Joe Biden built up the VP hype and then just... tweeted it out

A very 2020 moment.
By Tim Marcin  on 

Everybody freaked out about who it would be, then he just... tweeted it out.

We're talking, of course, about former Vice President and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden picking California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate in the 2020 presidential election after weeks of hype.

Biden, signaling a shift in how things work, tweeted on Tuesday that he was honored to have Harris as his veep choice, calling her a "fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants."

It wasn't long before Harris followed up with a tweet of her own.

Everything is sort of topsy-turvy in 2020 — in case you didn't notice — but Biden's decision to post the news to Twitter feels like an endpoint in a shift in how political messaging works. Obama shifted how things worked by using a text/email to announce Biden as his choice in '08. President Donald Trump made history by announcing Vice President Mike Pence as his running mate via tweet in 2016.

Now, some four years later, Biden followed suit on Twitter instead of making some big public address. And it wasn't exactly like his campaign could host some big event, considering the coronavirus pandemic is worse than ever in the U.S. So here we are. Politics in 2020: Everything happens on Twitter.

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Tim Marcin

Tim Marcin is a culture reporter at Mashable, where he writes about food, fitness, weird stuff on the internet, and, well, just about anything else. You can find him posting endlessly about Buffalo wings on Twitter at @timmarcin.


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