“Well,It’s Election Day … Again”: How a Multi-day Memetic Narrative Captured the World’s Collective Anticipation during the 2020 “Election Week Limbo”

Abstract

During the more than three days stretching between the 2020 U.S. election day and when the presidential race was officially “called” for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, a blizzard of memes snowed down across social media. This project analyzes more than 500 of these “election week limbo” memes, created and shared during a prolonged moment of collective political anticipation and anxiety. What emerged in this sample was a spontaneous, collaborative and evolving moment of meme-based storytelling that mirrored a classic five-act storytelling structure. Meme-ers sustained this narrative for most of a week, not simply to generate new, humorous takes on an iconic photo. Rather, they collectively evolved the shared tale of a distinct political moment during an isolating pandemic, capturing the “election limbo” story memetically as moods shifted, plot twists emerged and unlikely heroes came to the forefront, creating a distinctly collaborative, narrative, and evolving meme storytelling experience.

An inciting incident. Rising drama. Conflict. Plot twists. The emergence of unlikely heroes. A climax, complete with the slaying of a dragon. And perhaps, even the foreshadowing of a sequel …

Readers and scholars alike would recognize these as classic storytelling components, common in the plot structures that dominate the teaching of narrative storytelling for plays, books, shows and films: the three- (or five-) act structure, the Hero's Journey, Save the Cat, etc. Beyond creative writing and screenwriting classrooms, these narrative elements also reflect ancient storytelling traditions. Humans, Gottschall (2013) argues, are “addicted to story” (p. xiv). Today, just like during the hunter-gatherer era, story fulfills an “ancient function of binding society by reinforcing a set of common values and strengthening the ties of common culture” (p. 138). Though storytelling has adopted new forms and media over time, this hasn't fundamentally changed story, which ultimately boils down to “character + predicament + attempted extrication” (Gottschall, 2013, p. 186). Stories structure most arenas of everyday life. Storr (2020) argues that it's impossible to understand the human world without stories, which appear in our newspapers, sporting events, playgrounds, song lyrics, and public conversations: “Stories are everywhere. Stories are us” (p. 2).

The stories flooding our lives can be carefully written, but they can also be organic. This study is interested in the latter: the emergence of a spontaneous, crowdsourced moment of collective meme-based storytelling in an unlikely moment. During the more than three days that stretched between the 2020 U.S. Election Day (Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020) and the day that the presidential race was officially “called” for Democratic candidate Joe Biden (Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020), a blizzard of memes snowed down across social media. During this period, which we call “election week limbo,” we gathered hundreds of memes and other pieces of viral content that commented on this prolonged moment of collective political anticipation. Milner (2016) likens meme generation and circulation to a tapestry: individual users add unique “strands” on a certain theme that then collectively weave togetheran (p. 220). We anticipated using this framework to study this sample of memes, asking questions about the intertextuality of these “strands,” and the ideological and emotional tenor they reflected during such a high-stakes election. As we’ll elaborate on below, several questions guided our textual analysis: what visual patterns emerged among the election week memes, what ideological and emotional qualities were present in the sample, and how (if at all) did the memes evolve during this “election week limbo” period? What emerged from our sample surprised us. Within this more than three-day collaborative meme event (a lifetime for typically fleeting viral content), these “election week limbo” memes spontaneously crafted and sustained a cohesive narrative that began to resemble novelist Gustav Freytag's classic five-act structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution (Glatch, 2020). Digital participants around the United States and the world organically produced a memetic story of the experience of waiting for the election results, one full of classic storytelling components. Notably, digital content creators and audiences sustained this narrative day after day, not simply to generate new takes on an iconic photo as has been the case with high profile political memes in the past (such as the “Pepper Spray Cop” memes). Instead, weavers of this particular “cultural tapestry” collectively evolved the shared tale day by day as plot twists emerged and unlikely heroes came to the forefront, creating a distinctly collaborative and evolving meme storytelling experience.

Before sharing the crowdsourced narrative that emerged from our tapestry of “election week limbo” memes, we’ll contextualize our study within the broader areas of defining and categorizing memes, and the connection between memes and social mindset, ideology, and politics.

The Study of Memes, both Academic and Popular

Both within academia and popular parlance, the exploration, definition and analysis of memes and meme culture has ramped up substantially over the past 10 years. Academics typically start their exploration with Richard Dawkin's 1976 book The Selfish Gene. As Shifman (2013) explains, this book uses a biological framework, and defines memes as “small cultural units of transmission, analogous to genes, that spread from person to person by copying or imitation” (p. 9). Shifman updated Dawkin's theories for a digital media context, bridging the gap between academic skepticism of memes and enthusiastic popular discourse about them; she argues that memes “encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of contemporary digital culture” and thus merit serious inquiry (p. 4). Perhaps fittingly, the term, as well as its analysis, has spread across academic disciplines, mutating itself as the scholarship has expanded.

Whether an academic scholar or an everyday internet user, most people recognize that a meme is (1) almost always intended to be funny or ironic; (2) typically presented in the form of an image with text on top of it (though it could be a video or wholly text-based); and (3) likely intertextual, making reference to other memes as well as shows, films, advertisements, celebrities, and cultural moments. Another key trait of memes is that they have a goal of being shared, and likely evolve and adapt over time. As Bebic and Volarevic (2018) explain, the aim of the meme is to be “easily noticed in a social network but also easily spread” (p. 44). Sci and Dare (2014) describe memes as “promiscuous and mobile,” drawing on “a seemingly endless array of discursive formations to create an irreducible plurality of meaning,” which they argue encourages circulation (p. 23). Most memes travel rapidly around digital platforms “without signature or citation” (Milner, 2016, p. 15).

Beyond academia, popular projects have taken on the work of operationalizing, archiving and explaining memes to the public. Although memes can trace their origins to older traditions of street art and political cartoons, many argue that the modern conceptualization of memes emerged from websites such as 4chan around 2006. Projects like LOLcats popularized the “image macro” format, which “was initially limited to describing images captioned in bold Impact font with white letters and a black outline” but would evolve to include a broader category of images with superimposed texts (“Image Macros,” n.d.) Modern digital meme culture is now a teenager, having thrived for approximately 15 years, and now spans several generations of online users; understandably, there is a growing push to historicize memes and meme culture. Sites like “Know Your Meme” have a primary purpose of cataloging Internet memes, and its content is considered so culturally relevant as to have been integrated into the U.S. Library of Congress (Kurutz, 2020). We also see the historicization of memes in BuzzFeed's 2020 video series called “I Accidentally Became a Meme.” Viewed by tens of millions, these oral history documentaries feature some of the most popular meme subjects of all time (Ermahgerd, Success Kid, etc.) (BuzzFeedVideo, 2020). The careful documentation of meme history is a clear indication of the important role such content plays in modern society.

Memes have also become big business, moving beyond their digital presence to a material presence, often monetized by retailers or appropriated for “marketing and branding purposes” (Howley, 2016, p. 157). People made famous by memes, such as “Bad Luck Brian” and “Overly Attached Girlfriend” have turned their meme fame into something of a career, or at least a profitable side gig; these people participate in pop culture conventions and produce further content in their memetic personas (Milner, 2016, p. 195). In April of 2021, “Disaster Girl” Zoë Roth made history when she “sold the original copy of her meme as a nonfungible token, or NFT, for nearly half a million dollars” (Fazio, 2021). In this way, digital meme culture ends up entangling with more traditional media outlets and cultural gatekeepers: “Capitalizing on [a meme's] attention requires national TV appearances, local commercials, reality series, autograph sessions and more” (Milner, 2016, p. 203).

As to why people create and share memes? Sci and Dare (2014) explain that there's a “particularly postmodern kind of pleasure” that comes from recognizing memes, sharing them, and engaging in “the play” of editing, altering and updating viral content and thus contributing to “a specific memeplex” (p. 20). They found their sample of Pepper Spray Cop memes replicated not because the memes contained essential information, but because of “the ironic pleasure of intertextuality produced and reproduced through surface articulations” (p. 20). Chateau (2020) found that sharing memes allowed users to identify with emotions represented by them “without being authentically tied to them, under the guise of irony” (para. 1); this helps transform memes into “authentic flows of intimacy” (para. 19).

Beyond defining, indexing and categorizing memes, and the motivations for sharing them, a growing body of scholarship explores the relationships between memes, ideology, and mindset.

Memes as Reflective of Mindsets, Tools of Political Participation

Shifman (2013) argues that while memes may seem “trivial and mundane,” they’re actually reflective of “deep social and cultural structures” (p. 15). Memes tend to “shape and reflect general social mindsets” which eventually scale into “a shared social phenomenon” (p. 4). What qualifies as political “participation” has broadened significantly in the digital era, now encompassing acts such as commenting on political blogs and posting jokes about politicians. Shifman explains that digital platforms offer “appealing and convenient ways to stimulate participatory activity, especially among younger citizens who have been the least likely to participate in formal politics” (p. 120).

Meme scholarship has supported this observation. In evaluating Barack Obama's digital media strategy and memes featuring him, Howley (2016) notes the “increasingly intimate and dynamic relationship between popular culture and political engagement” (p. 156): “Internet memes enable and encourage non-traditional actors to ‘speak back’ to political authorities in surprising, and surprisingly eloquent, ways” (p. 171). Algaba and Bellido-Perez (2019) came to a similar conclusion: memes can summarize ideological stances within a political context, turning “hegemonic propagandistic discourse into humorous situations” and allowing citizens to express political exhaustion, lending a political voice to the public (p. 281).

Memes can also create positive and negative associations with political leaders. Nee and De Maio (2019)'s study of Hillary Clinton memes during the 2016 U.S. presidential election found a preponderance of “negative female biological gender stereotypes” that went against leadership ideals (such as being weak and unhealthy), and “were also incongruent with positive traditional female characteristics of honesty and integrity” (p. 314.) The memes consistently “depicted [Clinton] as crooked, evil, and dangerous for America” (p. 314). Lalancette and Small’s (2020) study of leadership memes about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau found that they served as an “alternative avenue for political expression and criticism” (p. 308). The memes created a space for “open and public condemnation of his leadership” and contributed to “a broader conversation about political practices and expectations about politicians” (p. 319.) They also identified “a sharp contrast between [Trudeau's] image-making and criticism about his personality found in memes” (p. 319). Jankowski and Kratzer’s (2020) analysis of memes of Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear within the context of his COVID-19 response found that meme-makers “legitimated” the governor as “a multi-faceted leader” and that within the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Beshear memes indicated “the presence and endurance of … cultural understandings of leadership” (p. 22).

Analyses of the “Pepper Spray Cop” memes, derived from a 2011 photo of a UC Davis police officer pepper spraying a group of students sitting passively on the ground, have situated memes as tools that have the ability to unite web users in collective conversation. Mielczarek (2018) describes such memes as packing a “rhetorical wallop” and as tools for dispensing social justice “off- and online at the hands of their authors, producing virtual shaming campaigns so severe as to resemble cyberbullying. Their producers weaponized them as tools of online stalking that hunt their targets relentlessly via the networked interwebs” (p. 68). Meme-ers “could not retaliate physically against [the UC Davis police officer], but they certainly punished him in the virtual world by creating a monster” (p. 77). These digital memes had a costly real-world footprint, too, given how they amplified the situation. UC Davis spent more than $175,000 to scrub the internet of negative posts and repair its image (Stanton & Lambert, 2016). They also paid “$1 million to three dozen protesters who were pepper-sprayed” and $38,000 in workers’ compensation to the officer involved (Garofoli, 2013, para. 7).

More broadly, scholars have studied the “weaponization” of memes. Zienkiewicz (2020) explored how “the playful, deceptive online engagements of the alt-right are found to be increasingly viral” and aid in the recruitment of “young rebels” (para. 1). Dafaure (2020) summarizes other such examples of violence in the wake of divisive online rhetoric, analyzing the “enemy images” of immigrants and refugees, social justice warriors, feminists, Muslims, and other groups often featured in the memes of alt-right media. The reduction of these “fictionalized entities” can result in “very real threats for the people (mis)represented and caricatured in those memes” (p. 19), such as Elliot Rodger's 2014 murdering of six people in California in what's become known as one of the first “incel” attacks and Edgar Maddison Welch's 2016 military-style assault rifle shooting following the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory (p. 18). Additionally, participants in January 2021's “Stop the Steal” rally and in the following violent attacks on the U.S. Capitol incorporated a host of digital- and meme-based imagery, including Pepe the Frog masks and “kek” and QAnon flags alongside more historical symbols such as the confederate flag (Rosenberg & Tiefenthaler, 2021).

The literature indicates memes’ ability to reflect deep cultural structures, to shape social and political mindsets, and to inspire participation in public critiques that can yield offline consequences. What was unique about our sample of “election week limbo” memes, is how they wove themselves into a classic narrative story structure across the span of several days, creating a distinctly spontaneous and crowd-sourced moment of collective meme-based storytelling.

Sample and Methodology

Meme collection is slippery and imprecise, as the content is constantly shifting and anonymous (or at least deeply disconnected from any authorship.) Mielczarek (2018) refers to this as memes’ tendency to perform “multidirectional and multilayered platform hopping” (p. 74). This is largely what causes popular memes to quickly go viral via networked communities of users and is what can “make retracing chronology of memetic movements” challenging; they’re elusive, seeming to “appear from (and disappear to) everywhere and nowhere at the same time” (Mielczarek, p. 74). Data collection for this project happened in real time during the more than three days that the 2020 U.S. presidential election results hung in limbo (Wednesday, Nov. 4, through Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020, when major news networks called the race for Biden.) Meme collection happened primarily through snowball sampling; upon noticing the inundation of “election limbo” memes being shared by the evening of Election Day, one of the authors began their own collection of samples, and also put out a call on their social media channels, soliciting related memes. This garnered hundreds of responses. Some of those leads took the authors to meme production accounts and “public” social media albums that were populated with relevant memes. We combed these accounts and sites for additional memes throughout the duration of the “election limbo” period, and after a round of filtering for project fit, the authors ended up with 543 distinct memes to analyze.

Like Shifman (2013), we distinguish between memes and what she dubs “virals,” described as “a single cultural unit (formulated in words, image or video) that is spread by multiple agents and is viewed by many millions” and may or may not “have derivatives” (p. 58.) Our sample includes both types of content. In the spirit of Milner (2016), we consider memetics “as a set of social practices” rather than “focusing exclusively on memes as individual texts” (p. 3). While a disparate tweet or image may not in and of itself be a meme, “it may be memetic in its connection to other [digital content]” and “may be memetically spread along with others in kind” (p. 3). For the ease of language, we’ll simply refer to our units of analysis as “memes,” as more than 70% of our sample presented as such.

Our qualitative textual analysis reflected “the constant comparative technique.” We each assigned samples to categories in our first round of analysis, we worked collectively to elaborate and refine those initial categories, we collaboratively searched for and identified relationships among and between these categories, and then we refined and integrated our data into a final analytical structure (Wimmer & Dominick, 2006). Like Mielczarek (2018), we sought to identify “dominant textual hooks” deployed in our sample of memes. To identify these, the following questions guided our analysis:

What visual patterns emerge in the sample, and what types of popular culture do they feature? What unique-to-the-moment meme templates emerge, and which classic meme templates are remixed?

What ideological and emotional qualities come through in the memes?

How (if at all) does the sample of memes morph and evolve across the days of this election week limbo?

Like any study of memes, our sample included some random variants, but we argue that taken as a set, the memes of these four days during the week of the 2020 U.S. election organically created a multi-day memetic narrative that mimicked a classic storytelling structure, and thus, we’ve organized the following analysis sections around those steps (or “acts.”) Rising action came in the form of memes related to initial anxiety around waiting for results and seeking clarity on the fate of the nation. Midway through the limbo period, plot twists and emerging heroes came into play in the memes, charging the story toward narrative climax. And finally, once it was clear Biden would win, the “falling action” memes reflected a change in tone, divided between those gleeful for Biden's victory, those suspicious of the election results, and more than subtle foreshadowing that the story of this election would not be wrapped up neatly (alluding to continued claims of voter fraud after the election and the January 6th, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol). Before we get to the memes of that week, however, we must address Act I, or the exposition of this story, because just like in classic myths of antiquity, the memetic storytelling tension that unfolded during the 2020 Election Week had been foretold.

Act I—Exposition: The Storytelling Set-up of the 2020 Presidential Election

In classic storytelling structure, exposition sets the stage for the action to begin. It's the place where the sole focus is “on building the world in which the story's conflict happens” (Glatch, 2020). For months, the stage had been set for the tensions that would unfold during election week. As French (2020) wrote during the week of the election:

Rarely in American history has so much happened and still changed so little. In 2020 alone, the House impeached the president, a pandemic killed more than 230,000 Americans and seriously sickened countless more, we endured a historic economic collapse, and a shocking act of police brutality in Minneapolis ripped the scabs off America's racial divisions, leading to protests and civil unrest in cities and towns from coast-to-coast. (para. 4)

The pandemic not only affected the lead-up to the election; it affected voting behaviors and the release of election results, which was not unexpected. For weeks, journalists and pundits had warned that early results may not be reflective of the eventual outcome, and final results could be delayed for a variety of reasons, including high voter turnout and increased mail-in votes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Anticipating this, news outlets released detailed explainers featuring state-level data about how and when votes might be released. Importantly, many warned of what analysts had dubbed a “red mirage,” where states that hold off on counting mail-in ballots would initially swing for Trump before later, upon counting those mail-in ballots, likely turn for Biden (Kahn & Lange, 2020).

It's also well-documented that the Trump and Biden campaigns anticipated legal disputes over the election results. As early as September 2020, lawsuits were “piling up” across the country, with cases concerning “the fundamentals of the American voting process, including how ballots are cast and counted” (Tucker, 2020, para. 2). Following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020, then President Trump pushed for his Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, to be seated “as soon as possible,” saying that “it's important to have a ninth justice to decide any election disputes” (Durkin Richer & Tucker, 2020, para. 7). Additionally, CNN documented at least eight times between July 2020 and election day when President Trump made comments either alleging that he may not cooperate in a peaceful transfer of power if he lost, or otherwise suggesting he may delegitimize the election (Liptak, 2020).

Nevertheless, when this predicted situation actually unfolded, as people went to bed on Election Day and woke up the next day … and the next day … and the next day, only to find that no major news outlets were ready to “call” the election for either candidate, people in the United States and around the world became almost frenzied with anxious anticipation. As one journalist wrote on day two of this election week limbo:

We’re all on an emotional rollercoaster ride: with Donald Trump and Joe Biden neck-and-neck, many of us are waiting, refreshing the internet while hoping to be put out of our misery. But amid what feels like hour-by-hour updates of “no news yet”, the internet has turned towards what the internet does best: memes, of course. (Noor, 2020)

Act II—Rising Action: Collective Anxiety and Impatience with the Unknown

If this exposition set the stage, Election Day marked the inciting incident, and the beginning of our meme collection as the story moved into rising action. During this act in a classic storytelling structure, problems are identified and intensified, hooking the audience as the protagonists progress toward a climax. Atypical of a modern U.S. presidential election, the rising action of this election intensified across days, not hours. With their part (voting) done, the citizenry—now the audience—had nothing to do but wait. There was no one left to convince about a candidate, no electioneering to be done. The audience watched and waited, powerless. During the tension of collective anticipation, internet architects devised and shared a variety of memes showcasing the anxiety caused by the lack of an Election Day outcome, the need for a scapegoat to blame for the tense waiting, and the desperation for someone to provide answers.

The Collective Anxiety of Waiting

The earliest memes in our sample were more or less non-partisan; they were more likely to reflect a collective national (and even global) need for a conclusion. The 2020 election campaign, couched in the midst of an upending global pandemic, took its toll. In October 2020, more than two-thirds (68%) of U.S. adults said that the election was a significant stressor, compared to 52% of adults who reported the same in 2016 (2020 Presidential Election a Source of Significant Stress, 2020). By the time Election Day arrived, people were anxious for results, and this came through in the memes, many of which focused on self-medicating with alcohol or Xanax or tranquilizers to cope with the stress of waiting. One meme alluded to erectile disfunction side effects (that the country needed to call the doctor because its election had lasted too long.) Meme-ers nailed it when they characterized our collective obsession with checking the results maps, despite no change and despite it disrupting work, sleep, and overall health, as seen in a well-known Dave Chapelle meme that compared an obsessive refreshing of election results to an addict needing another snort of cocaine. In the memetic story of this election, the action was rising, but the conclusion was still not clear. This led to a surge in our second category of memes during this storytelling act: exasperation with complicated results maps.

Map Memes

The anxiety during this phase of election week limbo was so heightened that it led to an obsession with election maps, as well as the people who could interpret them. While election coverage often focuses on sharing Electoral College votes by state, these memes played on the lack of knowledge by featuring maps with no relevance to the election, such as maps colored with crayon scribbles, maps for locations where it is legal to own an otter or a kangaroo, and a map of most popular Thanksgiving side dishes. Several memes involved Trump scribbling on or relabeling maps, alluding to a 2019 hurricane map that he appeared to have altered. Some of these map-based memes filled in specific state shapes with meme imagery, such as Michael Scott's “cringe” face. Another showed every other country in the world filled with a “Side Eyeing Chloe” meme picture, looking judgmentally at the United States’ election chaos.

As maps and numbers consumed the audience, an unlikely mentor surfaced to help interpret the slowly unfolding results. CNN's map guru, Steve Kornacki, blazed into the memeverse with his khaki pants, glasses, and unrelenting energy. Much like the role of the “mentor” in the classic Hero's Journey story structure, Kornicki emerged as someone with practical training and wisdom to bestow as the action of the story climbed. The embodiment of an exhausted audience that couldn't stop refreshing, Kornacki memes focused on his math skills and his seemingly irrepressible energy, such as one that likened him to a cocaine-sniffing Elmo, suggesting that Kornacki was too devoted to his work to eat, opting for a mound of white powder during a “30-s lunch break.” Kornacki was also often portrayed as the popular Pepe Silvia meme from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, in which character Charlie stands wild-eyed, making a conspiracy-laden rant in front of a complicated wall of information covered in scribbles and arrows. Kornacki's work became magical—one meme asks if eventually he flies away like Mary Poppins. His competence also briefly transformed him into the internet's boyfriend. Memes described him as “map daddy” or a “chartthrob” and as having “big ‘substitute teacher I had a crush on’ energy.”

Though Kornacki may have been explaining the entire electoral map on television, in the memeverse, not every state got equal attention. As the election week limbo stretched on, and the number of “in-play” states dwindled, the meme-ers of the world narrowed their focus. At the end of this “rising action” act, meme-ers shone the spotlight on one state in particular, cast as both savior (because its electoral votes created a particular path toward being able to call the election) and scapegoat (because, why was it taking so long?): Nevada.

Nevada Mockery Memes

Won by Hillary Clinton in 2016, Nevada was expected to remain blue in 2020, but given how the electoral votes were rolling out, the state gained extra prominence. Building on the earlier memes, we were no longer generically waiting for results; we were waiting on Nevada's results, an early indicator that the week's developments—and the memes that accompanied them—were going to be stitched into a cohesive narrative. A fresh set of memes poked gentle fun at the state, which had become a collective scapegoat. A recurring theme likened Nevada to that friend who lies about how close they are to “being ready to go.” For example, one compared Nevada to a showering woman texting that she's “down the street” when she obviously hasn't left the house. A complementary set of memes gives various takes on the United States, and the world, impatiently staring at Nevada, waiting for them to “do something, already.” One simply portrays the public as a skeleton, dead well before Nevada reported its results; another featured elderly Rose, from the film Titanic, saying that it’ll have “been 84 years” before Nevada results came in.

These memes also portrayed Nevada engaged in a variety of stalling techniques. Nevada was the distracted staff from The Office, building a house of cards with ballots rather than counting them. Nevada was Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained as the laughing Calvin Candie, spelling “BOOBIES” on his upside-down calculator instead of counting votes. In other memes, Nevada ballot counters embodied “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” too busy drinking and gambling all night to do their job. Nevada, mocked for its low education scores, becomes Andy Dwyer from Parks and Recreation, confessing, “I don't know how to count and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.” Nevada memes were so popular, in fact, that meta-memes about Nevada memes emerged, such as one that said: “Congratulations! You have seen your 10,000th Nevada meme today and have unlocked Golden Nevada!” Another suggested that Nevada ballot counters were too busy looking at “Nevada election memes” to finish counting.

The memes of Act II were largely non-partisan and collectively cathartic. Rather than serving as vehicles for constituents to “speak back” to politicians or criticize hegemonic political practices (as was the case with the memes studied by Algaba & Bellido, 2019, and Howley, 2016), these election limbo meme-ers focused on the experiences of the people watching the political moment unfold rather than particular policies or politicians. At an isolating moment of the pandemic, during a collectively anxiety-inducing political moment, this portion of our memes allowed people to collectively tell the story of their anxiety, often through the guise of irony, similar to Chateau’s (2020) findings related to depression memes. During this phase of memetic storytelling, the hopes were high that either map magicians like Kornicki or ballot counters in Nevada could give insight and end the anxiety-inducing moment of election limbo. While focusing on these saviors, however, a plot twist emerged in the story of the prolonged election week, and the memes were quick to turn the page and document this new chapter.

ACT III—Building to the Climax: Plot Twists and Emerging Heroes

In a classic storytelling structure, the climax of a story typically reflects a turning point wherein “the central conflict is addressed in a way that cannot be undone” (Glatch, 2020.) A plot twist often changes our understanding of a situation, perhaps in the form of action by an unexpected hero. As election week limbo stretched into the second and third days, our sample of memes began to offer up “emerging heroes” who promised to deliver us a conclusion to the election. As the ballot counts in those final key states began to shift toward blue, we began to see an increased politicization of the meme content. The emergence of unlikely heroes, both real and fictional, began to shift the memes more left-leaning, representing the rising hope Biden/Harris supporters felt as victory seemed possible.

The Sneak Attack

It was at this point in the sample where we could truly see the sustained storyline stretching across this multi-day meme event. If the “Act II” memes in our sample positioned a personified Nevada, and sometimes Arizona, as “the state to watch,” memes in Act III complicated this narrative, suggesting that other states were sneaking up to steal the limelight from Nevada—that Pennsylvania and Georgia, for instance, would emerge to become the heroes who could finally declare the presidential victor. One image used repeatedly to capture this dynamic built on an oft-circulated meme of two actors: a mischievous Jason Momoa sneaks up behind a besuited Henry Cavill during a red carpet event. Within this election meme context, Cavill becomes “Nevada,” enjoying the limelight, while Momoa becomes Georgia, where Biden is closing in on Trump. In another meme, Momoa represents blue mail-in ballots, sneaking up on the presumably red Georgia. The memes represent a plot twist—that the anxious nation had been looking for answers in the wrong place (Nevada), and that unexpected heroes would emerge to charge the narrative toward its climax. This set of memes helped capture our collective head snap as we realized we’d been looking for answers in the wrong place. And in this redirection, new heroes emerged.

Heroes Emerging to Claim Victory

As Pennsylvania came more seriously into play by Friday of election week, “Gritty,” the mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, emerged as a specific hero in numerous memes. An orange Muppet-like character whose intense facial expression, perhaps best described as maniacal-yet-threatening glee, Gritty has often been memetically “embraced by many leftists as an example of the chaotic good energy they hope to bring to the political conversation and/or world” (VanDerWerff, 2020). Gritty memes in our sample positioned him as a sort of lurking, menacing presence, prepared to “come for” Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” [MAGA] supporters. Again the Momoa/Cavill red carpet meme was at play, with Gritty subbing in for Mamoa, sneaking up on an unsuspecting Trump. Elsewhere in our sample, Gritty appears as the Game of Thrones heroine, Olenna Tyrell. Revising this well-known meme, featuring Olenna's famous quote regarding her murder of villain Joffrey Baratheon, the Gritty-as-Olenna version is remixed to say: “Tell Donald, I want him to know it was me” (as in, Gritty was eager to take credit for the “murder” of the Trump administration.)

Memes of Olenna Tyrell show up elsewhere in this portion of our “meme story,” reinforcing the narrative power she holds as an unexpected foil. In another meme appearance, she's replaced by a different emerging hero who wants Donald Trump to “know it was her” who led to his political downfall: Georgia politician Stacey Abrams, who many credited with helping to flip Georgia “blue,” and thus helping to get Biden elected, via her work with the Fair Fight Action project. Elsewhere in our sample, Abrams is placed into another dramatic scene via a Lord of the Rings reference. In the scene, the Witch King of Angmar yells at his opponent “You fool, no man can kill me.” Eowyn, a female warrior, removes her helmet and says, “I am no man” and kills him. In the election limbo meme version, the Witch King is red Georgia, about to be unexpectedly slayed by a different woman: Abrams.

Contentious Counting

Another unlikely hero to emerge in this act was the Count from Sesame Street. At this stage of Election Week, counting itself had become contentious, and more liberally-oriented memes poked fun at the notion that counting was somehow cheating, particularly given that during the “exposition” act of this election week story, analysts had clearly anticipated that late-counted mail-in ballots in key states would dissipate the “red mirage.” The Count, then, emerged as a hero in support of, well, counting. One powerful cartoon depicts Count Dracula punching Donald Trump across the jaw, representing a win for counting every vote. Another plays off the “Woman yelling at a cat” meme, with, at left, an angry, crying Trump pointing a finger toward the second photo at right, which features Count as the seemingly unperturbed cat.

This was the moment in our meme story where memes stopped representing a neutral collective anxiety and started constructing heroes who could be credited for Trump's pending defeat. This turn back toward a more polarized weaponization of memes would strengthen in the final acts of this collaborative and evolving meme story.

ACTs IV and V: Falling Action, and a (Partial) Resolution

When the “red mirage” theory came to fruition, that is, when additional mail-in ballots were counted and the tide began to appear to be turning in Biden's favor, serving as the climax of this story, the memes in our sample became more divisive and vitriolic. The collective connections forged in the earlier acts, where we all waited together, had dissolved, and once again, the political memes became less unified, and more weaponized. At this stage of election week limbo, the memes reflected the “falling action” stage of the classic storytelling arc.

Personal attacks on Trump became prominent in this final phase of the meme story. Memes likened his insistence that he won the election to other things he does “prematurely,” and describe the race being “closer than Donald and Ivanka at a father-daughter dance.” Another suggested that Trump “would have thrown on a dress if he was on the Titanic.” One encouraged Trump to give up on the election, just as he did with his casinos, wives, weight, and COVID-19. Fat-shaming emerged in the memes with variations on the idea that “the only way Trump gets to 270 [the required number of electoral votes needed to win the election] is if he loses 50 pounds.” At this time, conservative memes alleging voter fraud also began to pick up steam. They showed Democrats wearing dozens of “I voted” stickers to indicate their participation in voter fraud, and Joe Biden walking through a cemetery to thank all his voters [a play on the theory that fraudulent Biden votes came from dead people.] Several memes also highlighted conservatives’ perceived hypocrisy that Democrats didn't think election fraud was worth investigating given the many investigations they pursued during Trump's presidency (as in the meme featuring a bewildered Forest Gump, captioned: “And just like that … the Democrats don't like investigations anymore.”) Another set of memes speculated about where Biden's “extra” votes were coming from: one featured Hillary Clinton as a FedEx driver “dropping off the rest of the ballots.”

The final memes of our sample signaled the end of the Trump administration. Predictably, “you’re fired” memes abounded, inspired by Trump's signature line from his reality show The Apprentice. Memes likened his loss to “another messy divorce” and suggested that the country had begun “uninstalling” him. Trump's own tweets inspired the quick creation of new memetic content. About 30 min prior to Pennsylvania calling the election for Joe Biden, Trump tweeted “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” (Burns, 2020) Meme-ers likened Trump's refusal to concede to Leonardo DiCaprio's profanity-laced “I’m not leaving” speech in The Wolf of Wallstreet. At this stage meme-ers repeatedly characterized him as a displeased “Karen,” wearing a short blonde wig, demanding to speak to the manager (a.k.a. the Supreme Court.) Others played off The Office bankruptcy meme, mocking someone's confusion around the extent of their own power (in the original scene, Michael Scott tries to declare bankruptcy, and co-worker Oscar explains that saying the word “bankruptcy” doesn't make it happen. In this version of the meme, Trump is Michael Scott, trying to declare “victory” through words alone when he doesn't have the electoral votes.) Meme references to a forthcoming civil war emerged, hinting that the political tension leading up to the election was hardly going to disappear overnight. Several conservative memes at this stage called for protesting the “unfair election” more respectfully than what they characterized as destructive liberal protestors. And in an omniscient meme of what would transpire at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, we see a picture of Trump typing at a laptop. A superimposed phrase suggests he had just Googled “how to start a koo” [coup].

These election week limbo memes might have continued past Saturday, Nov. 7, were it not for an event that redirected the loopy, sleep-deprived internet's attention: Rudy Guiliani's “Four Seasons Landscaping” press conference. The content of the speech was vastly overshadowed by its location, in front the garage door of a landscaping business humbly situated between an adult bookstore and a crematorium. Just like that, the meme-ers had a new theme to run with. The multi-day meme story that stretched and evolved during election week limbo may have ended, but the larger political story was far from over. Guiliani had called the “Four Seasons” conference not so that Trump could concede, but rather to publicly allege voter fraud, and encourage the American people not to trust the election results. Trump would choose not to concede that night as Biden made his acceptance speech. In fact, it would be exactly two months later—January 7, 2020, the day after the deadly insurrection at the United States capitol—when Trump finally came close to conceding, saying: “Even though I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts bear me out, nevertheless there will be an orderly transition [of presidential power] on January 20th” (Roche, 2021). There was no neat and tidy ending to the divisive election or the country's political division. Months later, ripples from Trump's adamance of election fraud could still be felt, including states being inundated with divisive proposals for Republican-initiated voting reform, an issue that hit a flash point with Georgia's Senate Bill 202, which resulted in significant backlash and economic boycotts from critics (Cox, 2021), realities that the internet has found much less meme-worthy.

Conclusion

The memes analyzed for this project were both timeless and very “of the moment” for 2020. Classic meme favorites—featuring The Office, SpongeBob, Wojak, The Simpsons, and famous meme templates like “Side Eyeing Chloe”—abounded, but others were more reflective of this particular election, and 2020 as a distinct year. This included references to popular media of the pandemic—Tiger King, Schitt's Creek, the Cardi B song “WAP”—or headlines that were unique to 2020, like gender reveal party-related injuries, Kanye West's presidential bid, the gun-wielding McCloskeys from St. Louis, and Jonathan Swan's instantly meme’d Axios interview of Trump. The election week limbo meme event stretched on so long, in fact, that meta-memes about the election week memes emerged. One likened election week meme-ers to the violinists playing on the deck of the Titanic, providing entertainment while American democracy was sinking. Others featured shots of computer desktop folders with labels like: “memes if Trump wins,” “memes if Biden wins,” “memes if Kanye somehow wins,” “civil war memes,” and memes for “if Americans overthrow the government.”

We argue that the election week limbo memes functioned uniquely when compared to other big “meme moments” in modern digital history. This was not a meme of replication based on a single image, which is often the case with meme flurries. This was not “Pepper Spray Cop” or “Bernie Sanders Wearing Mittens Sitting in a Chair” where the fun of the game, and thus the memetic commentary, relates to remixing a single image into new landscapes. In these election week limbo memes, the creators, editors and sharers produced something multidimensional, something more akin to a staircase, where each new wave of memes narratively built upon the previous waves in a way that echoes traditional storytelling practices. In this way, this sustained, multi-day meme narrative reflects a unique and noteworthy fusion of ancient communal practices and modern digital media modes. The exposition of Act I set the stage, hinting at the political and legal tensions that would surround the results of a historic election intertwined with pandemic realities. The memes of Act II sprang from the inciting incident—election day—and were marked by the emergence of early, largely non-partisan memes which captured our collective anxiety, and a desperation to discover the victor. For a fleeting moment, after months of toxic political polarization, we weren't arguing about whether Biden or Trump was the villain of the story; we all collectively agreed it was Nevada who deserved our ire, and that someone needed to ensure that poor Steve Kornacki was being given mandatory food and rest breaks. The memes of Act III, in building toward the climax, saw the development of plot twists, and unexpected heroes charging the narrative forward in dramatic reclamations of power—the states of Pennsylvania and Georgia, and characters like Gritty, Stacey Abrams, and the Count, all eager to “slay the dragon” of the Trump administration—returning us to a politically divisive memescape. When Biden finally secured enough electoral votes to be named the victor, we moved into Acts IV and V, the falling action and the (quasi) resolution. Liberal meme-ers began to gloat and celebrate the end of Trump's administration while conservative meme-ers began to discredit Biden's win. In moments of darker humor, some anticipated what would come next, sharing memes of an impending civil war, strategies for starting a “koo” [coup], and alluding to the collection of memes that would be appropriate to share if someone tried to overthrow the U.S. government.

The collaborative creation of this meme moment occurred because it was one of the rare media moments in the COVID-19 pandemic, and in today's splintered digital media landscape, where the majority of viewers focused their sustained attention on one news event rather than being fractured across streaming platforms. This wasn't the Super Bowl or the Oscars where collective attention might be held for a few hours. This was a news event with global implications that stretched on for days, and people across the world stayed tuned in around the clock, sharing their collective experience of the emotional rollercoaster via memes. We argue that this unique and collaborative “election week limbo” meme story serves as a noteworthy example of memes’ capability of sustaining an evolving narrative over the course of many days, and demonstrates memes’ ability to extend beyond single-user replication and remixing, and into something more akin to collaboration and community-building, particularly in a time of collective stress and trauma. Here, we saw the citizenry become the audience; with their part in the process (the act of voting) complete, they became powerless to change an outcome that felt increasingly far away. This extended, out-of-the-norm waiting gave space to an audience that turned to memes to tell the story of this time of waiting. As Gottschall explained, humans are “addicted to story,” so it's perhaps not a surprise that meme-ers organically produced this collaborative story about the experience of waiting for these consequential election results. Stories, after all, fulfill that “ancient function of binding society by reinforcing a set of common values and strengthening the ties of common culture” (p. 138). Importantly, the five-act storytelling formula ensures eventual relief from conflict and rising action. These memes emerged at the peak of a tense, pandemic-tinged election that had people of all political persuasions eager for the relief of resolution, which the classic storytelling structure promises. Additionally, the catharsis of creating and sharing memes, which produces that “particularly postmodern kind of pleasure” (Sci & Dare, 2014), may have been extra appealing at a moment when we were socially distanced from one another due to a global pandemic that turned our entire world upside down, a context for content creation that, unlike memes, may be difficult to replicate in the future. As Shifman (2013) said, memes eventually scale into “a shared social phenomenon” (p. 4), and anyone who spent the 2020 U.S. election week limbo period glued to their device, constantly refreshing for news updates, but only finding a fresh torrent of memes instead, can surely attest to having experienced just such an occurrence.