Nobody on the internet knows how organize a community like a stan.
The most engaged voter demographic in America isn’t anybody that the Pew Research Center writes about. No, it’s K-pop stans. Each week, they endorse their favorite group with their streams, Ticketmaster skills, and their relentless purchasing power. That’s the unbridled stan-ergy Kamala Harris’s campaign wants to bring into the presidential election. Remember when K-pop fans spammed a Trump rally’s registration, inflating attendance expectations and leading to a disappointing turnout? The BeyHive better get ready to swarm.
On July 25, Harris released her first presidential-campaign promo video for the 2024 election. She’s got a lot of ground to make up, given that she entered into the race with fewer than 120 days to go, so it matters that this thing gets shared. Luckily, she set it to Beyoncé’s 2016 song “Freedom,” featuring Kendrick Lamar. That means the video got shared, on the day of its release, by @Beylegion, a stan account with 475k followers, and @Beyoncepress (95.7k). Plus, it got tweeted out by stan-interactive accounts like @Popbase (1.5m followers) and @Popcrave (1.8m), both of which led with Beyoncé. After tweeting out the video, @Beyoncepress further kept the conversation going with “Freedom” moving up the iTunes charts.
This is Harris’s second major interaction with a stan army in the past week, after her team responded to Charli XCX tweeting, “kamala IS brat,” in reference to her recent album Brat, by changing the KamalaHQ Twitter banner to the Brat aesthetic. This is fine — and it got CNN talking — but Charli’s fan base (the Angels) is probably a little too wry and morose (not to mention, uh … small) to be fully mobilized. Playing into the Brat ecosystem could be interpreted as a kind of cringe “please like me” meme-ing — maybe a little too “Pokémon Go to the polls” to be actually effective. The Kamala x Brat edits that were on TikTok before Harris acknowledged the meme were more fun and made her seem like a fun aunt rather than a prosecutor. When her team references it, that saps out all the playfulness.
While Beyoncé hasn’t officially endorsed Harris yet, approving “Freedom” for a campaign video is basically the same thing. But Bey’s Cowboy Carter was expressly political in aim. Going forward, there is still work to be done, namely awakening the true beast: the Swifties. Though Taylor Swift is famously reticent to get into the political fray, when she does, she alerts a vast army of friendship-bracelet-makers invested in her morality. And, look, she has songs for campaigns too! If the Harris team wants a big win, try a campaign video with “The Man.” Or if they’re really savvy, they should negotiate to debut something from Swift’s next rerecording, Reputation (Taylor’s Version). Are you ready for it, fragile democracy?
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