It happened in what seemed like just a handful of hours.
A sudden swell of social media chatter around Vice President Kamala Harris has added to the ongoing discourse around whether President Joe Biden will end his campaign following last week’s debate. It happened, as a lot of political conversation still does, on X.
“My entire feed is now Kamala pilled,” Jay Caspian Kang, a New Yorker staff writer, posted on the platform Tuesday night.
On Wednesday morning, X listed “Kamala” among its trending topics in politics with roughly 188,000 posts, many offering some mix of genuine support and ironic bemusement. Some of Harris’ more memorable lines quickly became running jokes. At some points on Tuesday, “KHive,” the name for her vocal online supporters, made it into the top 20 topics on X, according to trends24.in, a website that monitors the platform.
Biden’s grip on the nomination, which appeared to have been secure heading into the debate, has in recent days begun to look tenuous. Post-debate concern that could have ebbed over the following weekend has instead intensified — possibly boosted by historic wins for conservatives at the Supreme Court — with one sitting Democratic congressman calling for him to withdraw and even former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., saying on MSNBC that it was legitimate for people to ask whether Thursday night’s debate performance was part of a “condition.”
The social media energy around Harris appears to be predicated on the idea that she would take Biden’s place rather than have to compete with other candidates in an open convention. If Biden drops out, she would be first in line for the millions of dollars in Biden’s campaign war chest, and a recent poll showed her outperforming Biden in a head-to-head matchup with the presumptive Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump.
And it’s not just some Twitterati who see Harris as having a chance to take the nomination. Betting markets, where people can wager real money on political outcomes, have shifted sharply in Harris’ direction in the last couple days. On PredictIt, one of the internet’s most popular betting markets, Harris overtook Biden as the person most likely to receive the Democratic presidential nomination — a shift that as recently as June 26 gave her almost no chance at all.
On Wednesday morning, Biden’s betting odds further collapsed and Harris’ surged after The New York Times reported that the president had told an ally he was weighing whether to continue in the race. That reporting, based on a single anonymous source, has not been confirmed by NBC News, and the White House had denied it.
By late Wednesday morning, Drudge Report was leading its homepage with a picture of Harris, declaring: “IT’S HER PARTY NOW.”
It wasn’t that long ago that Harris and her KHive were almost entirely absent from social media discussion. As The Daily Beast noted in 2022, Harris’ declining popularity had just about gutted what remained of her online supporters who were once seen as a particularly pugnacious group who often squared off against supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, aka “Bernie Bros.”
But shared concern over Biden has appeared to help mend divisions among both groups, with some even poking at the uneasy alliance that now appeared to be necessary to defeat Trump. On X and Instagram, various versions of a “Kamala Harris Apology Form” circulated, jokingly offering reasons that people did not support her in the past.
Others have posted that they have been “coconut-pilled,” riffing off remarks the vice president made at an event in the White House in May 2023. In her speech, Harris said, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” This excerpt became a meme because of its strange phrasing and the vice president’s sudden shift in tone.
By Tuesday, it was getting seized on as something of a semi-ironic rallying cry.
