Today, Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate in the 2024 election. Naturally, the pick will lead to a flurry of activity behind the scenes for the campaign, from whipping up new branding materials to drafting ads and social media copy. But if the new ticket hasn’t already purchased a website, they might run into a bright green obstacle when they do: Someone already bought the HarrisWalz.com domain, designed its homepage like Charli XCX’s album brat, and then sold it to an unnamed buyer.
Searching for the existing HarrisWalz.com site leads to one slime green image. In the center is the wordmark “walz,” emblazoned in a low-res Arial font. To anyone who’s logged on to social media in the past few months, the graphic is clearly an homage to the brat aesthetic, which has come to represent Gen Z’s irreverent sense of humor. It’s also, oddly enough, visually linked to the Harris presidential campaign, as netizens have made countless edits of Harris to the brat soundtrack and Charli herself tweeted, “kamala IS brat.”
Kamala HQ, the Harris campaign’s official X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok accounts, even rebranded to a brat theme. Now, though, the Harris-Walz campaign will have to look elsewhere for its own domain—a turn of events that demonstrates just how much grassroots meme marketing has come to define Harris’s run for the presidency.
The making of HarrisWalz.com
The original domain owner was Jeremy Green Eche, an attorney who specializes in U.S. trademark law. He’s the founder of the law firm JPG Legal, but as a side hobby, he also works as a “cyber squatter”—someone who buys domain names in hopes that they can be resold in the future at a profit. Every year, he says, he commits an hour to thinking up various pairs of politicians (both Democratic and Republican) who might appear on a ticket together. Then, he buys about 100 of them and lets the chips fall where they may. He nabbed the HarrisWalz domain for $8.99 in August 2020; and this morning, he sold it for his asking price of $15,000 to a buyer unaffiliated with either presidential campaign. Eche wouldn’t reveal who he sold it to.
“[Walz] was a governor in a Heartland state as a white man—he seemed like a logical choice for Harris as a running mate to me, even back in 2020,” Eche says.
In 2011, Eche pulled the same stunt with Hillary Clinton’s name, purchasing domains including ClintonBooker.com, ClintonBiden.com, and ClintonKaine.com. When Clinton chose Tim Kaine as her presidential running mate in 2016, Eche sold the domain to a marketing company that turned out to be the Trump campaign. Before making the sale, he says, he had ample time to design landing pages that would draw attention to the sites. The result was a series of comics inspired by Harry Potter fanfiction, which Eche now calls “cringe.”
This year, Eche had a much shorter window to market his Harris domains—a fact that echoes the Harris campaign’s own scramble to turn around marketing assets after she became the presumptive nominee. So, Eche’s wife suggested something simple and trendy: a brat theme.
“We were both very familiar with the whole ‘brat summer’ vibe and how people have tied it to the Harris campaign, so it made a lot of sense,” Eche says.
Clearly, the design caught someone’s attention—but whether the real Harris-Walz web page will feature a brat theme remains to be seen.