In June, Senator Kamala Harris of California visited a detention center for migrant children in Homestead, Fla. When officials at the facility refused to let her inside, she mounted a stepladder, binoculars in hand, to try to catch sight of the kids over the camp fence. Then she waved, touched a hand to her heart and gazed resolutely in their direction.

Twitter waved back. Other candidates were at the camp that day, stumping amid a throng of protesters, but it was Harris who left an impression. A three-second video of her wave was neatly sliced from its political context and served up online. It became an reaction GIF — a charm that could be stroked to produce endlessly personalized memes. The tweets detected a hint of faux sincerity in the wave, then magnified it by grafting it into pettier and pettier scenarios.

The comedian @DewaynePerkins wrote above the video: “Me waving goodbye to the stranger I unknowingly gave wrong directions to.”

The artist @ZoeGawd: “Grandmas on their porch still waving at y’all from 25 miles down the road.”

The photographer @ByDre: “When you tell your friends you gonna meet them at the next spot but know you are about to go home and get in bed.”

It was not the kind of reception that Harris had been seeking when she hit the trail. That moment outside the detention center was “heartbreaking,” she told BuzzFeed in a text exchange. “It was horrible.”

And yet the meme was not an altogether negative development for her campaign. The apparent contrivance of her performance, as drawn out by the meme, may have been unflattering, but the imagined scenes it was spliced into were harmless, even humanizing. As the meme spread, Harris’s image did, too, even if her message was left behind. “This isn’t a political tweet,” Dewayne Perkins clarified of his entry. It just starred a politician.

If we used to want our elected officials to represent our interests in government, now we also want them to represent us in new ways — to reflect our pop cultural sensibilities back at us; to make a facial expression in a video that we can relate to our own lives; to serve as a willing host for a round of internet jokes. A politician may hope that her image resonates positively with voters. But maybe it’s enough that her image resonates at all.