Liberal can’t meme. It’s part of the online game, which, while no silver bullet, has energized Trump supporters and right-leaning populists to the point where Democrats need to pay attention. They’ve also been brutal at trashing the Biden agenda. Forget Photoshop; some great ones have used Bureau of Labor Statistics data to gut the economic messaging of the Biden administration. It’s why the Biden campaign is looking for a “memelord” to counter this online offensive (via Politico):
Presidential campaigns have tried to insinuate themselves into the esoteric, in-joke-laden online ecosystem for years, often with dubious results: Recall Hillary Clinton, awkwardly exhorting young voters in 2016 to “‘Pokémon Go’ to the polls.” The ecosystem naturally treats disruptors a little better than incumbents; observers attributed former President Donald Trump’s shocking defeat of Clinton in part to his supporters’ mastery of “meme magic.”
The 2024 Biden campaign has already been ramping up its program from 2020 of partnering with online influencers, and the new job — paying someone a full-time salary to serve as what TechCrunch called a “seasoned meme lord” — is a tacit admission that the outside game is now the online game.
This form of ersatz, quasi-grassroots culture-jamming is not just a nod to a passing digital fashion. It’s a reckoning with what campaigning will look like in the 21st century, as personalized algorithms work overtime to ensure that users don’t see anything that would make them even a fraction more likely to put their phone down — politics often topping that list of boring or off-putting material.
So what does a Biden memelord actually do? Clarke Humphrey, the Biden campaign’s “senior adviser for digital persuasion,” told DFD that the role won’t involve creating memes, but instead setting up partnerships with content creators who would then agree to create memes on the campaign’s behalf.
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It’s similar to the campaign’s successful 2020 efforts to partner with notable online influencers, as Biden went on to put up big numbers with young voters.
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Biden’s campaign isn’t trying to appeal to the same feelings of outrage and indignation that Trump’s fiery online rhetoric reliably invokes. That puts him at a disadvantage in the digital sphere, where often the users searching out political content are often those most activated by a Trump-like populist appeal. And it’s why the Biden campaign is looking for a meme manager with a softer touch, who can insinuate the campaign’s ideas into the online ecosystem in a way that feels more organic.
I always felt that pro-Trump memes went viral because there was no centralizing authority. It was a collective of online activists who, through their creativity, generated content that resonated because it was funny and accurate. Again, this top-down thinking of using the worst media influencers no one knows and force-feeding them lines that don’t work or are dismissed because they're patently false is bound to fail miserably.
Also, even if something could be manufactured by this group, you need to have a good candidate with a record. Biden doesn’t have any of that. He’s a terrible president who commands nothing. Democrats are only standing by his side because there’s no one else, and they hate Trump more, but no one likes this guy. If Biden falls flat in the first debate, will the DNC move to have a major shake-up at the convention?