So surely the G.O.P. learned its lesson by 2012?

As far as memes go, 2012 was an even bigger nightmare for the Republicans. Obama had a comfortable lead for most of the way, and Occupy Wall Street was a grass-roots movement that really saturated social media and aligned sentiment against rich guys in general.

A lot of memes ended up portraying Mitt Romney as the Sith Lord of America. The “binders full of women” line from the town hall debate was a prime example. Within 24 hours, that gaffe turned into a full-blown meme, mostly in the form of captioned image parodies.

What’s new this year?

From what we’ve observed so far, memes are no longer treated as nuisances, although they still can be. We’ve seen memes play a vital role in crafting a powerful cult of personalities for Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump.

Sanders seemed to come out of nowhere this year. Were memes a factor?

If I had to pick one thing that was the most unique this year, it was the idolization of Bernie Sanders through meme caricatures.

Two of the most popular ones were Barnie Sandlers and Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash, two Facebook pages that operated on the same joke, that Bernie was running on a pro-meme platform. People would cut and paste text onto promotional materials, like official Sanders fliers, so it would seem as if Bernie was making insightful comments on the state of memes, as opposed to the state of politics.