Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her allies have found a new favorite line of criticism against her Republican opponents. They’re “weird.”
The apparently coordinated campaign to frame former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, as strange launched with a viral clip of Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz saying, “These guys are just weird,” on July 23. One day later, the Democratic Governors Association, which Walz chairs, and the Harris campaign leaned into the new messaging strategy.
Before the week was over, Harris was using the epithet to lead fundraising emails, and news anchors as well as party luminaries, including Hillary Clinton, were using nearly identical language to criticize Trump and Vance.
The adjective was used to describe everything from Vance’s position on abortion, to his support for enhanced child tax credits and his past comments expressing concern about the country being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies(.)”
But Vance has pushed back, arguing the label says more about the Democratic Party being detached from the concerns of regular Americans than it does about the GOP ticket.
“The American people will never elect a wacky, out of touch liberal like Kamala Harris,” Vance said at a rally in Reno on Tuesday.
Who’s really weird?
Following the event, Nevada’s GOP Senate nominee, Sam Brown, who had shared the stage with Vance, called out the Nevada Democratic Party for calling him and Vance “just plain weird” in a post on Tuesday.
Brown, whose face is covered in scars from a near-fatal explosion during his time as an Army captain in Afghanistan, said Nevadans should “lean into the things that make you unique and that others may call ‘weird.’”
“Do not allow them to define you,” Brown said in a video post. “Do not live out the narrative that they cast for your life.”
Vance was joined at the rally by Republican Nevada state Sen. Ira Hansen and Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald, who launched into a defense of Vance, saying the wave of “weird” comments is just the latest attempt by politicians in Washington, D.C., to discount the views of conservative Americans.
Hansen, who represents rural northern Nevada, reminded the crowd of when former President Barack Obama said it wasn’t surprising that working-class people sometimes “cling to guns or religion(.)”
Hansen and McDonald both then referenced the quote from former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton where she said “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”
“In politics, it’s a dumb idea to make fun of lots of voters. But they did,” Hansen said. “Now what is the current attack? We are ‘weirdos.’”
The state lawmaker said it was the policies of the elite in the Democratic Party that were “weird” to many Americans. Allowing biological males to participate in women’s sports, implementing burdensome regulations on American energy companies and removing Trump-era border policies, among other things, are all “very strange,” Hansen said.
Actually, it was Vance’s normalcy that makes him a threat to Harris’ candidacy, according to McDonald.
“Here’s a man who had an upbringing like many of us,” McDonald said. “He fought like everyone in this room to make it that we have a better America as we move forward.”
Maybe they both are...
Vance grew up in the solidly working-class Middletown, Ohio, a city impacted by the reduction in American manufacturing jobs. He was mostly raised by his maternal grandmother, “Mamaw,” because his mother struggled with emotional stability and opioid addiction.
After publishing a memoir of his childhood at age 31, Vance, now 40, became something of a spokesperson for Appalachian Americans hit hard by a wave of shuttered factories and broken families.
Vance’s book recounts his unlikely exit from “a culture in crisis” and describes how enlisting in the marines, graduating from Ohio State summa cum laude and receiving a degree from Yale Law School led to him reflecting on why communities like his were left behind and how it created resentment toward government institutions and elites.
Before getting elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, Vance worked with some of the biggest names in venture capital before founding his own investment firm to support startups in underserved areas in the Midwest.
Like Vance, Harris has risen to the top level of American politics after working her way up as an attorney. Harris, 59, was raised in Oakland, California, and attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., before receiving a law degree at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.
Harris went on to be elected as the San Francisco district attorney before being elected as California attorney general and then U.S. Senator.
On Thursday, Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle weighed in on the bipartisan exchange of the “weird” insult between Democrats and Republicans.
Her take? If someone has been to college, spends lots of time on social media, works at a large company or follows politics closely, then he or she is “weird” compared to the rest of Americans.
“If you meet all of these criteria, you are really, really unlike most voters, and should never use introspection to assess the political popularity of an issue,” McArdle said.