Eagle-eyed observers of President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign might have noticed an unusual job posting on its website this week: “Partner Manager, Content and Meme Pages.” 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. (“Dark Brandon,” the campaign’s indisputably signature meme, was after all the organic creation of an inchoate group of online posters appropriating a Chinese illustrator’s artwork.) “Obviously we cannot dictate what any of these people publish, and we would never want to do that,” Humphrey said. “But what we are hoping to do is build relationships with the folks who run these accounts, share resources and brass tacks talking points with them so that they have the information they need.” 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. But to purposely engineer a successful meme is a tricky business. Although the medium has changed, the coin of the realm in digital politics is the same as it was in the days of literal stump speeches or vans equipped with loudspeakers: authenticity. (As Humphrey told me, “No one wants to have Joe Biden saying ‘How do you do, fellow kids.’”) Trump’s weird mastery of the digital realm sprung from not just the anarchic id of his most hyper-online, trollish supporters, but from the fact that his digital presence just seemed real. Just after his Twitter account was banned in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, I wrote in POLITICO Magazine that the outgoing president wasn’t necessarily skilled at social media per se, but that his unrestrained personality was a perfect fit for the unfiltered, emotion-driven content that drives engagement on those platforms. 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. “All we're trying to do is give them information about what Joe Biden has done, and what his plan is for a second term,” Humphrey said, adding that the goal is for meme-makers to then “take that information and figure out how it blends in with the other work that they're doing.” It makes for a predictably disciplined contrast with the anarchic nature of Trump and his surrogates’ approach to digital campaigning — which, as Biden himself pointed out this week, can redound in his campaign’s favor when Trump shares a meme advertising a “Unified Reich.” One campaign is engaging in reciprocal, mutual interest-based exchange with creators whom it expects their potential voters to trust; the other is rolling up its sleeves, thrusting its arms into the muck of the fever swamp and repurposing whatever it pulls out. Whoever wins the 2024 election, it will be hard to suss out which strategy is more successful from the sea of competing motivations in a presidential race. But the fact that both campaigns are treating their digital presence as, if not the whole ballgame, at least equal to their broadcast or analog counterparts, reflects how what was once a weird novelty — pointed at to explain Trump’s unexplainable “black swan” election, like the passing of a comet or a solar eclipse — has now taken center stage in global democracy.
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