said a friend had made him a Harris-themed coconut tree T-shirt back in February. That meant that when she became the presumptive nominee, there was already an online repository of affectionate Harris content waiting to be remixed and made viral.
And the more it went viral, the more Democratic voters emerging from a carapace of dread wanted to be part of it.
