By MEG KINNARD
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 reelection. 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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Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina, and can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.
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Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
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