iii The “Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash” (BSDMS), created by two college students in 2015, had close to 450,000 followers in May 2016. history” as a partial explanation of Bernie Sanders’s unlikely challenging of Hillary Clinton’s presumptive candidacy in the 2016 primaries. viii “ Election 2016: Campaigns as a Direct Source of News,” Pew Research Center, July 2016, accessed Nov (.)ġ In February 2016, the Washington Post characterized the presidential primaries as “the most-memed election in U.S.vii Rodney Taveira and Emma Balfour, “How Donald Trump Won the 2016 Meme Wars,” Conversation, November (.).vi Alex Williams, “How Pepe the Frog and Nasty Woman Are Shaping the Election,” New York Times, Octobe (.).v Anastasia Denisova, “Memes, Not Her Health, Could Cost Hillary Clinton the US Presidential Race,” I (.).iv Leigh Alexander, “Blame it on the Zodiac Killer: Did Social Media Ruin Ted Cruz’s Campaign?” Guardi (.).

iii Caitlin Dewey, “How Bernie Sanders Became the Lord of ‘Dank’ Memes,” Washington Post, February 23, (.).

During the 2016 campaign, meme-ing served as an example of a politico-cultural discourse that exemplified the unusual election year in ways that conventional political analysis alone was not able to capture.

The article demonstrates the ways in which memes spoke to the intersection of electoral activism and cultural representations in several ways: they enabled users to rapidly take a stand on and react to developing political events in real time they provided alternative parallel discourses to mainstream media viewpoints and they enabled mobilizing voters outside of official political discourses. In particular, it focuses on memes that called attention to the candidates’ contradictory or incongruous statements critiquing their policy positions. This article considers the phenomenon of meme-ing in relation to both the Republican and Democratic campaigns. As brief, to the point, and quickly modifiable visual-textual messages, Internet memes were a particularly apt way to illustrate the most contested hot-button issues that emerged during the 2016 presidential race. history.” During the election year, meme-ing related to the major candidates became hugely popular and engaged various groups of people who were not ordinarily involved in bipartisan political processes.

In February 2016, the Washington Post characterized the presidential primaries as “the most-memed election in U.S.

Time for change memes 2017