The Woman Making Hillary Clinton Cool

Back in March, when millennial voters feeling the Bern threatened to crush Hillary Clinton’s Presidential ambitions, Karen Civil, a thirty-one-year-old social-media marketer, helped throw a Clinton rally at the Apollo Theatre. Renée Elise Goldsberry, a star of “Hamilton,” sang the national anthem. Before the event, Civil posted a video on her Snapchat account. The record producer DJ Khaled, a Snapchat superstar, has a shtick that involves him asking a friend how his business is going; the answer is always “Booming!” Civil suggested that she and Clinton copy it. So Civil asked Clinton, backstage, “Hillary, how’s business?” Clinton grinned and replied, “Booming!”

“I like to take people out of their element,” Civil said the other day, at a juice bar in downtown Los Angeles. She wore Chanel sneakers and a pink baseball cap embroidered with “Inspire or Retire.” “With Hillary, I’ll say, ‘We’ve got to do something funny. We’ve got to do something different, even when we take pictures.’ We did the ‘dust your shoulders off’”—a visual reference to Jay Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder”—“at the first rally I did for her in Atlanta.”

Civil creates marketing campaigns for hip-hop artists and music companies. Growing up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, she built fan Web sites for the Backstreet Boys and J. D. Williams, an actor on “The Wire.” She dropped out of community college to intern at the radio station Hot 97. Later, while working at Asylum Records, she decided that the brand she really wanted to build was her own. In 2008, she launched her Web site, featuring flip-camera interviews with up-and-coming rap stars like Drake and Nicki Minaj.

“I wanted it to be a girl’s point of view of hip-hop,” Civil said. “Not about personal lives or gossip but about the music: who produced it, when they recorded it.” Two years later, Beats by Dre asked her to move to L.A. and help its marketing department. Beats is now a client of her marketing agency, Always Civil Enterprises.

In 2014, the television host Terrence Jenkins invited Civil to a holiday party at the White House. (“I wanted to take home a plate, but when Barack started his talk he said, ‘Make sure you don’t take the china or silverware.’ So I took a napkin and a macaroon.”) Last year, Civil spoke at a White House event for young women activists, and got on the radar of De’Ara Balenger, the Clinton campaign’s director of engagement. “From the outset, we were obsessed with Karen,” Balenger said. She invited Civil to critique the campaign’s social-media presence. The good: Clinton’s old Instagram tagline, “Pantsuit Aficionado.” The bad: Clinton’s general unhipness.

In September, 2015, Balenger hired Civil to help make Clinton cooler. Since then, there has been a noticeable uptick in rap and R. & B. stars on the periphery of the campaign. Usher attended the October, 2015, rally that Civil organized in Atlanta. At a campaign event in Philadelphia, in August, the rapper Freeway, who’d been diagnosed with kidney failure, spoke about affordable health care. “We gonna get it poppin’ for Hillary,” he told the crowd. A few weeks ago in Florida, Civil helped put Clinton’s running mate, Tim Kaine, onstage with the rapper Pusha T (sample lyric: “They call me Pusha for one reason, ’cause I keep that sniff all seasons”). Afterward, on “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert asked Pusha T if he actually knew Clinton. “We met each other via FaceTime, via Karen Civil,” he said.

As Clinton has got up to speed, so have campaign elders. Minyon Moore, a senior adviser who worked in Bill Clinton’s White House, said, “With the millennial space, you don’t have to understand it to try and get involved with it.”

“I just hang with all the young, cool kids there,” Civil said. She mentioned Balenger’s boss but struggled to remember her name. It’s Huma Abedin.

Civil took a sip of beet juice (she went vegan a year ago). Her phone buzzed. The rapper Paul Wall wanted to know if she’d be at the opening of his Houston store. It specializes in “grillz” for teeth, and Wall had engraved a gold one with Civil’s name for her birthday, which is on Election Day.

“It’s really about continuing the legacy that Obama started,” Civil said. “I know we still deal with racism and being divided, but he makes you feel like this is one nation, with his demeanor, his swag.” She went on, “It’s, like, there’s never going to be another them. But I want somebody to keep that momentum going.” ♦