The Myth of a Brat Summer

Kamala Harris’s team leaned into Charli XCX theming, but they’re mistaking the media elite for average Americans.

Kamala Harris’s Brat summer, according to generative AI.

A handful of swing states–Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, etc.–decide the presidential election. So, who has presumptive Democrat nominee Kamala Harris’s team copied for branding? A gaggle of homosexuals and women on the isle of Manhattan.

New York-based journalists, gay Twitter accounts, and other coastal types declared 2024 “the Brat summer” because of Charli XCX’s lime green Brat album cover. Following their lead, Kamala followed Charli XCX on Instagram and chose lime green as her campaign’s social media color. 

It’s understandable why someone in DC would mistake Brat for a hit. Millennial politicos, New York-based magazines, and others have dedicated more time to Brat than any other summer album, outside of Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department. The press coverage would lead you to believe Charli dominates the charts, but excluding Chappell Roan (a denizen of Missouri), Taylor Swift (a Philly girl who started doing southern cosplay), and lone lesbian Billie Eilish, country and rap artists run Billboard in 2025. Brat’s lead single, “Von Dutch,” didn’t even crack the top 100. “360,” the second single, peaked at 73. 

Kamala mistaking Brat for a hit points to a bigger issue with the Democrats’ endless Obama era. They mock Hulk Hogan for tearing his shirt in half at the RNC, but they forget that the most dominant show on streaming last year wasn’t Succession. It was the microwaved basic cable repeat Suits. Twisters–a sequel to, yes, Twister–is the highest-grossing movie in America, outside of the latest Marvel sequel. While low-rent TikTok videos succeeded in 2020, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Hollywood shorts app Quibi flopped. We are a lowbrow country. 

The irony: Democrats once understood culture better than Republicans. Conservatives struggled so much with culture that after Obama won, Andrew Breitbart made it his mission to get conservatives to understand “politics is downstream from culture.” 

The even greater irony: Democrats’ problems with culture go back to Obama, the man who supposedly launched the celebrity presidency. Obama was enmeshed with mid-2000s/nineties pop culture. He’s a relic of when movies made stars, and Oprah counted as America’s biggest influencer, not Joe Rogan. 

The changes began during the Obama era. Wendy Williams took Oprah’s slot as the most important talk show host, but Obama never catered to Wendy. As Williams once quipped, she was excited for a Trump presidency because she’d finally get a White House invite. She may have been America’s top talk show host during the Obama presidency–and a black woman at that–but she was the wrong type of celebrity for Obama. She was on his permanent no-list.

There are some positive signs that the Democrats haven’t completely lost the plot when it comes to pop culture. Megan Thee Stallion and Quavo performed at Kamala’s rally, and Megan tied her performance to the abortion issue, a pivotal topic for Democrats. But then Kamala fumbled the ball and quoted Quavo lyrics in a strange accent that went viral. Trump, at least, doesn’t rap Kid Rock lyrics.

Brat summer is part of a broader problem for Democrats. Right now, Kamala is living in Kamalot, as New York magazine coined it. The energy is on fire, but the polls are not. Kamala fever may have broken out in New York and Los Angeles, but Kamala won’t win the electoral college there. Yes, it’s vital to appeal to young hipsters (they’re the base), but Midwest and Southern culture matter, too, arguably more so than Charli XCX stans. Don’t believe me? Ask Hillary. She surely remembers how she forgot to visit Wisconsin. Kamala should avoid the same mistake.