Digital Pop Culture in the US Election Campaign 2024- An Exemplary Analysis of Trump and Harris Memes

Memes have become an important part of political communication, as they can be used to reach the Gen Z voters in particular. Memes enable low-level access to political content. They compress complex information into an image or video clip that deliberately leaves room for the viewer's interpretation. Even absurd TikTok clips can motivate users to take an interest in candidates and the content addressed. Memes in the formate of GIFs, emojis, Insta-Stories, TikTok videos, or snaps are not only a popular form of everyday communication, entertainment and self-expression, they increasingly matter for the exchange of political content in social networks. Their use indicates group membership and demarcation from "others". A further reason why memes are particularly suitable for political ads is that imagery works associatively, requires shorter attention spans, can be understood faster, and remains in the memory longer (“picture superiority effect”). Against this background, the paper uses a multi-method approach to analyze selected memes from the 2024 US presidential election campaign. Examples include #Trumpwave, a subgenre of the far-right meme genre #Fashwave, which has been presenting Donald Trump since 2017 in neon colors as a successful businessman, a typical symbol of the 1980s and the best president/candidate for the presidency. The analysis also focuses on Kamala Harris' social media campaign, which became a pop culture phenomenon thanks to countless memes circulating on various platforms. In this way, Harris refreshed her image and appealed to young voters in particular. Many of them also produced memes for Harris themselves. The paper suggests that memes matter a lot for political communication, political campaigning, and online community building. Moreover, due to their multimodal character, the analysis of memes requires an approach which combines visual methods and discourse analysis, a mix that is not yet very common for political science analyses. The paper shows which new perspectives on the analyzed material become possible through such an approach.