Why 'weird' is the new watchword for Democrats attacking Trump and Vance
With a younger presidential candidate, Dems ditch dire warnings for more casual disses
Not that long ago, Democrats were painting Donald Trump as a fundamental threat to democracy itself. But these days, they're mostly just calling him weird.
"'Weird' is a word that regular people use in their everyday lives," Martha McKenna, a Democratic strategist and ad maker, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
The party's tonal shift came after the 81-year-old U.S. President Joe Biden stepped down from the presidential race and endorsed 59-year-old Vice-President Kamala Harris in his stead.
Now, as the party lines up behind a younger candidate, they've shifted their campaign language to something more casual.
It's a tactic that some strategists, pundits and communications experts are lauding as smart and accessible, but that others say could backfire for a party that is sometimes seen as looking down on regular people.
At a campaign stop in Atlanta on Tuesday, Harris said of Trump and his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance: "Some of their stuff is just plain weird."
Last week, after Trump appeared on Fox News, Harris's team issued a memo of bulleted takeaways, including: "Trump is old and quite weird?"
The language echoes repeated remarks by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — one of the candidates to be Harris's running mate — who, according to Politico, has been using the word "weird" to describe hard-line Republicans for months.
"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 labelling Republican comments as "weird" is the sort of concise take that resonates quickly with Harris supporters.
"It frustrates opponents, leading them to further amplify it through off-balance responses," he said. "So far, at least, Trump-Vance has been incapable of finding an effective response."
The J.D. Vance of it all
McKenna says the new strategy is a direct response to Trump's running mate, who once dubbed Harris and other leading Democrats "a bunch of childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives" and suggested in a 2021 speech that parents should have more voting power than people without kids.
"The word 'weird' has come about, I think mostly as J.D. Vance has hit the national scene, and we've learned more about his really odd obsession with the private lives of American women and whether or not women choose to become mothers," McKenna said.
"I think his obsession with this really is weird."
Sens. Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, both Harris allies, on Friday posted a video on X calling Vance's comments about limiting the political power of childless Americans "a super weird" and "really creepy" idea.
'A flight from substance'
Not everyone is a fan of the new Democratic strategy.
"I cannot think of a sillier, more playground, more foolish and more counterproductive political taunt for Democrats to seize on than calling Trump and his supporters 'weird,'" opinion columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote in the New York Times.
Friedman says the party needs to connect with "white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women" who "feel denigrated and humiliated by Democratic, liberal, college-educated elites."
"They hate the people who hate Trump more than they care about any Trump policies," wrote Friedman. "Therefore, the dumbest message Democrats could seize on right now is to further humiliate them as 'weird.'"
Michael J. Sandel, a Harvard professor of government, echoed that sentiment, telling the Times the language marks "a flight from substance" for the party, and it "allows Trump to tell his supporters that establishment elites look down on them, marginalize them and view them as 'outsiders.'"
During the 2016 presidential election campaign, Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton faced backlash for branding Trump supporters "a basket of deplorables" — a moniker many on the right later embraced.
Clinton later said she regretted the comments.
Flipping the script
Trump and his supporters have long mockingly shared clips of Harris's laugh, jokes and stories, in an apparent attempt to paint her as strange or unhinged.
Jacob Neiheisel, University at Buffalo political communication professor, says the Democrats are trying to turn the table.
"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," he said.
Trump's campaign, meanwhile, is trying flip the script back.
"You know what's really weird? Soft on crime politicians like Kamala allowing illegal aliens out of prison so they can violently assault Americans," Donald Trump Jr., the former president's oldest son, wrote on X on Monday.
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."
But McKenna says she rejects any suggestions that Democrats are stooping to the level of their Republican rivals.
"Trump is a bully who goes after the way people look, the way they talk. Even today, he went after Kamala Harris about [how] he doesn't know whether she's Black or not," she said, referring to comments the former president made on Wedneday during a gathering of Black journalists.
"Democrats are saying J.D.Vance and Donald Trump are wrong in the way that they think about American society and American families, and they're wrong in their policy positions. And we're finding new words to describe that. And what they are is weird and strange and always wrong."
With files from The Associated Press. Interview with Martha McKenna produced by Chris Trowbridge.
