“I love Kamala Harris”

Four years ago, my middle daughter was three, nearly four, as the campaigning for US President and other offices was underway. Being as we live in a state considered “battleground”, we are absolutely flooded with advertising for various political candidates. One of the creepiest bits of political advertising was a 3-second jingle for Biden that would often run between kids’ programming – things like Little Baby Bum and Cocomelon – that sung out “Joe Biden will always be my friend.”

More than once, I caught middle daughter absent-mindedly singing this, and, not to be mean about it, but I felt it necessary to explain to her that she doesn’t know Joe Biden, he doesn’t know her, and so Joe Biden really isn’t her friend.

This year, despite the attention the state has gotten, and the large number of candidate visits and mailers in the mailbox, there has been very little discussion of the election at home, being as there’s only one eligible voter in the house. Truthfully, as much as I’m interested in certain aspects of politics, over the last couple of years, I haven’t had the time or the inclination to follow it as closely – there’s work here for me to do, and it’s all removed from the political sphere.

Anyway, middle daughter is now seven, and youngest daughter is four. The three of us took a walk to the park the other day – a gorgeous, sunny day which one has to appreciate here with the approaching winter – and as we were walking the mile back home, I heard a little voice pipe up randomly from out of the stroller.

“I love Kamala Harris.”

Mind you, I wasn’t mad, but I stopped the stroller to come real close to her and ask what she said. She started giggling and repeated, “I love Kamala Harris.”

Now, theologically speaking, I applaud her; we all should be loving to all fellow human beings. However, I highly suspect that this statement was not said out of Christian charity, but rather because I’ve noticed an insane amount of political ads placed in YouTube videos whose target audiences are probably 90% children under the age of 10. I’d also guess that they are 19 to 1 Harris, with the occasional ad for Eric Hovde thrown in. (Mind you, the anti-Hovde ads make him sound like the devil, so much so he’s made a parody ad of them.) They aren’t ads made for kids, but there’s an obvious tone of something being menacing and Kamala Harris being the solution to making the world right again.

I used to think that these ads were placed in the kids’ videos to try to convince the adults to go vote. Now I’m not so sure. It sure seems like they are targeting the kids themselves so that the kids will want the people in the house to vote for the “nice lady”. What’s even creepier is that I was using Youtube on one of the same devices as my 4-year-old, logged into the same account, and there were definitely a much greater percentage of non-political ads watching my videos – geared at adults; one of the channels I was watching has a viewership that is something like 90% female (it’s a man who cleans houses!) – and not only was there a lower percentage of political ads in total, they were much more balanced between Republican and Democrat (5:3ish D to R, if I had to guess).

Yes, I’m interested in politics, but over the years, I’ve been less and less pulled in that direction because politics is not what I was called to do. I totally agree that it’s important to pay attention – and to vote – but playing so many political ads through children’s content seems downright creepy. Youtube will probably never do it, but after these experiences, I’d love to see Youtube completely quit playing political ads in videos where the main audience is under 10.

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