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You might not think of an American Girl doll meme account as a useful resource for navigating the 2024 election. But Barrett Adair and Carter Leigh have made the Hellicity Merriman Instagram account just that.
People sometimes joke that American Girl doll accounts like Hellicity Merriman break the news to them — the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump, President Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 race. After the disastrous presidential debate between Biden and Trump, Adair and Leigh took things a step further by starting an Instagram channel called, American Girls. In it, they discuss and provide information on events related to the 2024 race. “At some point, I realized there's a story every day, and there's something to talk about with this election in particular every single day,” Adair says. The channel, which is a new Instagram feature that allows creators to send messages to their followers in a one-way group chat-esque forum, is run mostly by Adair.
Leigh (who asked to go by her first and middle name) and Adair both work in progressive politics. The two met in 2017 while working in political advocacy in Virginia and bonded over their shared love of American Girl dolls. They reconnected and launched the account in 2022, naming it after the Revolutionary War-era American Girl Felicity Merriman.
Both still work in politics — Leigh for a progressive youth organization, while Adair is a digital strategist for a prominent Democratic think tank and advocacy group. Adair often collaborates with political influencers to create content to disseminate information and thoughts on Capitol Hill happenings. “With all of the content that I send to our creators that we pay, I found myself really wanting to make stuff for the meme account based on the same prompts,” Adair says. And with the amount of news coming in, the American Girls channel was born.
The broadcast channel feels indicative of how young people consume information these days. When asked where Adair and Leigh recommend young voters get their news, their answer was short and simple: TikTok, specifically from reliable politics creators who specialize in taking the news and summarizing it into digestible, bite-size videos. “It is the best way for young voters to get news created for them,” Adair says.
Some might find that answer to be a disconcerting death knell for traditional media and media literacy at large — an indication that yes, indeed, young people don’t want to take the time to read, watch, or listen to the news. That they just want to read the headlines and move on with their lives. Leigh and Adair would reply with another very simple answer: paywalls. A 2019 Reuters Institute for Journalism study found that over 75% of US newspapers are behind a paywall, with the monthly cost for access averaging about $11.93, according to Nieman Lab. Adair and Leigh emphasize that most teenagers and college students don’t have the expendable income for a subscription to the New York Times or Washington Post. “And if they do, they're going to buy Chipotle with it and I can't fault them for that,” Adair says.
While many outlets, including the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC (and Teen Vogue!) provide free journalism to all readers, it’s clear that a growing number of young people consume most of their news on social media. A 2023 Pew Research study found that 32% of Americans aged 18 to 29 regularly get their news on TikTok.
Though the American Girl channel has become another forum for information about the 2024 election, Adair and Leigh are the first to acknowledge their own biases and lack of expertise. They don’t pretend that their broadcast channel could take the place of traditional media — nor do they think it should. “It's more like a political talk show taking place via group chat,” Adair says. Leigh mentions how often she hears college students lament how they feel they “don’t know enough about politics” to vote. That’s probably the case in just about any election, but this one seems especially unique. Between an assassination attempt and an incumbent candidate making the stunning decision to drop out mid-election, it can feel like the chessboard of the 2024 election is always changing. The genesis of the channel was to help their followers handle the sheer volume of information and make sense of it all.
This need felt particularly urgent in the hazy, depressing days leading up to Biden dropping out of the election. Adair often found herself turning to the broadcast channel, to their followers, to say, here’s what’s going on, this is what I think it means, this is what will definitely happen, and this is everything you need to know — and then to ask, now how do you feel about it? More than anything, Adair and Leigh want the American Girl broadcast channel to offer a community where young people can learn about political news during a very fraught and confusing time — a community that isn’t condescending and empowers its participants in the democratic process.
It feels poetic that an American Girl doll meme account named after the brand’s Revolutionary War-era doll has created a forum where young people can congregate online during this tumultuous presidential election. “Felicity was a patriot and that's the foundational lore of the account, in many ways, and certainly symbolic of what it's become,” Adair says. Many of the account’s followers came to Hellicity Merriman because of their love for or connection to the American Girl doll world. What the account has become — the resource Adair and Leigh have turned it into — feels like a natural evolution of what the AGD brand means to them: to teach young girls about American history and foster an educated, yet critical appreciation for their country.
“Even if we're not 10 years old anymore,” Leigh says. “It doesn't mean we're not still American girls.”
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