Kamala Harris memes are all over the internet. Will tweets and TikToks turn into votes?

In a series of events over 24 hours that would have been unimaginable a week ago, Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, secured the backing of Joe Biden and key leaders, brought in a record-breaking $81m, and became the face of brat summer.

“kamala IS brat,” pop star Charli xcx declared on Sunday, a reference to her new album released last month that has launched countless memes declaring it the season of the brat. A brat, in the British singer’s own words, is “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it”.

Brat was having a moment, Kamala was having hers, and the two came together in cultural union via a tidal wave of posts – largely from younger Americans – like videos with the pop star’s music over clips of the vice-president’s frequently shared coconut tree remarks.

Harris’s campaign quickly embraced the memes, adopting a lime green Twitter/X background in the same aesthetic of the Brat album. The internet went wild.

Now the question is what it might mean for Harris’s chances come November. Will tweets and TikToks turn into votes?

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While this year’s election drew plenty of memes and online engagement, there was little excitement about the rematch of Joe Biden, 81, and Donald Trump, 78, and instead a pervasive sense of cynicism.

Young people had reported feeling disengaged and apathetic about the upcoming elections, and US politics in general. In a US News-Generation Lab poll of voters 18-34 from early July, 61% of respondents agreed that the upcoming election would be among the most important in history, but nearly a third said they would probably not or definitely not vote.

Of those who said would not or were unlikely to vote, 40% said it was because they didn’t like any of the candidates, and 15% said they were turned off by politics.

After Biden’s widely criticized debate performance, and amid growing calls for him to bow out of the election, there was a flurry of Harris-related memes. The KHive, as Harris fans have been called, seemed rejuvenated by the renewed interest around her.

The memes and posts surged after Biden announced that he would step aside, and that he was endorsing Harris, including videos of her with music from Chappell Roan and Kendrick Lamar, and along the way the tone of the content shifted from oftentimes just ironic and silly to something more earnest.

“It went from being just shitposting to shitposting into reality and as it became more and more real people also understood what power this could actually hold and what this could actually mean,” said Annie Wu Henry, a digital and political strategist who has worked with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive congresswoman from New York, and Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman.

She views the furor around Harris among younger voters as both about Harris but also something larger. “It’s about the potential for something new, it’s about a political party that can be agile and make adjustments based on what they are hearing from the people.”

“I think it is really exciting and bringing a lot of energy and hope to folks that haven’t felt this way in some time and for young people that maybe haven’t had a moment of hope like this in politics before.”

The buzz online is bringing results, said Marianna Pecora, the communications director for Voters of Tomorrow. The gen-Z led liberal advocacy organization had its best fundraising day in history, Pecora said, and saw more apply to join a chapter or start a chapter in two days than in the last month combined.

Priorities USA, one of the largest liberal Super Pacs, told the Guardian on Tuesday that after Biden endorsed Harris, it saw a notable increase in the share of young people who said they plan to vote in the upcoming election.

Related: ‘I was not voting before, now I am’: gen Z voters on what they think of Kamala Harris

It’s also brought a sense of joy and excitement not often seen in politics, Pecora said, particularly for a generation that came of age during one of the most difficult periods in recent history from growing political turmoil and the rise of far-right extremism in the US to Covid-19.

“We’ve had this history as young people not seeing a system that really works for us and not having too many figureheads that are really fighting for us,” said Pecora, who was 13 when Donald Trump was elected.

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While polls show that Harris – like Biden and Trump – has struggled with favorability ratings, she has helped elevate issues that are important to younger voters, including abortion rights and Israel’s war on Gaza.

Harris, a biracial woman who is set to be the first Asian American and black woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, is an appealing candidate to gen Z voters, who are among the most diverse generation in US history, said Yalda T Uhls with the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at the University of California, Los Angeles.

This year 41 million members of gen Z will be eligible to vote, and nearly half of them are people of color.

A report from the center published last year that surveyed people from ages 10 to 24 found that adolescents are most interested in hopeful uplifting content of people beating the odds. “I feel like that’s the Kamala story,” Uhls said. That same study also found that in their entertainment, older teens were most interested in seeing a Black woman as the hero of a story.

“Maybe young people have been waiting for this. They have been waiting for a candidate they feel is representative of them,” said Uhls, who co-authored the report and also grew up with Harris.

But while Harris’s entry into the race has energized young voters, they also want to see real policy proposals that align with the issues most important to them, experts say.

“Whether this translates to a large surge in youth voter turnout in November may come down to whether the new Democratic nominee also can convince young voters of a credible plan to address the existential threats they see in their everyday lives,” said Sarah Swanbeck, the executive director of the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans, pointing to the climate crisis, protections for democratic institutions, and economic policy that will improve social mobility.

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The events of this week have marked a special moment for young women, said Pecora. Young women for decades have been the arbiters of culture, she said, and this moment is tying the culture of young women to the vice-president.

“We know we’re the margin of victory and that is translating into how this is happening online. It’s no coincidence to me that young women who have become the base of the Democratic party, who are fighting for reproductive freedom, their culture is the culture that is becoming mainstream with this movement,” she said. (Conservatives have frequently railed against the growing number of unmarried women supporting Democrats.)

Related: Democratic delegates on Biden’s exit – and Harris’s rise: ‘We’re awestruck’

“It’s showing that we have power and sway in this world where young women are typically told wait your turn or let a man do it.”

Uhls, the UCLA scholar who has studied gen Z, said she predicts the enthusiasm of the last few days will make a difference in November.

“I think it’s going to translate to votes,” Uhls said. “Young people get most of their news and political information from social media. Some of them have written about this but they are thrilled that someone is actually marketing to them.”

Still, Harris’s path to the White House is tough. The latest poll from PBS News/NPR/Marist found that if the election were today, 46% of voters would support Trump and 45% would vote for Harris, a close race though within the margin of error. The outcome of November’s election is expected to be decided by a few thousand voters in a handful of swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But, Pecora said, the discourse about the election that is unfolding online is also happening elsewhere between friends and family at dinner tables and in classrooms, Pecora said.

“That engagement is taking itself into people’s conversations, into their homes, into their communities. That’s where voters are turned out,” she said. “The energy that’s happening online is not siloed to the internet. It translated to dollars, and those dollars are translating to real organizing capacity and an ability to turn out young voters in November.”

And so, Democrats say, there’s hope.