When Vice President Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate for the US presidential election on Tuesday, she marked the occasion by sharing a video of her calling the Minnesota governor and asking if he’d be interested in campaigning. In the video, Walz is seen wearing a T-shirt, khaki pants, white sneakers, and a camouflage baseball cap.
In politics, this is “appealing to the base” – looking like an average (but electable) American. Among pop culture fans, it’s called “appealing to the Chapel Lawn fans.” During the singer’s meteoric rise over the past year, Lawn sold a camouflage cap with “Midwest Princess” emblazoned in large orange block letters. When Waltz officially joined the candidate, her campaign began selling a similar hat that read “Harris Waltz.”
Soon, everyone wanted to know. The chapel saw this?
Turns out, she did just that: Later on Tuesday, she reposted an image to X showing a side-by-side comparison of her hat with the Harris campaign’s hat, with the caption, “Is this real?”
And that was indeed the case: our colleagues at Teen Vogue reported that the first batch of 3,000 hats sold out in 30 minutes. Now, more than $1 million worth of hats have been sold, making the hat officially a liberal status symbol. (Harris’ campaign later updated the outlet, saying that 47,028 Harris-Waltz camo hats had been sold, bringing in $1,878,524 in revenue.) As word spread about the hat and its similarity to Rowan’s merchandise, the joke became reality.
“This is the Bushwick-meets-Los Feliz unity our country needs,” podcast and TV personality Desus Nice wrote, referring to the trendy hubs of New York and Los Angeles, respectively. Wall Street Journal tech columnist Christopher Mims shared Roan’s tweet in a thread, saying, “Chapel Roan’s post of his Harris Waltz camo hat is kind of the start of Gen Z.”
Some say “Inception.” Others say “recapturing the narrative.” Indeed, the hat could be a subtle (or not) attempt by the Harris-Waltz campaign to enlist Rohn’s endorsement. She turned down the opportunity to appear at a Pride event at the White House when President Biden was still up for reelection, so the hat could be a move to make her reconsider. (A rep for Rohn did not respond to a request for comment.) It could also be an attempt to do for the Harris-Waltz campaign what red did for Donald Trump.
In the years since Trump began wearing the red hat, the “Make America Great Again” cap has become not only a symbol of his presidential campaign, but also of the values he and the Republican Party stand for. The red hat has become a symbol and a meme in itself: Kanye West has worn it to the White House, and his supporters have worn it to rallies.
The language on MAGA caps has also become translatable. The Strand Bookstore in New York created a line of hats (but in white) that read “Make America Read Again.” In 2020, LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers wore red caps that read “Make America Read Again.” Great Again “Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.”
