It seemed like it happened in just a few hours.
A sudden increase in social media attention surrounding Vice President Kamala Harris has added to the ongoing debate over whether President Joe Biden will end his campaign after last week’s debate. It happened, as many political conversations still do, on X.
“My entire feed is now filled with Kamala pills,” Jay Caspian Kang, an editor at The New Yorker, posted on the platform Tuesday night.
By Wednesday morning, X had named “Kamala” one of the trending topics in politics with some 188,000 posts, many of which offered a mix of genuine support and wry bewilderment. Some of Harris’s most memorable lines quickly became running jokes. At points on Tuesday, “KHive,” the name for her vocal online supporters, made it into the top 20 topics on X, according to trends24.in, a website that monitors the platform.
Biden’s hold on the nomination, which seemed secure going into the debate, has grown shaky in recent days. Post-debate anxiety that could have abated over the weekend has instead intensified — perhaps fueled by historic victories for conservatives at the Supreme Court — with a sitting Democratic congresswoman calling on him to withdraw and even former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., saying on MSNBC that it was legitimate for people to ask whether Thursday night’s debate performance was part of a “condition.”
The social media energy surrounding Harris appears to be based on the idea that she would take Biden’s place rather than have to compete with other candidates in an open convention. If Biden drops out, she would be first in line for the millions of dollars in Biden’s campaign coffers, and a recent poll showed her outspending Biden in a head-to-head matchup with the presumptive Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump.
And it’s not just Twitter users who think Harris has a shot at clinching the nomination. Betting markets, where people can wager real money on political outcomes, have shifted sharply in Harris’s favor in recent days. On PredictIt, one of the internet’s most popular betting markets, Harris has overtaken Biden as the person most likely to win the Democratic presidential nomination — a shift that left her with virtually no chance as of June 26.
On Wednesday morning, Biden’s odds fell further and Harris’s rose after The New York Times reported that the president had told an ally he was considering continuing in the race. That report, based on a single anonymous source, has not been confirmed by NBC News and the White House has denied it.
Late Wednesday morning, the Drudge Report homepage featured a photo of Harris with the caption: “HER PARTY IS NOW.”
It wasn’t long ago that Harris and her KHive were largely absent from social media conversations. As The Daily Beast noted in 2022, Harris’s declining popularity had all but hollowed out her online following, once seen as a particularly combative group that often pitted itself against supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, aka the “Bernie Bros.”
But shared concern about Biden appears to be helping to heal the divisions between the two groups, with some even raising the uneasy alliance now felt necessary to defeat Trump. Versions of a “Kamala Harris Apology Form” circulated on X and Instagram, jokingly offering reasons why people hadn’t supported her in the past.
Others posted that they were “coconut-pilled,” a riff on comments the vice president made at a White House event in May 2023. In her speech, Harris said, “Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of everything you live in and everything that came before you.” The clip became a meme due to the vice president’s odd phrasing and sudden change in tone.
On Tuesday it was taken as a kind of ironic battle cry.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
