Why This Election Season Is Getting Down To The Vibes

What have you noticed about this election cycle? Perhaps we’ve seen that candidates are interchangeable, that the media can reinvent incredibly unpopular politicians and reintroduce them via a carefully curated brand, or that the framing of issues often matters more than the issues themselves. Elections used to be about policy, but now they’re about popularity. Okay, they’ve always been about popularity. Historically, candidates have always needed to make their performative tour around the country, drinking local beer and eating local food that each state calls their own. 

They would need to pet puppies, kiss babies, and demonstrate broad appeal. If primaries are about rallying your base with sweeping, audacious ideas (that may or may not ever get passed) that appeal to the most impassioned zealots of the party, then the general election is about being as vague as possible. This is not the time to alienate. It’s the time to change hearts and minds by making yourself more palatable to undecided voters outside your loyal base. However, marketing as part of the electoral process is one thing. It’s another when it becomes the process itself.

Rebranding Kamala

Look, my home state is Pennsylvania, so if anyone knows the game of swing states filled with undecided, malleable voters with absurd voting histories, it’s me. In Pennsylvania, anything goes. Your neighbor’s voting history might look something like this: Gore, Bush, Romney, Obama, Trump, Trump, Kamala. Sound absurd? That’s Pennsylvania for you, baby! Ideological coherence is for partisan states; Pennsylvania is for people with audacity and a lack of party loyalty. In nearly every election, my home state decides the fate of the nation. 

Only, if the fate of the nation lies in our hands, I would much rather prefer it to be based upon policy rather than marketability. If anything should be a popularity contest, shouldn’t it be policies, or at the very least, a vision for our country, rather than who is more brat? I say this as someone who simply can’t turn down a good meme campaign, and I’ll admit, the Harris machine has done a hell of a job making her more marketable this go-around. Even I like her more than I used to. There’s something infectious about her childlike wonder and maniacal laughter. She truly does seem “unburdened by what has been.”

If Kamala’s campaign of yesteryear evoked anything, it was “drab,” “evil,” and “insane,” but it has effectively been rebranded as “Unbothered,” “moisturized,” “happy,” “in her lane,” “focused,” “flourishing.” Maybe it’s all the discourse on my X feed, co-opted by doomer manosphere figures constantly lunging down women’s throats for being happy, that has cast Kamala in a more favorable light. The thing is, it doesn’t matter because perceptions are fickle, unreliable. 

Our perceptions of candidates have an air of theater about them, given how much interference is involved in projecting the facade around their character, personality, and relatability. That funny meme you saw your candidate tweet? That’s some 23-year-old Zoomer intern. Tim Walz does not know who Charli XCX is, and if he does, that’s because a group of political consultants briefed him on it about 30 minutes ago so he wouldn’t be caught slipping. It’s not that there’s no basis for character analysis in deciding who will lead our country, but that we are so often deceived by a facade of media stooges and journos who do that character analysis for us – often disingenuously.

Perceptions Can Be Deceiving

People liked Trump because he symbolized a shift away from carefully curated empty suits beholden to corporate interests. When you saw an unpolished, inappropriate tweet around the hours of 3 a.m., you knew it was really him tweeting it. Trump said what he thought, often to his detriment. Almost entirely on the basis of “mean tweets,” we saw a damage control campaign unlike any other kick into full gear in 2016. On paper, there wasn’t anything extraordinarily divisive about Trump (certainly not until the chaos of 2020 ensued). His rhetoric on issues like the border, immigration, and crime is reminiscent of what were Democratic talking points not too long ago.

The devil is in the framing – if you tell voters with incessant frequency over a long enough timeframe that one candidate is evil incarnate, they can’t help but internalize that. And that’s my point – the media knows how to craft public opinion, for better or for worse. They can make you hate or love Kamala. They can make you see Donald Trump as a quirky, wealthy New Yorker who mingles with people from all walks of life or as a far-right extremist. Trump, of course, knows his image fully and plays it up as much as possible. Sometimes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s philosophy of “welcoming their hatred” really is just good marketing. If there’s anything real estate mogul, reality TV star, and former president Donald Trump understands intimately, it’s marketing. 

In the third quarter of election season, we saw Biden get memory-holed and subsequently replaced by none other than “Mamala” Harris. (Side note: Kamala’s visible disgust at Drew Barrymore parasocially referring to her as Mamala did make me gain respect for her.) It’s true that Kamala Harris has had a momentous rebrand of such magnitude it could truly parallel Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the first iPhone. Where before her bizarre personality, poor public speaking, and tone deafness were a hindrance, it’s now a blessing.

Her policies may be abysmal and she may hardly have any platform aside from the one she recently plagiarized from our current, potentially incapacitated, sitting president, but there is something remarkably refreshing about her youthful vigor, playfulness, joie de vivre – even surprising resistance to identity politics. I am not here to convince you that Kamala is unlikable or that her rebrand has been ineffective. On the contrary, I think that’s the only thing she has going for her. Her pleasant wine-aunt disposition is a lot more naturally prosocial than JD Vance’s stilted donut banter. There’s something infectious about her waffling about coconut trees. Coconut trees, however, don’t govern.

At the time of writing this article, the two candidates for the most important position in the country have only participated in one debate. Might I also add that one of these candidates was never elected by the people. She didn’t win the primary vote. The media realized they could no longer gaslight the nation, nor the world at large, about Biden’s cognitive capacity and all but cartoonishly dragged him off the stage with a comically large hook. Overnight, the Democratic Party decided the current sitting president needs to be Parent Trapped pronto if they want any chance of winning the election. The absurdity, of course, is the implication that he’s not fit to be the president but remains our present commander-in-chief. Who exactly is running the show here? 

Out with Policy, In with Cult of Personality

One glaring omission from this election cycle has been policy. Maybe that’s because Kamala, up until a few weeks ago, didn’t have any. Maybe it’s because candidates have realized they don’t have to tie themselves to policy specifics; instead, they have to win the meme war and capture the hearts of Americans. They can sit back while the media machine and cult of celebrity do their bidding for them. It’s what many in the political commentary sphere –  mainstream and alternative, journalists and laymen, the establishment, populists and progressives – have identified as an election built on vibes rather than substance.

Do our political parties and ideological divides even form over policy anymore, or are they just identity signals formed around abstract groupings we deem cool, edgy, dissident, and otherwise? More importantly, how did our electoral process become so divorced from the very objective of political office? Think about the driving forces of this presidential election season for a moment. What comes to mind are debate soundbites about eating cats and dogs, the brat memeification of Kamala’s public image, powerful photos from close-call attempted assassinations, and remarks about Taylor Swift and “childless cat ladies.” 

This election has been so obscured by appeals to popularity, memes, and celebrity alliances that they’ve almost managed to chalk up the Stalinesque erasure of former Democratic presidential nominee (and, might I remind you, the current sitting president) Joe Biden to a false memory. Remember when the idea that Biden wasn’t cognitively fit to be president was just a looney conspiracy theory? The theatrics and performance are a stark contrast to debate throwbacks that have been circulating on TikTok by citizens yearning for a simpler time, where, well, we just knew what was going on, quite honestly.

For better or for worse, Trump is starting to embrace this nebulous vibes-based campaign that the left is guilty of. While at first it was Kamala who was running away from media appearances and stalling in the face of the mounting pressures of her debate with her snarky rival, now it’s Trump running for the hills (and not just when bullets are flying at him). He knows his debate performance was lackluster, to say the least. Kamala may have shown up shaky, voice quivering, anxious, but she steadily gained confidence over the course of the debate and juxtaposed herself against Trump’s ramblings about eating cats and dogs and transgender operations on illegal aliens as the normal, level-headed candidate. 

She repeatedly baited him into responding to attacks on his ego. Instead of landing blows against Kamala’s disastrous economic plans or forcing her to explain why she hasn’t implemented any of her proposed policies over the past four years she’s been in office, he wasted time responding to claims about the crowd sizes at his rallies. It didn’t help that the debate was basically a three against one, with moderators David Muir and Lindsey Davis making no attempts to conceal their allegiance with their one-sided live fact-checking.

This wasn’t the slam dunk Trump was expecting after mogging his previous geriatric opponent on the world stage so brutally that Democrats were forced to replace him. The post-debate headlines and memes flooding social media were mostly a mockery of Trump’s references to Haitians eating cats and dogs, a talking point JD Vance admitted was something of a memetic fiction they capitalized on in order to get the media to address some very real immigration issues in Springfield, Ohio. Under the Biden-Harris administration, 20,000 Haitians have taken residence in a 60,000-person community, leading to tensions over road safety and exacerbating the strain on public services.

There were also images of alien creatures dressed in feminine attire with the tongue-in-cheek caption “transgender operations for illegal aliens.” The memes highlighted the absurdity of Trump’s comments, but they didn’t refute them. Kamala has, in fact, supported this very proposal on record. Presidential races are very much about optics, unfortunately, and I’ll admit I think the predominating optics on the right (or at least some terminally online factions of the right) are terrible. They’re scaring away women voters and people with empathy in droves, whilst the Democratic machine is rallying up their base with unrelenting appeals to young people. 

As much as I’m tired of hearing that I should vote for Kamala because she’s brat, I’m also sick of the losing game conservatives are playing by making Taylor Swift the target of their ire or making sweeping social faux pas like referring to entire voter bases you rely on as “childless cat ladies.” Now, more than ever, Trump and Vance need to hammer Kamala on policy, because whatever they’re currently doing certainly isn’t working. MAGA is increasingly becoming associated with freakishness, downward mobility, even degeneracy, while Democrats are distancing themselves from the religion of woke and presenting themselves as the party of normalcy.

People care about who’s going to make their lives better, safer, and more affordable. From my own anecdotal encounters with fellow Americans on both sides, most people report their cost of living soaring, and it’s considerably more difficult to make ends meet. Whether these candidates are cool or upstanding people is a little beside the point. I could convince myself to like either of these candidates’ theatrics, but I’m not interviewing them to be my best friend or partner. I’m electing them to advance an agenda that will improve the country at large. The Kamala rebrand may be a case study in marketing, but I don’t think people are quite that malleable that they can close their eyes and pretend they aren’t living the reality they’re living.

I’m enjoying the ride as much as everyone else, but no matter how much I’d like to “kiki” with Kamala over a glass of wine and no matter how many times I’ve played that video of her hysterically laughing with her sister on repeat, you can’t psyop me into voting for another four years of Democratic mess. Inflation is through the roof, we have an unprecedented number of border crossings, women-specific spaces are being eroded, and quite honestly, I don’t feel very safe in my own country. 

I would love to return to an era of presidential debates and media coverage that focused on the policies candidates were proposing, and when that candidate clearly shows up empty-handed, they should get scrutinized for that. Trump and Vance may have embraced some clownish tactics themselves (embracing fake memes, fixating on Taylor Swift, and questioning Kamala’s racial background), but these tactics didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. I guess you could say, “You live in the context in all in which you live and come before you.”