Vice President Harris’s campaign is casting her opponents as “weird.”
The campaign’s strategy pins that label on everything from former President Trump’s rally remarks on Hannibal Lecter to Sen. JD Vance’s (R-Ohio) past comments on childless women.
“You may have noticed Donald Trump has been resorting to some wild lies about my record. And some of what he and his running mate are saying, it’s just plain weird. I mean, that’s the box you put that in, right?” Harris said of Trump at a fundraiser in Massachusetts on Saturday.
The Harris campaign said Sunday that Vance had “a weird night on Fox News” after he was questioned Trey Gowdy about his criticism of childless Americans. The senator said Democrats have taken his comments out of context but that “the left has incredibly become explicitly antichild and antifamily.”
One former party official says the word sums up how Republicans are acting right now.
“I think it puts a finger on something that Democrats have had a hard time to articulate, which is that these guys who want to be in the OB’s room, they want to be in your bedroom, they want to make all these decisions in your life — it’s weird. It’s hard to put a finger on how to say it, but I think ‘weird’ is the best we’ve got. I think it’s very potent and effective,” said Clayton Cox, former Democratic National Committee (DNC) national finance director.
Vance has replied to Harris’s “weird” insult against him, saying that it doesn’t hurt his feelings. Instead, he said, “it’s an honor.”
At a North Carolina rally last week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), who is considered a potential Harris running mate, reacted to Trump talking about the serial killer in the film “The Silence of the Lambs,” commenting on social media, “Say it with me: Weird.”
“Trump is old and quite weird?” the Harris campaign said in a campaign email Thursday. And, on Friday, the campaign called Vance a “creep” in an email that opened with, “JD Vance is weird” to highlight his past comments on abortion.
“I think it’s accurate, because he is weird,” David Thomas, a Democratic strategist and former aide to then-Vice President Al Gore.
“Any basic Google search will show you all of the very strange things JD Vance has said over the years here. I’m not sure who did the vetting here, because it seems like the Republicans got buyer’s remorse almost immediately, and that’s because he has a habit of saying very strange things. And that is going to be a problem for them for the rest of the summer, going into the fall,” he added.
The strategy flowed into the campaign’s second full week, when on Monday, it called Vance’s ideology on families “weird and extreme,” and the DNC released a memo arguing that it has “a winning message” and “out-of-touch weirdos as opponents.”
Harris is challenged with expanding the base beyond the states that won President Biden the White House in 2020. Polls indicate that she is behind Trump in most battleground states but by margins tighter than Biden’s polling before he ended his campaign. Harris declared she would seek the Democratic nomination after Biden dropped his reelection bid and has support from enough delegates to secure the nomination, which is expected to become official through a virtual roll call vote as early as Thursday.
Harris is polling just under 46 percent, behind Trump’s nearly 48 percent, according to an aggregation of polls compiled by Decision Desk HQ/The Hill, about a week into her candidacy.
Cox argued that the “weird” strategy could bring in voters who aren’t yet paying attention, as Harris’s campaign is eager to pull in new support before Labor Day.
“I think it will definitely get folks who aren’t paying attention or can’t really exactly put a finger on, why does this feel different? So think it’s something that can help with your not really political, not really paying attention folks,” said Cox, a vice president at McGuireWoods Consulting.
And, Democrats think the Harris campaign has proven it can be quick and nimble over the last week, so some argue that it can try out new strategies if this “weird” one doesn’t resonate with voters.
“At this point, anything related to the Harris campaign feels more organic than a strategy. Can it backfire? Yeah. And they can move to something else. This is moving fast,” said Ivan Zapien, a former DNC official.
Last week, Harris quickly adopted a split-screen strategy to describe herself and her opponent, calling out Trump as a convicted felon while pointing to her role as a former prosecutor. She also has tried to cast Trump as “scared” for not committing to a previously scheduled debate in September, accusing him of backpedaling.
The campaign is focused on highlighting comments from Trump and Vance that they deem offensive — a strategy that was adopted when Biden was on the top of the ticket. As part of that, Democrats have pounced on the recently resurfaced remarks that Vance warned the country was being run by “childless cat ladies,” deeming them, well, “weird.”
“I think these comments totally speak for themselves. You don’t need to manipulate or doctor the content when it’s that weird,” Thomas said. “He manages to offend just about everybody in the country, one way or another here, so he’s going to have to answer for what he said.”