Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
It was no MAGA hat, but for a moment this summer, the Harris-Walz camouflage cap was an atypically trendy bit of political swag from the Kamala Harris campaign. Modeled after a Chappell Roan snapback, the $40 hat sold out almost as soon as it went up for sale, making the campaign close to $1 million but leaving the hat-hungry masses wanting.
Soon after the hat’s launch, Grant Boulanger, a resident of Tim Walz’s Minnesota, placed a preorder for his 20-year-old daughter, who desperately coveted one. “She mentioned Chappell Roan, who I didn’t know very well,” Boulanger said. “And so I did a little bit of research and learned about her, and thought, you know, I can get on this fad.”
When his friend got around the waitlist by buying a bunch of camouflage hats and hiring a local T-shirt store to stitch “Harris Walz” on the front, Boulanger secured one for himself. As a parent of LGBTQ+ children, he was hoping for a Harris win, which would signal that the country was moving in the right direction. “It was hope that made me put that hat on,” he said. About 50 percent of the time outside his workday as a public school teacher, the cap sat proudly on his head.
Then came the election. Trump won, and the Harris campaign disbanded. But Boulanger’s hat remained hanging on a standing fan in his bedroom. He’d see it when he woke up each morning, a daily reminder of the failed promise of the effort to defeat Donald Trump. After a time, the sight of that camouflage print and orange lettering became too much to bear. Boulanger stuffed the hat in a closet. “I’m still at a stage where it makes me shake my head and think, What the hell happened?” he said.
For a losing presidential campaign, Election Day marks a certain kind of death. The television ads come to an abrupt end. Field offices quickly dissolve. The candidates, once leading characters in the American story, hurtle back into supporting roles or relative obscurity.
The merchandise is one fragment that lingers. Campaigns try to ignite the American imagination, to conjure fantasies of a brighter tomorrow or stir up fears of a nation in decline. Swag from a losing campaign provides a lasting container for those visions. It suggests an alternate history, a route not taken that could have led to a million different worlds better or worse than this one, in a concrete physical form.
Viewed from the pain-dulling distance of a few decades, the items are nostalgic, almost quaint. Remember the days when we thought Al Gore might be president? With the notable exception of Donald Trump merch, which lived on in public as a claim that he was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election even after he lost, these pieces of ephemera often end up hidden in an attic for a child to inherit as a historical artifact in some distant future. Some travel further: After the 2012 presidential race, the aunt of a Mitt Romney campaign staffer brought hundreds of leftover T-shirts and hats to a school and orphanage in Kenya. In the past, if a losing candidate might have run for the same office again, leftover signs and swag were saved and repurposed. Surplus items were warehoused, donated, or thrown away.
But that era is over. Recent election cycles have rarely ended with boatloads of extra merchandise to offload. “Like most campaigns, the Harris campaign used a print on demand service, so there won’t really be much merch left over if any,” said Kate Conway, creative director of the campaign. These days, across industries, garment printing and embroidery is often done one product at a time, on an as-needed basis, as online sales come in.
One manufacturer of such products is the Nebraska-based custom apparel company Shirts101, which contracted with the Nebraska Democratic Party to produce a suite of Harris campaign merchandise to sell, including a Realtree “Walz” hoodie. (The vice presidential nominee grew up in Nebraska.) The business made all the products on demand as Harris supporters placed orders. Now, less than two dozen “Kamala for President” shirts remain on the shelves. The lack of surplus inventory feels like a win for Shirts101 owner Rick Poore. “It really came off without a hitch,” he said. “Except Kamala lost.”
As for those surviving shirts? Shirts101 still lists the Harris campaign items for purchase on its website, though no one has bought any since the election. “I guess if anybody wants a relic of the past?” Poore said.
A whole universe of bootleg and tribute swag is still out there on the internet, much of it at fire-sale prices. Manhattan housewares store Fishs Eddy was recently selling Harris mugs at a 50 percent discount. “Waahhhhh! This is what hope looked like,” the sale sign read.
There is a certain type of person who apparently looks at this kind of merchandise and sees not a painful reminder of the three-and-a-half months when a Harris presidency seemed possible but a heartening connection to a dream that still lives on. In the reviews of one bootleg Harris-Walz camo hat on Etsy, several entries expressed an intent to keep the hat in full wardrobe rotation. “I plan to wear it for the next four years in protest and encourage other people to do the same,” one read. “This will be my micro feminism for the foreseeable future,” said another.
On Dec. 2, one user wrote, “Thanks, I needed this for posterity”—a losing campaign’s version of “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Etsy vendor Angiepea still lists nearly 100 different made-to-order Kamala-related items in her store, including a “don’t vote weird” garden flag. She sold about a dozen items in December—a “teeny tiny trickle” compared with the business she was doing in the weeks leading up to the election. Though the returns are small, she hasn’t removed the items from her store page, she said, because she’s “not emotionally ready yet.”
John Pitts feels similarly attached to the camo hat he acquired from the campaign. The head of policy for a fintech company, Pitts splits his time between downtown D.C. and a 10-acre farm property in West Virginia that he and his wife bought during the pandemic. For him, the appeal of the Harris-Walz hat was less about the candidates—though he supported the campaign—and more about the marriage of form and content. “I bow hunt and I vote Democrat, and I’ll be goddamned if someone tells me I can’t do both of those things,” he said.
“D.C. doesn’t have an exclusive right to Harris-Walz,” he continued, “and West Virginia doesn’t have an exclusive right to camo.”
Pitts was unaware of the hat’s Chappell Roan connection until I informed him—he just liked that it combined the two sides of his identity, carving out space for him in both his urban D.C. milieu and his Trump-supporting county a couple of hours west. It was the first piece of campaign swag he’s ever owned. Though his wife preordered it for him the day after it sold out in early August, the hat didn’t arrive until October, just in time for him to wear it during hunting season.
Pitts stopped wearing the hat when Harris lost the election. “Wearing campaign merch after an election, to me, culturally reads as, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ ” he said.
But even though the cap makes him a bit sad to look at, he has no plans to remove it from its current resting place: on the wall of his dining room in West Virginia, right below his musket. Pitts still sees the hat as a kind of refutation of tribalism—something that seems worth striving for but harder to manifest with each passing election.
“This is going to sound like really stupid and nostalgic, but tossing it feels like giving something up,” Pitts said. “And as long as I’ve got it, I’m not giving it up.”
