Former Vice President Kamala Harris had the internet waiting in anticipation on Wednesday, as her dormant KamalaHQ online campaign accounts teased a comeback, posting for the first time since the 2024 election. While the KHIVE buzzed about a potential campaign launch, ultimately the former Democratic nominee announced a new digital partnership with People for the American Way to convert the old campaign accounts into a new digital content hub targeting Gen Z.
As someone who has worked as both a digital organizer for Democrats and with young voter advocacy groups – the effort feels misguided. Rebranded as just “Headquarters,” the accounts join what is now a robust digital landscape of anti-Trump meme pages. While Democrats are focused on winning back young voters and fighting back online, the launch felt like another splashy consultant-serving, donor-driven project that sidesteps the real work the left needs to do to win back younger generations. That work requires digital fluency connected to actual infrastructure and organizing, not measured in view counts, but voters registered and ballots cast.
So far, “Headquarters” seems to exist in a universe in which Brat Summer never ended. Twenty-four hours in, the accounts have tweeted the middle finger emoji, shared old clips of Trump gaffes and sparred with Trump orbit figures like White House Communications Director Steven Cheung.
As someone who has worked as both a digital organizer for Democrats and with young voter advocacy groups – the effort feels misguided.
The account rebranded under the handle @headquarters_67, a reference to a now outdated Gen Alpha meme from 2025. This only betrays the convoluted effort to co-opt young energy online. In fact, the launch was mocked so heavily for its inauthenticity that a day later, the handle changed again, this time to @headquarters68_. For an X account with 1.1 million followers, most posts so far have received less than 1,000 retweets.
While KamalaHQ repeatedly went viral during the 2024 campaign and the same young digital operatives are behind the new iteration, in many ways the project feels like a copy of anti-MAGA accounts that filled the post-presidential cycle void. Newsom’s Press Office, for example, has already been delivering vicious digital content that counterpunches against the digital right for months. Since 2024, Democrats have also worked to build a much more robust “digital army” of creators pushing out anti-Trump content. Compared to the alternative of Harris’ old accounts staying dormant, putting them to use – even limited – may seem intuitive, but one more voice in the left’s digital echo chamber won’t move the needle.
Instead of pandering to young voters with more “slop” content, Democrats need to do the harder work of investing in long-term, non-stop, youth organizing.
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Following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, many on the left commented on the impact of his organization Turning Point USA, wondering why there was no equivalent on the left. No such entity exists because, at every opportunity, it seems operatives and funders opt for the instant gratification of a new digital amplification effort that delivers millions of views — while demonstrating zero results.
Understanding Kirk’s project as a social media operation, however, fundamentally misunderstands its impact. While Turning Point certainly has its share of viral clips and a formidable online presence, that is only the surface level view of a $100 million funded, top-down, grassroots infrastructure that the right invested in for over a decade. The organization has fulltime organizers that engage young people with daily programming and register them to vote. They are a constant presence, not one that pops up every four years around a presidential campaign. If every aspiring leader, organizer and donor on the left looks towards short-term instant wins, we will never build something similar.
For Democrats to truly compete for Gen Z and now Gen Alpha, they must understand that online movements usually fade away and become moments. If there is no room, no chapter, no meeting – there is nothing lasting. Of course, online assets can be used to recruit, amplify and message, but the center of gravity must be out in the real world.
Though far from the juggernaut that is Turning Point, the left got a glimpse of how this type of organizing can operate with the recent rise of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani’s campaign, like Kirk’s effort, was often dismissed as a viral-first play. In reality, the upstart campaign built a grassroots organizing machine of tens of thousands of volunteers that knocked doors and made calls. Beyond politics, Mamdani’s movement gave young progressives community – offline.
Harris’ uninspired Headquarters gambit does not signal much about her future political ambitions, but it does underscore a Democratic Party that still conflates youth organizing with digital content creation. Young people aren’t waiting for more or better content – they are waiting for somewhere to go, something to build and a movement that they can be a part of untethered to any single candidate or election cycle. Until Democrats commit to that unglamorous work – prioritizing infrastructure over impressions – no rebrand will matter.
Kaivan Shroff
Kaivan Shroff is a senior advisor to the Institute for Education and a political commentator. He previously served on the advisory board for Dream for America, a progressive Gen Z-led non-profit. He is an alumnus of the Hillary for America digital team, holds a joint degree from Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a BA in Political Science from Brown University.
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