It’s the summer of “weird” in the battle for the White House.
Vice President Kamala Harris and her allies are painting the Republican ticket of former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as “weird” and “extreme” in a strategy that diverges from the Democrats’ “threat to democracy” attack line. Vance and his allies have responded in kind, with the Republican vice presidential nominee calling Harris “wacky” and “out of touch.”
“You may have noticed that Donald Trump has been resorting to some wild lies about my record. And some of what he and his running mate are saying, well, it’s just plain weird,” Harris said Saturday at a Massachusetts campaign event. “I mean, that’s the box you put that in.”
The subject line of a Harris campaign email declared, “JD Vance Is a Creep (Who Wants to Ban Abortion Nationwide).” Another email questioned whether Trump, who’s also been lumped into the condemnation, is up to the task of serving as president again now that the 78-year-old is the eldest candidate after the exit of President Joe Biden.
“After watching Fox News this morning we only have one question, is Donald Trump ok?”, a Harris press release said, succeeded by a list of criticisms such as Trump is “flustered and lashing out” and “old and quite weird.”
Several prominent Democrats have also leaned heavily into such attack lines, including Govs. Tim Walz (D-MA), Andy Beshear (D-KY), and J.B. Pritzker (D-IL), all contenders for Harris’s running mate, Sens. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Brian Schatz (D-HI), and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
“These guys are just weird. That’s who they are,” Walz, head of the Democratic Governors Association, said on the trail while stumping for Harris. “We’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”
Rep. Greg Landsman (D-OH), whose district borders Vance’s hometown of Middletown, accused Vance of “running one of the cruelest, most chaotic, and downright *weirdest* campaigns for vice president we’ve ever seen.”
The “weird” labels underscore the perceived liability that Democrats feel Vance brings to Trump. Under the surface of public GOP support for Vance, some Republicans are concerned that Trump picked the wrong running mate.
But the tactic has Democratic strategist Brad Bannon scratching his head as to why the party believes it’s a winning message when they should “punch up instead of down” by focusing on Trump.
“My inclination is to say, totally meaningless. It’s so trivial to voters, I can’t even begin to think about it,” Bannon told the Washington Examiner. “Voters have bigger fish to fry than weirdness. They want discussion about the things affecting their lives, and I just think calling each other weird is small potatoes and meaningless.”
Vance and his allies have sought to flip the script that Harris is the real weird one.
The Ohio senator labeled Harris a “wacky, out of touch San Francisco liberal” at a Minnesota campaign rally over the weekend.
“JD Vance is weird,” Vance posted on X sarcastically, along with a clip of Harris, then-California senator, saying at a CNN townhall that “my pronouns are she, her, and hers” during the 2020 campaign as a vice-presidential candidate.
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., posted the same message on X with a video of Harris interacting with a drag queen.
In down-ballot races, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans devoted a section of a strategy memo provided to GOP candidates for some of the “weird” moments from Harris, including her affinity for electric school buses and Venn diagrams, laughing “at inappropriate moments,” a desire to ban plastic straws, and limiting red meat consumption.
The battle over who’s the bigger oddball has been fueled by short clips of both candidates that supporters can easily share and make go viral on social media. The strategy also enables politicians to tone down the rhetoric in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump and boil down the argument to simple messages for voters about Vance and Harris: They’re not like you.
Vance doubled down on his views that parents should have more voting power than those without children and said he was being sarcastic when previously referring to Harris, Buttigieg, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) as “childless cat ladies.”
Vance suggested the “weird” insult from Democrats was simply an extension of partisan rhetoric and that he wasn’t offended by it.
“Look, the price of admission, meaning the price of getting to serve the people of this country, is the Democrats are going to attack us with everything that they have. I think it’s an honor,” Vance told Fox News. “As Harry Truman once said, ‘If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.’”
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In the latest sign that Democrats aren’t relenting, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) also entered the fray. He branded Vance as “one of the best things [Trump] ever did for Democrats.”
“It comes out Vance has done some things more extreme, more weird, more erratic … than President Trump,” Schumer said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “I’ll bet President Trump is sitting there scratching his head and wondering, ‘Why did I pick this guy?’”
