“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” Vice President Kamala Harris said last year at a White House event, chuckling as she quoted her mother. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
Perhaps it was the way she laughed at herself, or the way a folksy saying took a sudden philosophical turn. Whatever the reason, over a year later it has become the line that launched a thousand memes.
On social media platforms including X and Instagram, some users have added coconut and palm tree emojis to their bios and beside their handles, referring to the speech. Clips of Ms. Harris speaking have been remixed into pop songs by artists like Charli XCX and Chappell Roan, and they have spread widely across TikTok.
It’s the latest iteration of a longtime online fandom around Ms. Harris, sometimes known as the KHive. The online encyclopedia Know Your Meme credits the MSNBC correspondent Joy-Ann Reid with coining the moniker — a play on BeyHive, the name of Beyoncé’s devoted fan base — in a tweet in 2017, when Ms. Harris was a first-term senator from California. Both Ms. Harris and President Biden have referred to the KHive on social media over the years.
The KHive grew in number in 2019, during Ms. Harris’s unsuccessful run to secure the Democratic nomination for president, but became quieter when she became Mr. Biden’s vice president and struggled at times to make the role her own. Since Mr. Biden suspended his re-election campaign on Sunday and endorsed Ms. Harris to be the Democratic presidential nominee, her supporters have become increasingly vocal, reinvigorating the online community.
Courtney Phillips, a stay-at-home mother in Gastonia, N.C., who is a founder of the grass-roots organization Mamas4Kamala, said she had been part of the movement since Ms. Harris’s first presidential campaign.
“At that time, KHive was just beginning to naturally, organically find people in those online spaces,” Ms. Phillips, 37, said. When Ms. Harris did not win the nomination, Mamas4Kamala threw its support behind Mr. Biden. Now, Ms. Phillips said, she is seeing an infusion of KHive energy among members of her group and more broadly.
“We don’t necessarily call ourselves the KHive, but, let me tell you, we are all about Vice President Kamala Harris,” said Jotaka Eaddy, a social strategist who founded the collective Win With Black Women in 2020.
On Sunday, the group hosted a Zoom call that drew over 40,000 participants and raised $1.5 million for the Harris Victory Fund, Ms. Eaddy said.
Though the group itself is not affiliated with the fandom, some members of Win With Black Women are also veteran members of the KHive, Ms. Eaddy added, mentioning Reecie Colbert, a Sirius XM radio host who has previously given interviews about her involvement with the social media community.
“Everybody’s reconnecting,” Ms. Phillips, the Mamas4Kamala founder, said. “You know, it’s ‘Let’s really get to work now’ and ‘Let’s pull out our old shirts and buttons and campaign gear.’” She said she had also noticed younger Harris supporters entering the fold, using humor and memes to express their support.
Whether all of these new supporters identify as members of the KHive is a bit complicated. Kelly Weill, a writer who covers internet culture and disinformation online, described the Harris fandom as having at least two distinct factions.
The first comprises the original group of loyal Harris fans who championed her when she was a senator during the Trump administration and grilled the likes of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Brett M. Kavanaugh in Senate committee hearings. The second, Ms. Weill said, is made up of fans “considerably to the left of her 2020 platform,” including those who may have backed Senator Bernie Sanders or Senator Elizabeth Warren during the Democratic primary that year.
This new wave of support draws on a combination of irony and sincerity that’s native to the internet, and it often embraces Ms. Harris’s less scripted moments.
Aly McCormick, a political communications student at George Washington University, recently made a montage of Ms. Harris dancing, laughing and delivering her now-famous coconut-tree line as the Charli XCX song “360” bumps in the background. In the TikTok video, Ms. McCormick swapped out the lyric “I’m so Julia” for “I’m so Kamala.” (Charli XCX herself proclaimed “Kamala IS brat” on X on Sunday evening, a reference to the singer’s album by the same name and an apparent compliment.)
Ms. McCormick said she did not consider herself a member of the KHive but planned to vote for Ms. Harris if she won the nomination.
“I feel like the KHive has kind of turned into something else,” Ms. McCormick, 21, said. “In the 2020 election, it was a more concentrated primary group. Now, when I think of people who are excited about Kamala Harris, I see people in the center being super excited about her, but I’m also seeing people on the further left wing also excited about her. Within the past four years, she’s built a larger tent.”
Ms. Weill described videos like Ms. McCormick’s “Brat” remix as the kind of “unhinged internet moment that really feels like it belongs to us,” Ms. Weill said, referring to people on the left. She noted that Ms. Harris’s campaign had already started to seize on the fervor. The header image on the X account for Ms. Harris’s rapid response team was recently revamped to look like Charli XCX’s latest album cover.
Campaign memes involving Mr. Biden, like Dark Brandon, sometimes seemed forced, Ms. Weill said. But when positive memes circulate organically, they can help burnish a candidate’s image and feed momentum for their campaign.
Annie Wu Henry, a digital strategist who worked to elect Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, has emojis of a coconut and a palm tree displayed on her social media channels.
“It’s just something small that shows your excitement and support,” Ms. Henry, 28, said, adding that she had previously used emojis in a similar manner to show her fondness for Taylor Swift. (During the 2020 primary, some social media users opted for the blue baseball cap emoji to show their support for Andrew Yang.)
Ms. Henry considers the emojis on her profiles to be a digital endorsement of Ms. Harris, she said.
As is the case with most fandoms, there may be discord. “There are people that would probably consider themselves KHive,” Ms. Henry said, who “might disagree with the vice president on one thing or another.”
And in the past, members of KHive have been accused of internet trolling and harassment as they defended Ms. Harris online, according to a 2020 report from HuffPost.
But in an unusual political moment, the online fandom may be providing something sorely needed for many Americans.
“I think these people are rallying for Kamala Harris,” Ms. Weill said, “because she’s offering hope and even a little bit of fun in a presidential election that was previously completely devoid of it.”
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