The Washington Post reports:

Jaelyn Richter, a 27-year-old therapist in the Minneapolis suburbs, was painting her basement with her husband on Sunday when she realized she had the perfect song for a TikTok video about Kamala Harris.

Sitting for an hour at her kitchen island, she pieced together a music video on her phone by splicing emoji-adorned clips of Harris dancing over the voice of pop star Chappell Roan singing, “He doesn’t have what it takes to be … a girl like me.”

Richter said she had felt demoralized about politics for years. Her small TikTok following had only ever seen videos about her personal life and Taylor Swift. But in the moment, “it just felt like something had given me life again,” she said. The video has since been viewed more than a million times.

Harris’s rise as the Democrats’ likely presidential nominee following President Biden’s announcement he would step down has triggered a flood of online energy in the form of videos and memes designed to bolster her mass appeal.

The videos, often called “fan edits” or “fancams,” have cast Harris in the kind of light typically reserved for pop-culture icons, with thumping soundtracks, fast cuts and glittering visual effects. Many feature what supporters see as her most endearing moments, such as her marching dance alongside a drum line at a 2019 event in Des Moines.

The flood of viral political content carries echoes of the online “meme armies” that have flanked former president Donald Trump’s campaigns, built by supporters who see them as a critical way to reach mainstream audiences, using what one booster called the “21st century version of political cartoons.”

But the Harris videos show how the memes have evolved for a new TikTok era, fueled in part by young Americans fluent with the culture and craft of online video editing and eager to apply their skills to what they hope will be offline political gain.

Many of the most popular pro-Harris fancams come from political novices. Some, like Richter, said they had never made a political video; one account, whose pro-Harris video has more than 500,000 views, specializes in fancams about Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola, from the reality show “Jersey Shore.”

But the fan videos could play a crucial role in helping introduce Harris to new voters and hype up those already loyal during a hugely contracted campaign calendar, with just over 100 days before the election. [Continue reading…]