Remember Brat Summer?
It wasn’t so long ago, but it already feels like a part of the distant past.
NBC News shares graphic measuring how ‘Brat’ Kamala Harris is. pic.twitter.com/VthIOld0Y4
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) July 24, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris replaced the dementia-addled President Joe Biden last summer. The party refused to disclose Biden’s mental decline but panicked after his poll numbers sank.
Voila, a younger, more hip candidate. And, for a few fizzy weeks, everyone was connecting Harris with cool, brat-friendly vibes. That’s despite Harris’ low approval ratings and progressives hoping she would be removed from the ticket earlier in the year.
It turns out that rebrand was anything but organic.
The group Way to Win made it possible, in part, by paying off an army of social media influencers to push Harris’ cool quotient.
Spoiler Alert: It failed.
A Real Clear Investigations report from journalist Lee Fang details how Way to Win tried to rebrand the unpopular Harris in a matter of weeks.
The effort supported over 550 content creators who published 6,644 posts across platforms, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, and X. Way to Win coached creators on phrases, issue areas, and key themes to “disseminate pro-Kamala content throughout the cycle,” a post-election memo from the group noted.
We already know that Democrats spent plenty of cash to cajole big stars to join the Harris movement. One example? Oprah Winfrey’s company collected $1 million to help Harris defeat Donald Trump, money Winfrey claims went to production costs.
Now, RCI shares how a feminist comedian also took money to fund videos supporting Harris’ campaign.
Ilana Glazer, a comedian who starred in the Comedy Central show Broad City, received Way to Win funding for a series of election videos called “Microdosing Democracy,” in which she half-heartedly endorsed Harris as she lighted a spliff of marijuana.
View this post on Instagram
Content creators routinely create videos for nominal fees, often drawing massive audiences in the process. Some video podcasters merely turn their cameras on and speak before their in-house backdrops. Others have modest budgets to hire producers, editors and other experts to make their clips shine.
It isn’t clear how much Glazer was paid to create the videos in question. The above example seems like it required little funding to pull off.
The post How ‘Broad City’ Star ‘Microdosed’ on Harris Campaign’s Dime appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.