Project Coconut is a go: Explaining the memeification of VP Kamala Harris' presidential campaign

‘ Project Coconut’ is a go.

And if you happen to have just fallen out of a coconut tree and don't know what that means, it's from a speech Vice President Kamala Harris gave at the White House last year while trying to make the point that none of us live in a vacuum. She repeated something her mother, who was South Asian, used to tell her.

“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,” Harris said. And thus, the coconut meme was born.

The internet ran with it, and it seems Harris's presidential campaign is leaning into the joke. But can she meme her way into the presidency?

“We started seeing like a huge proliferation of Kamala memes after Joe Biden's debate performance in June. And everyone was kind of just like, ‘We are desperate. We need something hopeful to hang on to,’” Vox’s Rebecca Jennings says. “People really were like, ‘What if jokingly we kind of meme Kamala into becoming the democratic nominee?’”

The campaign is leaning hard into “brat summer,” a meme sparked when pop star Charli XCX released her new album “brat” in early June. The album’s club bangers and lime-green aesthetic have taken over the season à la summer 2023’s “Barbie.”

“Everything that [Charli XCX] as an artist stands for is kind of like party girl, hedonistic, messy, like club anthems that people are really feeling for this summer,” Jennings says. “And Kamala, who is known to burst out into laughter and she dances and she has really quotable kind of funny quips, it kind of jives with that in a way.”

The Biden HQ page on X, formerly known as Twitter, was rebranded to match the “brat” aesthetic.

And other politicians are getting in on the jokes: Hawaii Sen. Brian Chatz posted a picture of himself climbing a coconut tree.

“It just seems like a really smart play because now you see other Democratic politicians embracing it,” Jennings says. “Everyone's kind of getting in on this because they see it as a winning strategy.”

Hafsa Quraishi produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.