Hamilton’s Voter Mobilization “Remixes” Since 2016
The author would like to thank Adriana da Silva for providing Spanish-language transcription and translation assistance.
When Lin-Manuel Miranda hosted Saturday Night Live on October 8, 2016, his opening monologue quickly morphed into an equally personal and political reimagining of “My Shot,” the first solo for founding father Alexander Hamilton, the tenacious titular role Miranda created for the 2015 Broadway musical. His SNL performance concluded “and as long I as remember to vote this November / I am not throwing away my shot.” (3:58) Hamilton (2015)—its identity-conscious casting, hip-hop idioms, reception, and historiography—is the focus of articles, entire books, and journal issues across academic disciplines, as are its paratheatrical offshoots such as #Ham4Ham pre-show performances and parodies HamilTrump and Spamilton. Yet Hamilton-inspired voter mobilization public service announcements (PSAs) like the SNL performance are more widely discussed in media forums than music scholarship.
In their coverage of Miranda’s SNL appearance and the modestly-viral 2020 Hamilton voting PSA (discussed later), entertainment news outlets such as Broadway.com, Playbill, ScreenRant, HuffPost, and NPR characterized these performances as “remixes.” In fact, a music scholar might categorize these “remixes” as two familiar yet distinct forms of borrowing with long histories: contrafacture and medley. Contrafacture is the centuries-old practice of re-texting an existing melody, and it has played a role in American politics since colonial times. As music scholar Glenda Goodman argues, effective contrafacts will exhibit profound intertextuality with the source, which should be familiar to the target audience. Hamilton voting PSAs have primarily circulated on the musical’s YouTube channel and as television ad buys in the New York City metropolitan area. Those who self-select as Hamilton’s more than 670,000 YouTube subscribers, and the many millions of people living near Hamilton’s Broadway home therefore comprise two large target audiences with, respectively, expert and generalist levels of familiarity with the musical and its themes of “rising up” and fighting for one’s beliefs. Beginning in 2020, the voting PSAs also employed medley—excerpts of existing pieces, often from the same larger source, played in succession. In this article written on the eve of another consequential election, I argue that by iterating on the medley and contrafacture “remix” formula, Hamilton’s voter mobilization PSAs have successfully and continually inspired a targeted audience despite a shifting and contentious political landscape.
In the days following Miranda’s 2016 SNL appearance, English- and Spanish-language TV networks in the NYC metropolitan area began airing a trilogy of Hamilton-inspired PSAs called “#Ham4Vote,” produced with assistance from a marketing firm and a Latino-owned government affairs group. Although the ads were filmed on the musical’s Broadway set, the cast members do not appear in costume, visually manifesting something that Miranda, among others, preached: the election of 1800 is not so different from twenty-first-century ones.
All three videos are contrafacts of the Act I number “The Schuyler Sisters,” wherein audiences meet Eliza, the future Mrs. Hamilton; Angelica, her older sister who maintains a lifelong, mutually flirtatious relationship with Alexander; and Peggy, the childlike sister whose brief Act I appearance takes on retroactive significance when the same performer reenters as Maria Reynolds, Alexander’s mistress, in Act II. In the original song, the women buck their gendered exclusion from the promises of American independence, even as they revel in the political excitement of life in Revolutionary-era New York City. Indeed, the number is so apt that the “#Ham4Vote Sequel” reuses many of its original lyrics, such as, “you want a revolution? I want a revelation!” The sisters’ determination to “work, work” within the social confines of eighteenth-century white womanhood is echoed in the PSA’s command that viewers work within democratic structures and “vote, vote.”
As William Wilder argued for the Brennan Center in 2020, voter suppression tactics render democratic structures less navigable, with disproportionate effects for low-income and nonwhite voters and immigrants. The Spanish-language “#Ham4Vote Mi Gente” targeted New York City’s large Hispanic and Latino communities. Although “Mi Gente [My People]” re-texts the same verse from “The Schuyler Sisters” as the first “#Ham4Vote” PSA, the former is not a translation of the latter. Miranda raps that Hispanic and Latino people should “come,” “vote,” and “not let this country not count us.” By employing a rap flow and vocal harmonies entirely unique to “Mi Gente,” Miranda musically, as well as lyrically, encourages Spanish-speakers’ democratic participation.
On September 22, 2020—National Voter Registration Day (NVRD, a floating civic holiday)—Hamilton’s YouTube channel dropped a voting PSA with a revamped medley/contrafact strategy. This PSA presents a gallery view of individual, at-home performances by Hamilton cast members who were on hiatus due to the global pandemic. Co-producing this time was When We All Vote, Michelle Obama’s “leading national, nonpartisan initiative” (est. 2018) that aims to “close the race and age gap” in the US electorate. Miranda is among the organization’s founding co-chairs, and drawing on his hip-hop inspired musical about the US’s founding was considered an appropriate way to reach those voters.
This PSA quickly garnered half a million views (and the aforementioned press coverage) thanks to the online “like and share” culture, internet users’ pandemic-era preferences for virtual socialization, and the high-stakes 2020 election. Although the many forms of voter mobilization for NVRD confound efforts to ascribe causation solely to the Hamilton PSA, a record-breaking 1.5 million people registered to vote in the United States on September 22, 2020.
Music from the opening number kicks off the 2020 PSA medley, and like the musical, delivers context—a brief doctrinal and historical lesson on recent elections—in the form of a rhetorical question. Lyrics specifically implicate young people’s disengagement in the outcomes of the 2016 presidential and 2018 midterm elections. In the musical, the addition of instruments, more rhythmic activity, and intensified singing over the first minute build anticipation for Hamilton’s first entrance; over a lone piano, Miranda’s unornamented delivery of “Alexander Hamilton / my name is Alexander Hamilton” is the picture of humility. This structure befits the contrafact which places the “power to make the biggest difference” (1:01) in an “Ordinary Citizen / I’m just an Ordinary Citizen.” By reassigning the musical motif for the singular historical figure of Alexander Hamilton to an unnamed Ordinary Citizen, the PSA locates the potential to make consequential contributions to civic life in viewers, themselves Ordinary Citizens. As a woman of color, Justice Moore’s portrayal of the Ordinary Citizen, like Hamilton’s race-conscious casting, destabilizes what Audre Lorde theorized as the “mythical norm” of whiteness and maleness, among other traits, that inheres in otherwise unmarked “American” identity.
Moore’s character admits that she has never voted, prompting a trio of performers to explain, to the beats from “Aaron Burr, Sir” (1:19), prerequisite voter registration processes, outlining in-person, online, and mail-in options and stressing that rules differ by state. In the musical, these beats underscore the introductions of John Laurens, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Hercules Mulligan, who would become Hamilton’s Revolutionary allies and intimate friends. The PSA brings this song’s narrative function to bear on the medley/contrafact, thus inviting Moore (as a proxy for all nonvoters) to join a lively democratic community.
Justice Moore applies hand sanitizer in the 2020 Hamilton voter mobilization PSA
Citing pandemic-era health and safety concerns and compulsively applying hand sanitizer (1:57), Moore again balks at voting. Her statement coincides musically with what, in the musical, is an equivocation from Burr, which Hamilton challenges before launching into what film composer Lehman Engel might have called the musical’s proper “I want” song, “My Shot.” With Moore musically placed in a similarly indefensible position as Burr, the PSA is primed to instruct Ordinary Citizens (viewers) that mail-in voting is a safe and secure alternative to traditional in-person voting.
The medley transitions to Lafayette’s virtuosic and braggadocious rap from “Guns and Ships,” in which he recounts the Revolutionary Army’s assets and strategies. Both performatively and topically, it is a suitable choice for the PSA to list the many benefits of mail-in voting, including its accessibility, ease, and insusceptibility to hacking, something many voters at the time regarded as a major vulnerability of internet-connected voting booths and counting machines (2:10). The musical portrays Lafayette and Hamilton, both immigrants, as having been invaluable architects of the battlefield tactics that secured colonists’ victory over British forces in the 1781 Battle of Yorktown, and in “Guns and Ships,” the ensemble continuously interjects their names. In the voting PSA, the refrain of “vote by mail” takes their place; it transfers the existing association between this musical motif and the two characters who personify victory onto a particular mode of balloting.
The opening line of “The Election of 1800,” “Can we get back to politics?,” pivots the medley into its final and longest section (2:35). In the musical, the song features conversational lyrics amongst undecided voters debating the presidential candidates—incumbent John Adams, Aaron Burr, and Thomas Jefferson—followed by a melodic section featuring a direct appeal to “dear Mr. Hamilton,” whose endorsement of Jefferson in the song’s third part swings the election in his favor. Displaying its nonpartisanship, the voting PSA avoids naming the 2020 candidates, Republican incumbent Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden, and instead addresses concerns that viewers, regardless of political party, were likely to have encountered in other news outlets, especially questions about various voter fraud schemes and whether and when mail-in votes would be counted. On the latter topic, the contrafact lyrics tell viewers to “wait for it” (3:05), a clever nod to Aaron Burr’s first solo number in Act I. The PSA performers then turn the song’s direct address section to the viewers, the “dear friends of Hamilton,” whom they invite to visit whenweallvote.org/Hamilton, a website that, when it was active, took visitors to a state-by-state directory of voter education and registration resources.
In the final section of the PSA (3:35), Miranda makes a surprise cameo appearance in which he reprises the role of Hamilton. In the musical (and historically), decision-making power rested with Hamilton as a New York delegate in the electoral college, and the voting PSA redirects it onto viewers: “our nation is asking to hear your voice,” not “my voice,” as the original lyric goes. The cast members punctuate his lines with exclamations of “Vote!” The final side-by-side images of Moore and Miranda visually reinforce the equivalence between the capacity for the on-stage and historical Alexander Hamilton and virtual and real-world Ordinary Citizens to effect change by voting.
Justice Moore (L) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (R) sign off in the 2020 Hamilton voter mobilization PSA
Miranda thanks the cast for their participation and advises them just as his character was advised by George Washington: “history has its eyes on you” (4:13). Michelle Obama, in another cameo, reminds viewers to spread the message of voter engagement to their friends and family. According to YouTube commenters who self-identified as ineligible to vote due to their age or non-US citizenship, her words were an especially meaningful way to empower them. Comments like “they had me when they called me a friend of Hamilton” demonstrate that the voting PSA effectively appealed to a preexisting audience and both directly and indirectly mobilized voters.
Following the success of this video, the self-described “HamFam” created another one for the midterm elections. Unlike the 2020 voting PSA, which was stitched together from individually home-recorded webcam videos, the post-pandemic PSA, “The Election of 2022” is a high-cost production with the performers singing in studio sound booths and filmed by professional videographers. Although the medley structure is much the same as 2020, new contrafact lyrics reflect the 2022 election context: emphasis on down-ballot races in a nonpresidential election year and on voter suppression efforts enacted through identification laws and the purging of voter rolls, and nothing about the pandemic.
Perhaps it is the relative lack of interest in midterm elections, the comparatively artificial production of this video, its occasionally awkward text-setting, or some combination of the above, but with only 43,000 views—less than 10% of the total for the 2020 video—“The Election of 2022” proves that lightning rarely strikes twice.
Or does it?
While finalizing this article for publication, the Hamilton YouTube channel dropped its latest voter mobilization video on September 17, National Voter Registration Day 2024. Since then, the video has been viewed nearly 700,000 times, meaning that it has reached more people in less time than the viral 2020 video. At the time of publication, the 2024 election cycle is upcoming and the reception to this PSA is unfolding. Suffice it to say that the recording studio video production of “The Election of 2024” resembles that of its most recent predecessor, but it boasts an entirely new medley—“What’d I Miss” (0:00), “Yorktown” (1:12), “The Schuyler Sisters” (2:02), “Guns and Ships” (2:49), and “Right Hand Man” (3:04)—with brand new, hard-hitting lyrics that revitalize the now familiar structure of these Hamilton voter mobilization PSAs and meet the exigencies of a tumultuous presidential election season.
