Associated Press
Vice President Kamala Harris and her Democratic allies are emphasizing a new line of criticism against Republicans — branding Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, as “weird.”
Democrats are applying the label with gusto in interviews and online, notably to Vance’s comments on abortion and his previous suggestion that political leaders who didn’t have biological children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.
The “weird” message appears to have given Democrats a narrative advantage that they rarely had when President Joe Biden was still running for re-election. Trump’s campaign, which so often shapes political discussions with the former President’s pronouncements, has spent days trying to flip the script by highlighting things about Democrats it says are weird.
“I don’t know who came up with the message, but I salute them,” said David Karpf, a strategic communication professor at George Washington University.
Karpf said labeling Republican comments as “weird” is the sort of concise take that resonates quickly with Harris supporters. Plus, Karpf noted, “it frustrates opponents, leading them to further amplify it through off-balance responses.”
“So far, at least, Trump-Vance has been incapable of finding an effective response,” Karpf said.
Harris and her allies have used the label frequently
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat who is on Harris’ short list for Vice President, called Trump and Vance “just weird” last week in an MSNBC interview, which the Democratic Governors Association — of which Walz is chair — amplified in a post on X. Walz reiterated the characterization Sunday on CNN, referencing Trump’s repeated mentions of the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the film “Silence of the Lambs” in stump speeches.
Responding to Trump’s Thursday appearance on Fox News, the Harris campaign — in a news release with the subject line “Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance” — included “Trump is old and quite weird?” in a bulleted list of takeaways.
A day later, multiple news releases from the Harris campaign described her opponents similarly, declaring simply that “JD Vance is weird” in part due to his stances on abortion, and Harris’ campaign spokesperson saying that Vance had “spent all week making headlines for his out-of-touch, weird ideas.”
Two of Harris’ allies, Sens. Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, on Friday posted a video on X calling Vance’s past comments about limiting the political power of childless Americans “a super weird idea.”
And then, at her first fundraiser since becoming the Democrats’ likely White House nominee, Harris used the characterization herself, calling out some of Trump’s “wild lies about my record and some of what he and his running mate are saying, it is just plain weird.”
“I mean that’s the box you put that in, right?” she added.
Many of Democrats’ comments appear to be allusions to a 2021 interview with Vance in which he slammed some prominent Democrats without biological children — including Harris — as “childless cat ladies” with “no direct stake” in America.
But Harris’ own characterization of Trump as “weird” may date back even further. In his 2021 book, political reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote that Harris reportedly gathered with aides in 2018 to prepare for her own presidential bid.
As staff aimed to prepare her for how she’d react if, during a debate, Trump stood over her as he did Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, Harris reportedly quipped, “‘I’d turn around and say, ‘Why are you being so weird? What’s wrong with you?’”
Trump’s campaign has tried to flip the script
On Sunday, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung posted video of Walz calling Trump and Vance “weird” as he stumped for Harris and said the likely Democratic nominee and her backers were themselves out of line for “trying to gaslight everyone into thinking the shooting was staged,” a reference to the assassination attempt at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania.
More broadly, some of Trump’s allies have angled to turn the conversation back to Harris and what they portray as her failed policy ideas.
Donald Trump Jr., the former President’s oldest son, took to X on Monday to ask, “You know what’s really weird? Soft on crime politicians like Kamala allowing illegal aliens out of prison so they can violently assault Americans.”
On Saturday, Vance reposted an X video Trump Jr. shared in which Harris talked about “climate anxiety, which is fear of the future and the unknown of whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children.”
“It’s almost like these people don’t want young people starting families or something,” Vance wrote. “Really weird stuff.”
Democrats are co-opting Republican attack lines to support Harris
Republicans have long shared clips of Harris’ laugh and some of her jokes or stories to try to make the Vice President seem weird — notably an anecdote she told last year about her mother scolding her, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”
The “coconut tree” story has itself become a Democratic in-joke in the days since Harris took over the campaign. Many of her supporters have embraced coconut emojis in their online accounts.
Calling Republicans “weird” may be a way to take Republicans’ previous tactics and make them their own, said Matt Sienkiewicz, a communication professor at Boston College.
University at Buffalo political communication professor Jacob Neiheisel compared the “weird” message to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2008 attempt to portray Barack Obama as a celebrity with no real accomplishments.
“At a functional level, I think that this might be part of a concerted attempt to mitigate some of the longstanding efforts on the right to paint Harris in a similar way,” Neiheisel said.
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Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
17 comments
Ninety Three
July 30, 2024 at 10:35 am
Call me “weird”
I want cheap fuel
I want low inflation
I want sovereign borders
I want a strong military
I want safe cities
I want our police respected
I want an effective foreign policy.
There are other things
I guess I’m “weird”
TJC
July 30, 2024 at 10:47 am
No, you are a tape recording of the things you’ve been told. Not an original thought in your head. As such, you never let facts get in the way. Not weird — boring.
Ninety Three
July 30, 2024 at 10:54 am
So you are fine with all the chaos we have had since Jan 2021. That’s zombie denial right there.
TJC
July 30, 2024 at 11:53 am
Here’s some zombie denial for you:
The “chaos” you refer to is mostly imaginary.
Violent crime in the U.S. has declined steadily over the last decade — the FBI publishes the stats.
Gasoline prices in the U.S. are lower than any other developed nation in the world. If you want to whine that they were lower a few years ago under Trump, you can also cry about it not being as low as it was in the Kennedy administration. Same with food and housing.
We have the strongest military in the world and outspend China and Russian and North Korea combined on our military. Calling for a stronger military is an old tried and true way of wrapping yourself in the flag and claiming to be a better patriot than the next guy.
The Biden administration has sent away more illegal immigrants than were sent away in the Trump administration — do your research, it’s true. And illegal immigrants, according to the records of all law enforcement agencies in the U.S., are far less likely to commit violent crimes than any other group of residents — legal residents — in the U.S. The “rapists and murderers” claims so often repeated by Trump are lies.
Our police are respected by most citizens, but some citizens — like the Jan 6 mob — are selective. If the cop is protecting and serving someone they don’t like, then he’s fair game for a beating. You say you want our police to be respected, but are you selective, too?
We have an effective foreign policy, evidenced by the fact that democracies around the world look to us to lead the way on confronting threats to democracy. Only the threat of another Trump presidency is weakening that desire to see America lead. They know he is unstable, at best, and in Putin’s pocket, at worst.
The cities of America that you so often ridicule, like Chicago, are huge economic engines that rival the GDP of whole countries. Los Angeles, Chicago, New York — each one is a world-class super-economy, and although they have pockets of poverty that breed crime, their crime rates are no worse per capita than any other place in the country. My guess is that your real problem with these cities is that they tend to vote Democrat, and they have a lot of people of color. Two things you can’t relate to, so to you those cities are not good. But our country — our military, too — couldn’t survive without the tax revenue they generate.
Your obsession with calling your political opposites “zombies” is childish. So are Trump’s references to Hannibal Lecter. We’re not living in a movie. Chicago is not a cartoon villain. Our military, our police are not fictional characters that you can point to when you want to claim superior patriotism, they are men and women who, although just like us in most ways, put everything on the line to uphold the Constitution and rule of law.
MarvinM
July 30, 2024 at 12:13 pm
Funny, of the seven things you mention, Democrats agree, i.e. want the same things, on at least 5 of them, and the other two I’d say we want as well, I just hedge a little about what you might mean by the words “sovereign” and “effective”.
We agree on so many things, what we don’t always agree on is HOW we can actually implement the changes we need to do to achieve the shared end goal.
For example, Democrats want cheap fuel – but we don’t want it at the expense of making the planet ultimately uninhabitable for our grandkids and/or great-grandkids. We also don’t want it at the expense of poisoning the air and water that we breathe and drink which affects all of us now.
Also funny, you didn’t mention any of the other things that actually are weird – like how JD Vance seems to think “Childless cat ladies” don’t deserve to have a say because they did not pop out any biological children.
Or any Republican legislator who thinks writing a law to track women traveling to other states to maybe get an abortion, and think they have a right to see her medical records.
Or trying to revive an 1800s law (Comstock) to keep abortion pills from being conveyed through the mail, which at the same time would cut off your subscription to Playboy magazine, or maybe even anyone’s ability to receive a Victoria’s Secret Catalog through the mail.
That – and more – is what is weird.
Tom
July 30, 2024 at 1:27 pm
Weird and then some I’m afraid. I think they have a Handmaidens Tale fetish that they’re trying to mainstream.
Michael K
July 30, 2024 at 11:41 am
Miss Spoke is paid by the name, not the content.
Ninety Three
July 30, 2024 at 11:46 am
Another shot with no counter for high fuel prices, inflation, foreign policy, no control at all at the Southern border, etc, etc.
Michael K
July 30, 2024 at 3:03 pm
Honey, those are your issues. I respond to the article.
ELVIS
July 30, 2024 at 12:33 pm
The feckless Dems are behind the 8 ball and can never cram their campaign into 2 and a half months.
No way the feckless Dems pull this one out.
Tom
July 30, 2024 at 1:40 pm
Most countries in the world run elections from soup to nuts in a month or two so it should be fine.
That aside, seeing as you’re calling people feckless, read up on why the House can’t manage to pass all 12 of their funding bills before August and why they packed up and went home early – there’s some fecklessness for you. They seem incapable of governing.
Michael K
July 30, 2024 at 2:53 pm
Republicans only have a few more days to decide whether to dump Vance. He’s been a huge disappointment. His lack of experience clearly shows. It’s difficult to imagine him as second in command – on the ticket with an overweight 78-year-old. They are probably stuck with him. Meanwhile, the “weird” characterization fits some of his more bizarre assertions. He is Sarah Palin with a beard.
Ninety Three
July 30, 2024 at 3:58 pm
Did you see the takedown of Kammy delivered by JD the other day in St Cloud, MN? To act like he isn’t capable to lead the US if Trump ever went down is laughable. Hell people in your own zombie party wanted Biden to dump her not too long ago. Yet here you all are embracing her ignorance and laziness acting as if she is the great messiah after she was run out of the Demo primary in 2019.
TJC
July 31, 2024 at 1:57 pm
“…her ignorance and laziness…”
In truth, she is everything you fear most: a highly educated, highly accomplished, strong female of color.
Childless Cat Lady
July 30, 2024 at 3:04 pm
Democrats don’t need to stick with name calling and negative ads to win this election. Kamala should end the silly stuff and stick to POLICY …… that is the Democrat’s strong point, because Republicans lack policies. Republicans can’t possibly run on the Project 2025 policies they’ve created.
Michael K
July 30, 2024 at 6:20 pm
Susie Wiles and Lindsey Graham tried to talk Trump out of picking Vance. But, as usual, Trump listens to no one.
Triple hitter double hater
July 30, 2024 at 6:44 pm
Most Americans are just trying to keep their jobs, keep a roof over their heads, care for and feed their families. This nonsense from both parties has worn very thin. Late stage democracy divisive politics of distraction bull $h1t. Sick of it. I want adult candidates who can talk about real issues and deal with reality. I don’t see that here from either camp and I’m sick of it. Where is the talk about what their tax plan is and how it will affect me, or how to deal with the debt? With what’s going on in the world right now? Cost of living? Why are we letting in terrorists unvetted when how many trillions of dollars and lives were spent fighting wars? Why do we offer more assistance to other countries than we do for citizens at home? You can’t spend your way to office and then keep driving up the debt. Somebody has to pay for it. That’s us. Looking at both parties doing the same things just on different $h1t. The environment and natural disasters? We don’t even have a budget for this? And no, consigning the US to becoming a client state to China for EV batteries is NOT a leading climate solution and will lead to more proxy wars over minerals, raping the earth, toxic waste, bankrupting the country and hurting people, how is this American ingenuity? Where is the solar you promised us to cut energy expenses? Also from China? We are better than this. Capable of better more practical solutions. Time for a multi party system. Citizens United was the nail in the coffin. Something has to give. This election is a disaster and a farce on both sides.
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