Joe Biden Lost the Internet. Kamala Harris Is Trying to Win It Back

Another election-shattering event took place this week after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. The right lost itself in another conspiracy cycle because of it, Silicon Valley megadonors started writing donation checks again in response, and Vice President Kamala Harris and her new presidential campaign embraced all the memes.

While much has been said about how Harris is slaying boots the house down and girlbossing the internet this week, I’ve been thinking about why Biden lost it. Or maybe never won it over in the first place.

Let’s talk about it.

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I Think This Strategy Is Rotten Right to the Core

Even before this election, the Biden campaign was smart about the internet. Over the past four years, they’ve built vast networks of supportive influencers and understood how to meticulously package different pieces of content for each platform. But watching the internet’s reaction to Harris this week, it feels like that strategy, as precise as it was, may have been the reason why Biden lost the internet.

Shortly after Biden’s campaign joined TikTok in February, I spoke with deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty over the phone. He said at the time, “I think the fact that the internet has become more personalized in the last four years just means we need to play the game a little bit differently and try a bunch of new things.” In March, the campaign hired additional staff to home in on and help create highly specific and personalized content.

Scrolling through the @BidenHQ branded accounts, it’s clear that the campaign did try a lot of things. They clipped cable news and Trump rallies, shot videos with charismatic surrogates like Representative Jasmine Crockett, and played with a variety of meme formats and TikTok trends. They crafted countless messages and identities for Biden—which meant that any cohesive narrative of the president was lost. Was Biden the menacing, laser-eyed Dark Brandon? Was he the sweet grandfather eating vanilla chocolate chip ice cream? Or was he the savior of American democracy?

It’s as if they played fast and loose with all of the data and analytics and missed the larger issue. The campaign was seemingly concerned with serving every voter the one specific message, vibe, aesthetic, or whatever that would persuade them to support Biden that it lost control of the overall narrative.

The Trump campaign, meanwhile, relentlessly focused on portraying Biden as too old and too out of it to govern. While Republican discipline isn’t the only reason why this narrative took hold with the public, it doesn’t seem to have hurt.

Now, Flaherty wasn’t wrong when he said the internet has become harder to navigate, let alone go viral on, since the previous election. A video with millions of views may surface onto my For You page but never make it onto yours at all. Building content for niche groups of people may help a campaign target certain demographics, but it doesn’t inspire shared moments like what we’re experiencing with Harris’ online ascendancy.

“The engagement we're seeing, not just for the vice president's campaign, but just for every cause since this announcement,” Josh Cook, president of Good Influence, a political influencer network, told me on Tuesday. “There's just a lot of energy, and it's benefiting everything across the board.”

Even without Harris’s #KHive supporters, her young(er) age and quirky personality made it easy for her to inspire memes long before she needed them. They created an old-fashioned organic viral moment, painting her in stark contrast to Biden and Trump. Hypertargeting individuals with bespoke content not worth sharing in the group chat didn’t work—the candidate, and what people made of her, did.

(Speaking of fandom groups like the KHive, the Harris campaign does appear to be activating them. In a Wednesday X post, the account Swifties for Harris advertised a Thursday youth call with the campaign.)

The Chatroom

On X this week, New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka asked whether Howard Dean’s infamous scream would have earned him more political capital in 2024 than it did 20 years ago. I’m sure Chayka posed the question at least partly in jest, but I’m going to do my best to answer it earnestly because it’s fun and I want to.

To start, most voters don’t fully tune into an election until much later in the cycle, and after Iowa, Dean’s scream was likely one of the first things many voters learned about him. That first impression would go on to color the rest of his campaign, one in which John Kerry and John Edwards were already gaining ground.

While Dean’s team could have put him on TikTok and scored interviews with popular podcasters prior to his shockingly awful performance at the Iowa caucus in 2004, he would have likely suffered similar destructive consequences today.

Unlike Dean, Kamala Harris is a known quantity, and her replacing of Biden gave her the opportunity to reintroduce herself at a critical moment after the first debate and when the internet was tired of hearing about two old politicians who sucked.

But I want to hear what you think! Is being a silly, goofy little guy more of a liability than it is a benefit? Even online? Leave a comment on the site, or send me an email at mail@wired.com.

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WIRED Reads

• The Right Reacts to Biden’s Withdrawal: It’s a ‘Coup’ The right’s favorite conspiracy to flaunt this week has been that the Democrats engineered a coup or bribed Biden to step down as the party’s presidential nominee.
• Silicon Valley Donors Bailed on Biden. Kamala Harris Is Winning Them Back Silicon Valley megadonors like Reid Hoffman and Ron Conway quickly endorsed Harris after tech leaders withheld cash from the campaign while Biden was at the top of the ticket.
• TikTok Lite Leaves up to 1 Billion Users With Fewer Protections TikTok Lite, designed for lower connectivity speeds, is failing to label AI-generated content on the platform at the same rate as the full version of the app.

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What Else We’re Reading

🔗 The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, founders of the venture capital firm a16z, recently joined the growing chorus of Silicon Valley leaders supporting Trump. In a piece for The Verge this week, Elizabeth Lopatto makes the argument that this rightward momentum is less of a movement and more of a “clique.” (The Verge)

🔗 The Referee Of Political Campaigns In an interview with GOP political technologist Eric Wilson, FEC chair Sean Cooksey says the commission probably won’t roll out any new AI and advertising regulations before the election. (Business of Politics Podcast)

🔗 The Pop Craveification of Breaking News If you’re a normal person who didn’t have push notifications turned on for the Biden campaign’s X account (🫠), you probably heard that he was stepping down from some news outlet or a group chat. Increasingly though, more and more young people are getting their breaking news from shitposters and meme accounts, something Taylor Lorenz wrote about in her newsletter this week. (Taylor Lorenz’s Newsletter)

The Download

On the pod this week, senior writer Lauren Goode joins me, Leah, and David to discuss the coconutpilling of Silicon Valley. Moments after Harris announced that she would be seeking the Democratic nomination, influential billionaires like Reid Hoffman rushed to back her campaign. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts!

Also, I’m sorry if you’re tired of the coconut edits by now, but this one is particularly good and not brat-related!

Thanks for subscribing! If you enjoy reading this newsletter, share it with someone you know. Otherwise, you can get in touch with me via email, Instagram, X, and Signal at makenakelly.32.