Donald Trump, Joe Biden

Whether it’s a grinning Joe Biden as “Dark Brandon” or Donald Trump’s face superimposed onto a scene from HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” both presidential campaigns this year have embraced digital memes, the lingua franca of social media. The campaigns of the Democratic president and Republican former president enthusiastically create and share content trying to shape the narratives around both men. Biden’s campaign even recently posted a job seeking a manager of meme pages. With tens of millions of people using social media as a primary information source, the battle of memes could affect who wins in November. Many Americans say they’re not excited about a Biden-Trump rematch and growing digital habits make it harder to reach people through traditional spaces for political advertising like print publications or television. Memes can be an edgier, faster way to get a political point across than a block of text or a lengthy video. But online misfires have hurt candidates and created major controversies.

Here’s a look at how memes are shaping presidential politics.  Memes have been around longer than you think.

The term “meme” was coined in 1976 by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who used it to refer to a piece of information that is imitated and shared, be it a slogan, a behavior, an idea. With the rise of internet culture, digital memes have skyrocketed in popularity. They often take the form of visual content like an image or a video with some kind of message that speaks to people who get it because of some knowledge they have or membership in a particular group. Memes don’t have to be funny or satirical, but that makes them more likely to be shared widely. And while politicians these days work to deliberately create and share memes, some of the most well-known ones were unintentionally sparked. One of the earliest memes of the modern era was former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s enthusiastic scream the night of the Iowa caucuses, with videos and images of the Democrat’s guttural shriek being widely shared, drawing ridicule and damaging his already struggling presidential bid.

When President Barack Obama was moving into the White House in 2009, the photos of outgoing President George W. Bush with the text, “Miss me yet?” were broadly shared by Bush’s supporters. A 2011 photo of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wearing sunglasses and staring at her phone became a popular meme the following year, “Texts from Hillary,” purporting to show her sending snarky texts to politicians and celebrities. “If you do it well, you tap into something that the group agrees upon or is feeling suspicious about; you tap into something that connects with the audience,” said Rebecca Ortiz, an associate professor of advertising at Syracuse University who has researched the influence of memes around political identity.

Biden’s campaign has created its own stockpile of photos and videos for distribution on official Biden-related accounts. According to a Biden campaign official, advisers are also looking to partner with third-party creators in the coming months, with the hopes of reaching the followings of users who already seem aligned with a pro-Biden message. By developing relationships with outside creators, campaign officials hope that some undecided or as-yet unpersuaded voters will glom onto Biden’s message if they receive it from another account they’re already following.

“We’re trying really hard to run a digital program that is authentic to our candidate, who is probably not spending all his time on Twitter - actually, he definitely is not,” said Clarke Humphrey, senior adviser for digital persuasion for the Biden campaign.

Associated Press