On Tuesday, when Vice President Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz to be her running mate in her bid for US president, she commemorated it by sharing a video of her calling the Minnesota governor and asking him if he’d like to join her campaign. In the clip, he appears in a T-shirt, khakis, white sneakers, and a camouflage baseball cap.
In politics, this is known as “appealing to the base”—looking like an average (yet electable) American. For pop culture followers, it was known as “appealing to Chappell Roan stans.” Over the last year, during the singer’s meteoric rise, Roan has been selling camo caps emblazoned with “Midwest Princess” in orange block letters. Once Walz officially joined the ticket, the campaign began selling a similar hat with “Harris Walz” on it.
Soon, everyone wanted to know: Has Chappell seen this?
Eventually, she did. Later on Tuesday she reposted an image on X showing a side-by-side comparison of her hat and the Harris campaign’s with the caption “Is this real[?]”
Indeed it was, and according to reporting from my colleagues at Teen Vogue, the 3,000 hats that were initially made sold out in 30 minutes. Close to $1 million worth of hats have now been sold, officially making it a liberal status symbol. As the hat, and its similarities to Roan’s merch, began to spread, the jokes sprang to life.
“This is the Bushwick x Los Feliz unity our nation needs,” wrote podcast and TV personality Desus Nice, referring to the hip enclaves in New York and Los Angeles, respectively. Wall Street Journal tech columnist Christopher Mims shared Roan’s tweet on Threads saying, “Chappell Roan posting the Harris-Walz camo hat is some kind of Gen Z inception.”
You say “inception,” others say “reclaiming the narrative.” Yes, the hat could be a subtle (or not subtle) attempt by the Harris-Walz campaign to get a Roan endorsement. When President Biden was still running for reelection, she’d turned down an opportunity to play a Pride event at the White House, and so maybe the hat was a move to make her reconsider. (A rep for Roan didn’t respond to a request for comment.) It could also be an attempt to make camo do for Harris-Walz what red has done for Donald Trump.
In the years since Trump started wearing them, the red Make America Great Again hat has become a symbol of not only Trump’s campaigns for the US presidency, but also for the values he and the GOP stand for. Red hats became symbols, memes of their own. Kanye West wore one to the White House; supporters wear them at rallies.
The language of the MAGA cap also became something translatable. The Strand bookstore in New York made a line of hats that said “Make America Read Again” (albeit in white); in 2020, LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers wore red caps that read “Make America Great Again Arrest the Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor.”