Harris and Democrats keep calling Trump and Vance ‘weird.’ Here’s why

Vice President Kamala Harris and her Democratic allies are highlighting a new line of criticism of Republicans, criticizing Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator from Ohio. JD Vanceas “strange”.

Democrats have been enthusiastically slapping the label on Vance in interviews and online, particularly on his comments on abortion and his previous suggestion that political leaders who do not have biological children have “no direct interest” in the country.

The “odd” message appears to have given Democrats a narrative advantage they rarely had when President Joe Biden was seeking re-election. Trump’s campaign, which so often shapes political discussions with the former president’s statements, has spent days trying to flip the script by highlighting things about Democrats that it calls odd.

“I don’t know who came up with the message, but I salute them,” said David Karpf, a professor of strategic communications at George Washington University.

Karpf said labeling Republican comments as “odd” is the kind of concise opinion that quickly resonates with Harris supporters. Moreover, Karpf noted, “it frustrates opponents, causing them to amplify it further through unbalanced responses.”

“So far, at least, Trump-Vance has failed to find an effective response,” Karpf said.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat on Harris’s ticket shortlist for vice presidentTrump and Vance were called “just weird” in an MSNBC interview last week, which the Democratic Governors Association — which Walz chairs — reinforced in a message on XWalz repeated the characterization on CNN on Sunday, referring to Trump’s repeated mentions of the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the film “Silence of the Lambs” in his speeches.

In response to Trump’s Thursday appearance on Fox News, the Harris campaign — in a press release titled “Statement Regarding 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Appearance on Fox News” — added “Trump is old and pretty weird?” to a list of key points.

A day later, several press releases from Harris’s campaign described her opponents in similar terms, stating simply that “J.D. Vance is weird,” in part because of his abortion positions. Harris’s campaign spokesman said that Vance “has been in the news all week because of his out-of-touch, weird ideas.”

Two of Harris’ allies, Senators Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, on Friday posted a video about X calling Vance’s earlier comments about limiting the political power of childless Americans “a super weird idea.”

And then, at her first fundraiser since becoming the Democratic nominee for the White House, Harris herself used that characterization, denouncing some of Trump’s “wild lies about my record and some of what he and his running mate say, it’s just plain weird.”

“I mean, that’s the box you put it in, right?” she added.

Many of the Democrats’ comments appear to be allusions to a 2021 interview with Vance, in which he criticized several prominent Democrats without biological children — including Harris — as “childless cat ladies” with “no direct interest” in America.

But Harris’ own characterization of Trump as “odd” may date back even further. In his 2021 book, political reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote that Harris reportedly met with her aides in 2018 to plan her own presidential bid.

As staffers tried to prepare her for how she would react if Trump stood over her during a debate, as he did to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, Harris reportedly said, “‘I would turn around and say, ‘Why are you being so weird? What’s wrong with you?'”

On Sunday, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung posted a video in which Walz called Trump and Vance “strange” while campaigning for Harris. He said the presumptive Democratic nominee and her supporters were also out of line by “misleading everyone into thinking the shooting was staged,” a reference to the attempted assassination at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally.

More broadly, some of Trump’s allies have tried to refocus the conversation on Harris and what they call her failed policy proposals.

Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, took to X on Monday to ask, “You know what’s really weird? Politicians like Kamala who are soft on crime are releasing illegal aliens from prison so they can violently attack Americans.”

On Saturday, Vance reposted an X video Trump Jr. shared a segment in which Harris spoke about “climate anxiety, which is anxiety about the future and the uncertainty about whether it even makes sense to think about having children.”

“It’s almost like these people don’t want young people to have families or something,” Vance wrote. “Really strange stuff.”

Republicans have long shared snippets of Harris’ laughs and some of her jokes or stories to try to make the vice president seem weird — particularly an anecdote she told last year about her mother who scolded her: “Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”

The story of the ‘coconut tree’ has become a story itself a democratic joke in the days since Harris took over the campaign. Many of her supporters have embraced coconut emojis in their online accounts.

By calling Republicans “weird,” they can adopt their past tactics and make them their own, says Matt Sienkiewicz, a professor of communications at Boston College.

Jacob Neiheisel, a professor of political communication at the University at Buffalo, compared the “odd” message to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2008 attempt to portray Barack Obama as a celebrity with no real achievements.

“On a functional level, I think this could be part of a concerted effort to soften some of the longstanding efforts on the right to portray 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.