Vice President Kamala Harris burst out laughing at her own joke when most in her audience of younger people did not seem to know what she was referencing.
“I ask of you this … that you will not walk away. That you will stay true to your spirit and your sense of purpose. That you will continue to fight for the promise of America,” Harris told a gathering of students in Prince George County, Maryland, Tuesday.
“And I ask you to remember the context in which you exist. Yeah, I did that. Uh-huh,” she added, laughing at her own joke.
There were some cheers and laughter, but most of the students didn’t appear to get her reference.
.@VP Harris: “I ask of you this…that you you will not walk away. That you will stay true to your spirit and your sense of purpose. That you will continue to fight for the promise of America. And I ask you to remember the context in which you exist. Yeah, I did that. Uh huh.” pic.twitter.com/tzu2TovJTM
— CSPAN (@cspan) December 17, 2024
Harris was calling back to a speech she gave to young Hispanic leaders at the White House in May 2023.
Do you think Kamala Harris will run for president again?
In those remarks, the vice president quoted her mother — a native of India, who immigrated to the U.S. — who would give her a hard time, saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”
On that occasion once again, there were a few polite laughs, but mostly it was Harris laughing at her own story.
“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” she continued, explaining to her audience the lesson she was trying to convey.
The Harris campaign and many of her supporters embraced her 2023 coconut speech, with her Kamala HQ account on social media platform X describing itself as “[p]roviding context.”
It appears, based on Tuesday’s audience response, that fewer people were in on the joke than she may have thought.
The vice president did not do as well with the younger demographic as President Joe Biden did in 2020.
President-elect Trump won the 18-29 year-old male voters 56 to 42 percent.
Young women also moved in Trump’s direction, shifting from 33 percent support in 2020 to 40 percent in this year’s election, according to a Tufts survey.
Overall, the Republican garnered 46 percent of the demographic in 2024 to Harris’s 52 percent. That was a 10 percentage point increase for Trump from 2020.
In truth, Harris had a problem connecting with almost every demographic up and down the line, and her awkward attempts at humor did not help.
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