Republicans aren't beating the weirdness allegations

Because they're guilty as charged.

This is weird. (Source: Screencap)

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The presidential election’s entire dynamic has flipped now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee. The party feels revitalized, and that’s in part because Dems have found an effective line of attack on Trumpers: They’re a bunch of creepy weirdos.

Democrats’ “weird” messaging has taken hold among voters because it’s both simple and devastatingly accurate.

To tick through a few examples: Earlier this year, Republicans bought “God Bless the USA” Bibles from Trump, an adjudicated rapist who’s now a convicted felon. Trump supporters paid $20 for fake $2 bills bearing Trump’s mug shot. The same people who refused to be “sheep” and wear masks during a global pandemic showed up at the Republican National Convention with large bandages over their ears like Trump. Instead of a normal, functioning political party, the GOP more closely resembles a cult. And Democrats are noticing.

“You know there's something wrong with people when they talk about freedom: freedom to be in your bedroom, freedom to be in your exam room, freedom to tell your kids what they can read,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who popularized the “weird” talking point during his recent TV hits, told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki late last month. “That stuff is weird. They come across as weird. They seem obsessed with this.” (Watch below)

Notably, Walz didn’t describe MAGA attacks on freedom as “anti-democratic” or “authoritarian,” just weird. He stresses the GOP’s outright obsession with the bizarre and creepy, which is why “weird” is more than just a “playground” taunt, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman claims. Nor does it minimize the stakes of this election.

To be clear, when President Joe Biden declares in speeches that "democracy is on the ballot” and “our freedom is on the ballot,” he’s not wrong. But Harris messages in a way that resonates more effectively with low information voters.

“You may have noticed Donald Trump has been resorting to some wild lies about my record,” she said at a recent event in Massachusetts, “and some of what he and his running mate are saying, well, it's just plain weird. I mean, that's the box you put that in, right?"

“Weird” is a perfectly apt description for Trump, who devotes his hate rallies to unhinged ramblings about Hannibal Lecter and sharks. And Democrats are now collectively pressing the “weird” attack.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzer expressed his disbelief that Republican VP nominee JD Vance is “insulting women who own cats. He has a weird view of America, honestly.” Democratic Sens. Brian Schatz and Chris Murphy filmed a video together where they responded to Vance’s “really creepy” and “super weird ideas” about Americans who aren’t parents. When Republicans mocked Biden for thanking the pilots who’d brought American prisoners home from Russia, White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates responded bluntly: “Don't be weird.” It’s the most succinct label for MAGA’s bigotry, pettiness, and outright ridiculousness.

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Polls have shown that the threat to democracy messaging wasn’t cutting through to voters, specifically core liberal demographics like young people. There’s compelling evidence that when Democrats constantly sound the alarm about “democracy on the ballot” and the “most important election of our lifetimes,” some voters simply tune out.

“Weird” works so well because even the most liberal voter doesn’t believe their MAGA uncle is a literal Nazi — but they do think he has views that are weird and off-putting. After Trump’s attempted assassination, there was genuine concern that Democrats would hold back on accurately painting Trump as an existential threat to democracy. Walz has inspired Democrats to embrace more straightforward messaging.

JD Vance isn’t helping

Making the case even easier for Walz and company is the fact that Trump chose quintessential weirdo JD Vance to be his running mate.

Vance has an approval rating that’s in free fall. His disparaging “childless cat lady” remarks about people without children (literally millions of Americans) and his comments calling pregnancies resulting from rape “inconvenient” are profoundly alienating. Yet he continues to double down on the weirdness.

For instance, last week Vance shared a video of women’s light welterweight boxers Imane Khelif and Angela Carini competing at the Olympics. He wrote, “This is where Kamala Harris's ideas about gender lead: to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match. This is disgusting, and all of our leaders should condemn it.”

Khelif’s gender became an obsession for right-wingers, but there are at least a few reasons that’s weird. For one, neither she or Carini is American (Khelif is Algerian, and Carini is Italian). Vance thinks US leaders should publicly condemn another nation’s Olympic athlete? Even worse, Khelif is a woman and isn’t transgender, which is illegal in Algeria. Making a big fuss about bigoted disinformation instead of celebrating American gold medal athletes like Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky is weird.

Vance’s weirdness has carried over to the stump. During Trump’s rally in Georgia on Saturday, he repeated the tired right-wing accusation that Harris “wants to take away your gas stoves. She even wants to take away your ability to eat red meat." This attack only resonates with people lost in a right-wing media echo chamber. It’s strange to think it would sway independent-minded voters more than the offensive positions Vance actually holds.

Rick Wilson on the weirdness of JD Vance

The GOP loves accusing Democrats of being fixated on “pronouns,” “critical race theory,” and other “woke” priorities more than issues that affect “real” Americans. But Democrats have now flipped the script. Whenever Dems points out that Republicans are “weird,” they also reinforce that they also have no plans for health care, infrastructure, or anything relevant to people’s lives.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has repeatedly put Vance’s insulting claim that childless Americans have no “physical commitment” to the country’s future in the larger context of a Republican Party that opposes serious action on climate change. On CNN, Buttigieg said, “If you have kids and you’re worried about climate, [you’re] choosing between a party that has a plan on climate that creates jobs and a party that still calls it a hoax.”

Over the past several years, MAGA Republicans have become obsessed with some weird shit (to use George W. Bush’s terminology). They boycotted Bud Light because of a single social media promotion featuring Dylan Mulvaney, a trans woman. They freaked out because the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade included two non-binary performers (among hundreds of others). They falsely claimed that Biden replaced Easter with the Transgender Day of Visibility. They’ve absurdly blamed DEI for the the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore and aircraft safety issues. None of this is normal.

Voters don’t like weird

Democrats have called Trump a “felon,” “rapist,” and “fascist,” but “weird” has proven a more effective catch-all for everything that’s wrong with MAGA. As Sen. Schatz told Semafor, “Trump is fundamentally weird, and usually the party that seems like they’re focused on creepy things or weird things loses.”

There’s ample support for that claim. Most recently, during the 2022 midterms, Democrats Mark Kelly and John Fetterman successfully painted their Republican Senate opponents as creepy weirdos. Sen. Raphael Warnock ran a particularly brutal attack ad against Herschel Walker that showed Georgia voters reacting in horror at footage of Walker rambling on about “vampires and werewolves.” The focus wasn’t on his obvious lack of qualifications but his undeniable weirdness.

Oliver Willis on why the Herschel Walker campaign made him sick

Going back to the 1988 presidential election, Mike Dukakis sabotaged his campaign when he looked awkward in a tank. Four years later, Dan Quayle questioned the family planning of Murphy Brown, a fictional character. That was weird. So was Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell’s unprompted confession that she’d “dabbled in witchcraft,” which led to a desperate 2010 campaign ad where she declared, “I’m not a witch.”

In 2012, Mitt Romney’s custom car elevator and an incident where he strapped the family dog to the roof of his car helped the Obama campaign define him as a rich weirdo. That same year, Democrat Claire McCaskill kept her Senate seat because her Republican opponent Todd Akin said women who are the victims of “legitimate rape” don’t get pregnant. He was ahead in the polls before that extremely creepy comment.

Liberals once talked about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as an aspiring autocrat, a more disciplined version of Trump who posed an equal if not greater threat to democracy. But Trump crushed DeSantis in the GOP primary with a relentless campaign of humiliation that highlighted how downright strange he is, including mocking him for wearing lifts.

Republicans acknowledge the benefit of painting an opponent as “weird.” Right after Biden withdrew from the race, the National Republican Senatorial Committee circulated a Harris attack memo that included an entire category titled “Weird,” which cited her laugh and her love of Venn diagrams. They might have more success defining Harris in that way if they weren’t so damn weird themselves.

Weird upon weird

The most effective political messaging causes your opponent to make unforced errors. We’ve seen a lot of this since Democrats stopped being polite and started calling Republicans “weird.”

Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy complained on X, “This whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from the Democrats is dumb & juvenile. This is a presidential election, not a high school prom queen contest. It’s also a tad ironic coming from the party that preaches ‘diversity & inclusion.’ Win on policy if you can, but cut the crap please.”

Quote-tweeting Ramaswamy’s post, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote, “Being obsessed with repressing women is goofy. Trying to watch what LGBTQ+ people do all the time is abnormal. Punishing people who don’t have biological offspring is creepy. It’s an incel platform, dude. It’s SUPER weird. And people need to know.”

Donald Trump Jr. reinforced AOC’s “incel platform” point when he suggested that a “White Dudes for Kamala” group should have a “more fitting name like: Cucks for Kamala.” Most Democrats uniformly responded with “Wow, that’s weird.”

MAGA types like Ramaswamy, Trump Jr., and Elon Musk feed on accusations that they’re “sexist,” “racist,” or “homophobic.” It’s the equivalent of telling a bully that they’re hurting someone weaker and more vulnerable. The bully likes that just fine, but what they can’t tolerate is someone pointing and laughing at them. MAGA is a cult of personality in service of a wannabe strongman. They want us to fear them but loathe being mocked.

As Hillary Clinton remarked, “If Republican leaders don't enjoy being called weird, creepy, and controlling, they could try not being weird, creepy, and controlling.” It seems easy but they just can’t help themselves.

MAGA insists that Democrats are the “weird” ones because they don’t reflexively resent fellow Americans who live or think differently. That plays directly into Walz’s argument that Democrats will no longer passively accept how the GOP frames these issues.

“Yes, they’re a threat, but …. we're not gonna play their game,” Walz said during a recent event. “We called them out for the weird nonsense that they believe and we presented a different argument to the American public. One where everybody matters." (Watch below.)

When Trump gave a speech at a Turning Point USA event and said that Christians wouldn’t have to vote again if he returned to the White House, the Harris campaign called the remarks “strange” instead of “fascist” or “tyrannical.” They didn’t paint Trump as the next Hitler, but instead diminished him as “someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant — let alone be President of the United States.”

Harris has reportedly been thinking along these lines for a while. Political reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote in his 2021 book, “Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump,” that Harris’s aides tested her on “how she’d have responded in situations [Hillary] Clinton faced [in 2016], such as when Trump was stalking behind her in the second debate.”

Harris reportedly said, “That was easy. I’d turn around and say, ‘Why are you being so weird. What’s wrong with you?’”

“Why are you so weird?” remains the most relevant question about Trump. Harris won’t hesitate saying this to his face — not out of frustration like Biden’s “will you shut up, man!” but while laughing at him. Perhaps that’s why Trump is afraid to debate her.

During his disastrous Q&A last week at the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump questioned Harris’s racial identity. Is she really Black or is she Indian? (She’s both.) Jonathan Last at The Bulwark made a compelling argument that this was Trump’s calculated scheme to throw Harris off her game. However, it seems more like racist desperation from someone who fears he’s losing control.

Trump’s cronies suggesting that biracial people don’t exist won’t win over critical swing voters. It’s just weird. And if Trump intended to bait Harris, the cheap strategy failed. Harris dismissed his repulsive remarks as “the same old show.”

Michelle Obama once said, “When they go low, we go high.” Harris has embraced that philosophy while not accepting that this means Democrats should just let MAGA trample over them. “Weird” is both descriptive of Republican smears and obsessions and also dismissive of them. Republicans can take the low road if they wish, but Democrats will retain the high ground, far away from the weirdos.

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That’s it for today

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