Ten years on, the “Pokémon Go to the polls” joke keeps resurfacing online
Ten years after Hillary Clinton mentioned Pokémon Go on the 2016 US campaign trail, the phrase returns as a meme every Election Day. Internet culture voices link its staying power to nostalgia for the 2016 web.
On US Election Day, 3 November, memes about the phrase “Pokémon Go to the polls” are circulating on social media once again. The line was spoken in 2016 by Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally in Virginia, while she was running to become the first female US president. TechCrunch notes that the joke has lived online for ten years and shows how tightly digital culture has become tied to American politics.
What was said
At the rally, Clinton spoke about future jobs, from building infrastructure to coding and creating new apps. She added that she did not know who had created Pokémon Go, but wanted to work out how to get its players to head to polling places. Cesar Ruiz de Castilla, an elected ward committee member in Philadelphia, told the outlet that the remark sounded overly confident and out of touch, and that people online made memes about it.
Why the joke endures
The account Organizer Memes, which teaches Gen Z activists to reach their peers through memes, described it as a relic of an optimistic, bygone political era. At the time, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr passed content back and forth, rather than users being scattered across dozens of platforms. In this view, the joke has lasted because it returns on every Election Day and works for both sides: the right uses it to mock Democrats, while the left treats it as a shared moment of embarrassment.
Today, many young people who were too young to vote in 2016 call it “the last good year”. The sentiment is tied to nostalgia for the internet before AI-generated content. Earlier this year, millions of people shared throwback 2016 photos on Instagram, and Spotify reported that user-generated playlists with “2016” in the title rose 790% in the first three weeks of the year.
Link to later memes
TechCrunch sees Clinton’s remark as a precursor to the 2024 “Kamala is brat” meme, when young people made edits supporting Kamala Harris even though some had earlier criticised her record as a prosecutor. The article concludes that “Pokémon Go to the polls” is an ironic yet earnest plea to friends to go and vote.
