'Pokémon Go to the polls' turns ten: how Clinton's failed joke survived an era

The joke that wouldn't die

Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton at a rally in Virginia joked that she wanted to 'get the Pokémon to go to the polls.' TechCrunch marks the tenth anniversary of the phrase: on yet another Election Day in the US, 'Pokémon Go to the polls' memes once again flooded social media, just as in previous years. Cesar Ruiz de Castilla, an elected member of a ward committee in Philadelphia, told the outlet that the line at the time sounded 'bold and confident, yet terribly out of touch and awkward,' and that everyone was making memes about it, even if mainstream media paid little attention.

What changed in ten years

It is telling how the context around the joke has changed. According to TechCrunch, today most app developers no longer write code themselves — it is done with the help of AI — and Pokémon GO was sold to Scopely, a company wholly owned by a Saudi sovereign fund. Only the meme itself remained unchanged. Over the same period, digital culture fused with American politics: Trump ran his first administration through Twitter, then launched his own social network, presidential campaigns hire meme managers, the White House invites podcasters and bloggers to briefings, and Elon Musk's advisory group under Trump named itself after the doge meme and cut international aid programs.

Nostalgia for the 'unified internet'

Political influencer Organizer Memes, which trains Gen Z activists to promote ideas through memes, called Clinton's phrase 'a relic of a bygone optimistic political era' and recalled that the 2016 election came at the time of the 'unified internet,' when Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr exchanged content rather than turning into 'an anarchic chaos of 25 platforms.' Notably, people who were not yet of voting age in 2016 call that year 'the last good year' — and this nostalgia, as TechCrunch writes, is tied less to politics than to longing for the internet before the era of AI slop, when social media served for communicating with friends rather than endless scrolling through an algorithmic feed of strangers. In early 2026, this sentiment went viral: users massively shared archival photos from 2016on Instagram, and Spotify reported a 790% increase in user playlists with '2016' in the title in the first three weeks of the year and changed its Instagram bio to 'romanticizing 2016 again.' The irony is that contemporaries considered 2016 a cursed year even before the election — one Slate columnist compared it to 1348, the year the plague arrived in Europe.

Why the meme lives on and Harambe doesn't

Organizer Memes notes that other symbols of 2016, such as the obsession with the gorilla Harambe, never gained such staying power. TechCrunch suggests that 'Pokémon Go to the polls' keeps resurfacing precisely because elections recur regularly, and the joke is understood by both parties: on the right it serves as mockery of Democrats, on the left as a collective groan of embarrassment. 'It's like when all the kids in a class are joking, and then the teacher joins in — and it stops being funny,' compared Mac Finkel, who campaigned on behalf of a healthcare workers' union on Election Day. In his words, there is 'the essential core of millennial cringe' here — for the same reason his friends rewatch the series 'Girls.'

From Clinton to 'Kamala is brat'

TechCrunch sees in Clinton's awkward joke a forerunner of the 'Kamala is brat' meme of 2024. Kamala Harris was initially unpopular among part of the young left-wing electorate because of her prosecutorial past, but they rallied around her when she became the only alternative to Trump: Gen Z created vivid, absurd 'fan cam' edits of her remarks in the aesthetic of Charli XCX's album 'Brat.' Jess Rauchberg, an assistant professor in the communications department at the University of Leeds, explained to TechCrunch at the timethat memes had previously mocked Harris as a 'cop' — including her truancy prevention program as California attorney general — and now “the same style of memefication, but as an endorsement.” Why the Pokémon joke is still funny, the publication honestly struggles to say for certain: it is at once a mockery of Clinton and an ironic yet sincere reminder to friends to simply go out and vote — despite disappointment in aging legislatorsunfamiliar with the social media era.