A longtime Biden aide just pulled back the curtain on the Democratic Party's social media operation—and what she revealed is a case study in political malpractice. Stefanie Feldman, who served in numerous campaign and official roles with Joe Biden for more than a decade, publicly shared a meme that Biden's 2020 digital team wanted to post from the official campaign account: a cartoon rabbit holding a sign that read "JUSTICE FOR GEORGE FLOYD."
Feldman vetoed it. And the fact that anyone on a presidential campaign thought it was a good idea tells you everything about where the Democratic Party's digital brain trust has been operating for years.
Newsweek reported that the disclosure arrived as former Vice President Kamala Harris rebranded her 2024 campaign account "Kamala HQ"—which boasts millions of followers on X—into a new entity called "Headquarters."
The rebrand, announced Thursday, sparked a broader reckoning among Democrats about whether their entire approach to social media has been a vanity project dressed up as strategy.
Feldman didn't mince words about the post she killed. She shared the image publicly and laid out her reasoning in plain terms:
"Here's my fav example of something the Biden 2020 digi team wanted to tweet out from the Biden campaign account. I vetoed it bc it is such an outrageously unserious reaction to a serious moment and not Biden brand. Lots of digi ppl were upset w me!"
A cartoon rabbit. For George Floyd. From the account of a man running for President of the United States.
Commentator Anthony LaMesa captured the reaction succinctly:
"This is the kind of thing that you'd imagine a white supremacist might post to ironically mock George Floyd's tragic death. Truly unbelievable. Reflects well on @StefFeldman that she wisely vetoed it."
Feldman's post was viewed 1.7 million times—far more engagement, one suspects, than most of the content the Biden digital team actually published. The irony writes itself.
Feldman's critique went deeper than one bad meme. She raised a structural problem that Democrats have been papering over with impressions counts and viral moments for years: nobody can actually prove that any of this works.
"I've yet to see digi folks measure success beyond views/likes. I've even seen them hype a post as 'effective' bc it had a huge # of impressions, when that post was ratio'd with neg content."
Think about that. Democratic digital operatives were celebrating posts that were going viral, specifically because people were mocking them—and counting that as a win. The engagement was real. The persuasion was nonexistent. But the budget kept flowing.
Feldman expanded on this point to Newsweek:
"I've seen some situations where the incentives for digital teams is just to rack up likes or impressions, and I think that spurs production of content like the piece I shared. I was asking whether anyone has figured out how to better measure the impact of digital work, because I certainly don't know the practices of every single digital shop."
This is the Democratic digital apparatus in a single paragraph: teams optimized for applause from other Democrats, producing content that makes the base feel clever while doing nothing—or worse than nothing—to persuade anyone outside the bubble. The rabbit meme wasn't an aberration. It was the logical endpoint of a machine built to generate likes rather than votes.
Into this wreckage steps Harris with her new "Headquarters" account. Lauren Kapp, who ran Harris' TikTok account during the 2024 race, previously told Newsweek the project signals deeper ambitions:
"This specifically just shows the Vice President's commitment to Gen. Z. This really is an investment into Gen. Z and people who are trying to reach young people. But this account is more than any one candidate or campaign."
An investment into Gen Z. From the party that just watched young voters shift toward Republicans in 2024. Harris foregoed a gubernatorial run in California this year and is viewed as a likely 2028 presidential candidate—polls currently show her as a top contender in the Democratic primary. So the rebrand isn't altruism. It's infrastructure for the next campaign, built on the same foundation that produced a cartoon rabbit for George Floyd.
Democratic strategist Matt Royer saw through it immediately:
"So in keeping with the same trend of Youth Engagement within Progressive and Democratic politics, we have made yet another Gen Z oriented organization that needs funding to work parallel to all of the other orgs that already exist and pull from the same funders? Be serious."
Even Democrats recognize the pattern: new branding, same dysfunction, another funding stream diverted into a parallel structure that duplicates existing efforts. The party's response to losing is always more apparatus, never better judgment.
Feldman said she hopes someone is working on solutions. She offered a generous assessment of the Headquarters effort:
"I am hopeful there are smart digital strategies people working on the solution right now."
"Maybe those people are even the people behind the new HQ account."
Maybe. But the evidence points in the other direction. Democrats lost in 2024 despite dominating social media engagement metrics. Kamala HQ generated enormous traffic—millions of followers, viral moments, the full suite of digital content that makes campaign staffers feel like they're winning. And they lost anyway. Kalshi betting odds currently give Democrats a 78 percent chance of taking the House and just a 36 percent chance of controlling the Senate. The digital machine keeps humming, and the actual results keep deteriorating.
Democratic strategist Andrew Mamo offered advice that landed like an epitaph for the entire operation:
"Be normal. Be yourself. Be real. If you wouldn't post it with your own two thumbs, don't let your team do it!"
Simple counsel. And yet "be normal" is the one directive the Democratic digital ecosystem seems structurally incapable of following. Normalcy doesn't generate impressions. A cartoon rabbit does—just not the kind of impressions that translate into anything resembling persuasion or electoral success.
The rabbit meme matters not because it was posted—it wasn't—but because it was proposed. It emerged from a professional campaign operation staffed by credentialed digital strategists who looked at a moment of genuine national crisis and reached for a cartoon animal. When Feldman vetoed it, they were upset with her. The instinct wasn't embarrassment. It was frustrating that the grown-up had intervened.
This is what happens when a party's digital culture rewards performance over persuasion. You end up with teams that treat politics like content creation—optimized for shares, stripped of substance, and completely untethered from the actual voters they need to reach. The content gets more polished. The memes get sharper. The losses get bigger.
Feldman deserves credit for saying the quiet part out loud. Democrats, she argued, need "to figure out better ways to measure whether social media is helping Democrats win." It's a remarkable admission: after years of being told that the left owned the internet, one of Biden's own people is standing in the wreckage asking if any of it mattered.
The rabbit held a sign demanding justice. The voters delivered a different verdict entirely.
