The Main Character Candidate

Joe Biden was the Too Old Candidate. Kamala Harris is the Hopeful Candidate. Donald Trump is the MAGA Candidate. J.D. Vance is the first ever Main Character Candidate. 

A symptom of chronic posting, the main character is someone who tweets a thought — often innocuous, but sometimes contrarian or downright offensive — and the post moves beyond the intended audience drawing an onslaught of insulting replies and dunks. You’ve seen this happen time and time again. Someone tweets about disliking hot dogs. Their 150 followers understand this as a joke, but when someone retweets it to their audience of 1,000, it gets picked up by a stranger who quote-tweets it to their audience of 25,000, declaring that original guy a weirdo. The one rule on Twitter is to avoid becoming the main character. 

X has seen many main characters come and go. There was Justine Sacco, for example, whose distasteful tweet about Africa united nearly all of Twitter in 2013 and led to Sacco’s firing. Then there was Daisy Miller who tweeted in 2022 about having coffee with her husband every morning and turned into a trending main character as people piled on. There was Bean Dad Guy in 2021 who bore the wrath of Twitter’s various communities after he tweeted a thread about having his daughter learn to operate a can opener. These characters create a storm of activity where people who don’t particularly care about the original person in question want to get in on the trend because it’s become unavoidable entertainment. As our timelines become more segmented, thrown into user clusters that machine learning algorithms think will increase the likelihood of us engaging, the contextless main character also creates a moment of monoculture that people want to participate in because it happens less and less frequently. 

As the internet has become progressively more large but our personal universes have shrunk thanks to that aforementioned sequestering, ways to become the main character of the day have expanded even though the underlying psychology is still the same. Finding dumb things to dunk on in an effort to join in on the conversation gets much easier the more material there is to pull from. The weirder (a word we’ll get into in a second) the better. We post to signal that we are in on the joke, that we understand why everyone in our circles are so mad, and we post to reiterate to our little cluster that we are nothing like the main character. 

All of which brings us to Vance. If you’re not chronically online, here’s what you missed. Vance may or may not have, uh, let’s just say gotten intimate with a couch, according to a random totally non-factual tweet. In an age of overtly abundant information and content, it’s the type of bizarre story that immediately hooks everyone. (My friend Rebecca Jennings has a great breakdown of the shitposting lifecycle in a new piece on Vance and how it started due to an alleged line in his book Hillbilly Elegy that doesn’t actually exist.) It was also the culmination of  a “weirdness” wave that saw news story after news story appear based on his stances, previous media appearances, and online history post-Trump’s announcement of his running mate. Think of it this way: if the inevitable move for Biden was to step down following weeks of critical news stories, declining polls, and internal party after the debate, shitposts about Vance and Hillbilly Elegy, the work that brought him his original fame and catapulted him into the position he has now, was his inevitable endpoint. 

But to really understand how Vance’s main character moment happened, it’s important to acknowledge the other puzzle pieces. Vance is the first truly millennial candidate. That means he’s the first candidate with an online history. Sure, Harris, Trump, and Biden all built digital presences — Trump won in 2016 with help from his Twitter presence — but they weren’t twentysomethings blogging about being sad and watching Garden State. Vance grew up online, like many of us, and lived his life through an online-first lens. He was (maybe) creating Spotify playlists and sending public Venmos. There’s a part of his activity that feels relatable even if nothing else about him is. His feelings about the music in Garden State hitting him hard — something we know because, again, he blogged it — feels like something many of us have tweeted ourselves. And because that aspect of Vance’s digital existence felt familiar, it heightened the weirdness of everything else.

What makes the main character travel on X is a belief that something about the person behind the post is unlikeable — or weird — even if that’s not true. Criticism of a parenting style that differs from your own, for example, is what led to mass dunking on Bean Dad, especially as the original thread became more removed from its context the more it traveled X. The Democrats' new strategy is to lean into this positioning online by pointing out Trump and Vance’s “weirdness,'' according to several reports. Unlike Trump, however, who leans into it and embraces the shameless side of his posting activity, Vance doesn't know how to move within this situation and that makes it even more weird. That’s the hallmark of the main character on the internet: something about the post or poster is off just enough.

Eventually in the “Main Character Cycle,” as illustrated below, empathetic defenders start to push back against the raging fire. This lends new contrarian voices to the conversation who, similar to those who jumped into the first wave of posting, feel safer in numbers. And eventually, because it’s the internet, people move on due to boredom or because the feed decided to show them something else people were mad about. But Vance is the news cycle. He’s someone who already transforms lurkers into posters, someone who encourages people to find ways into the conversation. 

The original joke about Vance and his intimacy with a couch seems just likely enough because of everything else up to that point that it spurred an entire article in the Associated Press. The story, which pointed out that the tweet was inaccurate, was eventually removed from AP’s website with a note that it didn’t pass their editing process. The fact that the AP wrote a story about the couch is on its own a little silly. But what prompted the story is also a symptom of a larger issue that we’re going to have to contend with as every new election passes. The candidates will be increasingly more online, and their histories — those collections of random blog posts, Spotify playlists, Venmo payments, tweets, TikTok dances, YouTube rants, and all other forms of public self expression — that we don’t think of as impacting professional resumes will start to. The very psychology that exists behind main characters appearing will kick into overdrive. 

This is something creators and influencers have confronted over the last few years as tweets they made when they were 14 start to reappear as they gain fame and, through fame, power. When you put every part of yourself out in public, it becomes more difficult to distinguish what’s real and what’s not, what was meant to be “seen” and what was barely a second thought totally forgotten years later. Running for office already invites a severity of scrutiny like nothing else. Running for office when so much of your life’s history is available to anyone and everyone, cringe and all, creates main character inevitability. Everyone in politics going forward are proper byproducts of the internet, not just users of it.

Part of the reason we’re obsessed with main character stories is because we realize how close we all are, as posters, to potentially becoming the main character someday. What makes this Vance arc so interesting to me is that it’s not an election story. Campaign teams, reporters, and strategists uncovering unflattering or offensive clips is practically central to the modern political landscape. Even the crazy cat lady comment Vance made on Tucker Carlson that’s recirculating received some coverage when Vance originally said it in 2021, but Vance wasn’t the main character then and the clip didn’t exist within a wider collection of weird online discoveries. 

The political aspect is within the decision to create a collection of evidence that one party can use to prove a point about the other. But what I’m most interested in is how the more we live every part of our lives online, the more breadcrumbs we invite people to find; those little weird parts about our lives that we often forget exists. Vance likely remembers the Tucker moment because it was a very purposeful statement within a very purposeful setting. It’s less likely that he remembers every Venmo transfer or Garden State blog post. That’s where the real heart of the main character is.

It’s a Catch-22, right? You have to participate online in order to grab attention for offline ambitions. This is especially true with areas like politics that are defined by capturing the most attention, remaining top of mind, and coming across as authentic even when trying to exert total control over image. The best way to avoid catapulting yourself further into the fiery pit of quote-tweets during a main character predicament is to either embrace it and become a “series regular” (Trump, Elon) or simply walk away from your phone and not attempt to post through it. 

When your approach is to post through it and start deleting evidence as it appears, there’s only one response people are going to have: “weird! I gotta tweet about it.”