"You're Weird": A Simple, and Quite Effective, Political Attack

MURRIETA, CA--After President Biden recently announced that he will no longer be seeking reelection, the Democratic Party has found its footing once again. At one point floundering after Biden’s disastrous debate performance, democrats have now powerfully unified behind Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive nominee for their party. Harris has proven herself to be a welcome replacement–she swiftly raised $250 million in donations after Biden stepped down, secured major endorsements from party leaders, and has won over scores of young voters, too. Online, memes of Harris have taken off on platforms like Twitter (now known as X), YouTube, and TikTok, presenting her in a hugely positive light. Due to all of this, the shift in energy within the Democratic Party is palpable. After Biden’s debate in June, it was as if party leaders were solemnly marching toward November with the general understanding that loss was imminent. Now, democrats are revitalized and ready to fight to win, a message that has been continually echoed by Harris in recent weeks.

To maintain this burst in energy, the Harris campaign has participated in meme-making, too. They have also taken to brainstorming attacks to use against their rivals: Donald Trump and JD Vance. Seemingly a product of both the Harris campaign’s memeing and conceiving of political attacks, a new strategy emerged to undercut their opponents’ credibility: Call them weird. It might sound like a joke, but this is a label that has stuck, and one that the Democratic Party has rallied behind. Candidates to be Harris’s VP, such as Tim Walz, have described the Republican Party in general as “com[ing] across as weird”, as have Harris’s campaign itself and several other prominent senators. It’s an attack reminiscent of Trump’s name-calling, and it seems as if the Republicans don’t have a response for the verbal assault. Jesse Watters, one of Fox News’s top hosts, has been furious at the fact that democrats have been describing his party as weird, as have several other prominent republicans. Despite their frustration, neither they, nor the Republican Party in general, have found an effective response to the label. Vivek Ramaswamy, a Trump loyalist, has described the attack as “juvenile”, while JD Vance has tried to turn it back around onto the democrats, describing Harris herself as “weird”–neither of these responses have worked.

Republicans are seething and scrambling to respond because being called “weird” undercuts any authority that they might have. The GOP attempts to present itself as the party of “law and order”, which is mostly an illusion to begin with. As I’ve written in previous articles, the Republican Party is anything but a paragon of unity right now–just this past October, we saw the historic ouster of Kevin McCarthy by hard-right conservatives, and we saw another attempted ouster of Speaker Mike Johnson just a few short months ago. Being called weird brings these kinds of glaring flaws bubbling to the surface, shattering any kind of mirage of order that the republicans have attempted to conjure up. It’s an incredibly damaging label, and one so simple that it is truly difficult to effectively respond to.