Republicans Are Weird. But What Are Democrats?

As someone who could start to vote during the Trump era and sees the whole Obama-Romney election as a product of a bygone time, I have seen the Republican Party become more radical every given year. I have seen the Trumpian turn of the party get scarier and scarier, with Trump’s personal vendettas, election denialism, and restrictions on a woman’s right to choose as hallmarks of the party’s current platform. Trump, for the last decade, has been in our faces, breaking more political norms than we can count that would have disqualified any other political candidate before him.

I was never a huge fan of the John McCains and Mitt Romneys of the world and would have been very critical of their positions on the economy, but they were decent people who were decent to their opponents, and decency matters.

Similarly, I have been a Democrat and progressive for the last decade as well and voted Democrat in every local and national election. My priorities on the issues have certainly ebbed and flowed, and I used to be critical that Democrats were too focused on being anti-Trump, less so on what they actually stood for on healthcare, the economy, and other pressing issues at any given moment. I used to be hypercritical of what I thought of as establishment candidates like Biden and Harris.

I was the type of Democrat who would foment and emphasize internal divisions over the cause of defeating Donald Trump. I got into far more arguments with my own Democratic peers over the party’s political messaging than Donald Trump and his wing of Republicans breaking norm after norm, precedent after precedent.

All of that changed on January 6th, 2021, the moment Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. I realized at that moment that my visceral distaste at my own side’s tepidness on progressive issues needed to be put aside at the possibility of Trump winning another election. Yes, there was something from 2015–2019 that led me to be more critical of Democrats than Trump, at times, thinking the branding of “we’re not Trump” was cowardly. I grew so frustrated that time over what I perceived as Democrats shooting themselves in their own foot in their branding and positioning.

But since January 6th and precedent-breaking decisions from a conservative Supreme Court with three Trump appointees, including the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, I realized we had to choose sides. “We’re not Trump” may not have been a super ideal from the perspective of a young 22-year-old progressive like myself, but the stakes were too high to emphasize the progressive-moderate divide over defeating Trump.

Now, I have joined the opinion of the mainstream Democratic Party: the stakes are too just high. Democracy and our basic political norm of having a peaceful transfer of power were at stake. Basic rights were at stake, and anyone who would argue “it’s just abortion” in the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe need only read Justice Clarence Thomas’s Dobbs concurrence arguing that the Court should go after other substantive due process, including the right to same-sex marriage, contraception, or the right to privacy in the bedroom.

Recently Democrats have started to call Republicans “weird,” which is an attack line positioning Democrats as the party of normalcy and stigmatizing Republicans as the party of not normal. This is a major shift from calling Trump and Republicans election deniers, borderline fascists, and existential threats to democracy. “Weird” obviously makes the stakes seem a lot lower than “existential threat to democracy.”

To me, one underlying impetus behind a new, more toned-down line of attacks on Republicans was Donald Trump’s assassination attempt. Many Republicans, including Vice President Nominee J.D. Vance, blamed Democrats for the assassination attempt (with no evidence that the gunman’s politics motivated the shooting).

“Today is not just some isolated incident…The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” Vance wrote on X.

Despite the lack of evidence, some of these charges from Republicans stuck a bit, and a reasonable voter could think that while this individual gunman didn’t have any traceable partisan motives, the temperature of the room was far too high.

I wondered how effective this attack line was on Republicans given its light-hearted and non-serious nature. I have heard critiques that it can backfire, like Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” comment about Trump supporters in 2016, but I don’t see merit in that argument. “Deplorables” is significantly more disparaging of a label than “weird.”

On a deeper analysis, the critique makes sense. One ad criticizes Republicans for wanting to get more involved in people’s sex lives and the kinds of books they can read. Some data analysts, including Harry Enten at CNN, find that this attack does work on J.D. Vance in particular according to polls, given his pejorative comment of Democrats being “childless cat ladies.”

I admit that I initially found the line of attack very cringey, but with Kamala Harris now picking Tim Walz as her VP nominee, a former high school social studies teacher and football coach from a small town of 400, as a juxtaposition to J.D. Vance’s positioning as a champion of the White working class, Democrats are well-positioned to make this argument without coming off as elitist. Walz’s background certainly has a lot more small-town credentials than the Yale law graduate, and venture capitalist J.D. Vance. Walz rose to prominence through a series of interviews and coining the whole “Republicans are weird” messaging, which has spread to the entire Democratic Party.

“They’re running for the he-man woman haters’ club or something,” Walz said on Morning Joe on July 23, 2024.

According to Tatyana Tandanpolie at Salon, Republicans are struggling to counter this line of attack. The “weird” branding reflects a change in messaging from Joe Biden’s rhetoric, which often reflected Trump as being an existential threat to democracy, to a lighter attack. It reflects something “off” about Trump and Vance while also cooling the temperature following Trump’s assassination attempt.

I don’t think Walz or Democrats were particular political masterminds in their attempt to characterize the Republicans as “weird.” But it is working, and just before Walz was picked as the vice presidential nominee, he went on The Ezra Klein Show podcast and provided insight into the “weird” attack. It’s not that he doesn’t think Trump is an existential threat to democracy, because he does. He does think that your average voter, especially in the swing states that may decide the election, doesn’t like being in a constant state of panic and having the stakes of politics always be so high as they have been in recent years. The average voter was probably overwhelmed by the constant “threat to democracy” rhetoric.

Walz also is very careful to distinguish between labels on Trump, Vance, and the Republican Party versus labels on Trump’s supporters. Labeling the former as “weird” is fair game and an effective political attack. Labeling the latter is where Democrats fall into the infamous slippery slope of snobbish condescension, elitism, and intolerance. That liberal condescension would inevitably alienate a lot of potential swing voters who are on the fence.

That means “weird” may be cringy and a strange attack to people who spend way too much time reading the news and on social media like me, but it does provide levity and a cooling of the temperature to the average voter. It also deftly dodges any accusations that Democrats were responsible for the political climate behind Donald Trump’s assassination attempt.

It’s also probably true that calling Republicans “weird” likely would not have been effective if Biden were still the nominee. You can’t call your opponent “weird” when you’re propping up an 82-year-old who was seen for 90 minutes during a debate unable to form coherent sentences, with constant questions about his health and mental fitness from medical professionals and non-medical professionals.

As such, Harris and Walz, who are 59 and 60 years old respectively, are a breath of fresh air because they carry none of Biden’s age baggage, nor do they carry the baggage of concerns surrounding the age of 78-year-old Donald Trump. Trump looked and seemed energetic and coherent, but that was only relative to standing next to Biden on a debate stage. Next to Harris, an effective communicator (particularly on abortion, Republicans’ biggest electoral liability), that comparison will likely be reversed.

While Republicans may be weird, however, I do wonder what Democrats stand for as their foil for “normal.”

At a rally in Detroit yesterday, Kamala Harris spoke at a rally of about 15,000 people, and was interrupted by a small group of pro-Palestine protestors, who chanted “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide…we won’t vote for genocide.”

Kamala Harris responded, to the applause of the audience, that “if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I am speaking.”

The hope of Democrats is that Kamala Harris won’t come with the baggage Joe Biden did over its handling of the War on Gaza and support for Israel. While Harris has spoken more about the suffering of Palestinians, her actual position is a bit more unclear and is likely similar to Biden’s. Over the past ten months, I have deeply doubted the ability of Democrats to win Michigan, a crucial swing state, given the large Arab and Muslim populations’ frustration with his handling of Gaza. These fears were corroborated when over 100,000 Michigan Democratic primary voters voted “Uncommitted” for the race in February.

The War in Gaza is an issue that not only divides Democratic leadership, with members of the Squad, like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Summer Lee being more pro-Palestine but members of the Democratic leadership being more pro-Israel. It’s also an issue that divides the whole Democratic coalition.

With friends who are both more progressive and moderate, I cannot count the amount of posts I have seen calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. I have also seen a plethora of posts decrying anti-semitism on campus (although fewer than the former). I am part of left-leaning organizations that want to put out official statements or positions on the war, like ceasefires, only to be rebuffed by major backlash from either supporters of Israel or those who think it’s a genocide. It has caused so much internal division in these organizations, which is very unusual since everyone is usually very ideologically aligned on virtually any other issue.

According to Al Jazeera, almost 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza, including over 15,000 children. The stakes of the war are obviously much larger than how it’s going to affect internal divisions in the Democratic Party.

And I’m not sure if the party does need to take an official stand to simultaneously placate its more pro-Israel supporters and more pro-Palestine base. Selecting Walz over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who was a frontrunner for the VP nomination but was seen as a potential liability due to his pro-Israel stance, does give the perception that the campaign worries about placating the base more than its pro-Israel voters.

But maybe it’s okay that the Harris campaign isn’t definitively taking sides. As much as one side might see it as a genocide and another may see it as a war against terrorism, the War in Gaza is the most divisive issue in the Democratic coalition and the leader of the ticket has to take a very delicate balancing act between numerous stakeholders with different interests.

Plus, there is nuance beyond the positions taken by the most radical of activists or the positions taken by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Like in the campus protests or the effort to get Biden to step down, there is major tension between the base and big donors in the party, where the base of younger voters might be a lot more pro-Palestine, some donors may not be. These are real interests the top of the ticket must balance to defeat Donald Trump.

I used to be one of the first to subject political candidates on my side to ideological purity tests. If they didn’t meet them, I would often see these politicians as untrustworthy, and more pejoratively, use the label of “snake.”

However, as the years have passed and I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized it’s a good thing to have a candidate who is not completely rigid in one position or another. Changing views is normal given more life experience, information, and exposure to different kinds of views and people. Being flexible and willing to listen was a very important trait that I underestimated. Biden was someone the left and the middle could simultaneously sway and influence. I have my personal positions on Gaza, which doesn’t very much in the fit on either “side” right now, but I have mostly avoided weighing in because I didn’t think it was my place amidst having friends with personal ties to the conflict who felt a lot more strongly than I did.

On yesterday’s New York Times podcast, The Daily, the podcast analyzed the frontlines of organizing efforts in Wisconsin, a key swing state, from the Harris campaign. The vast majority of voters interviewed by the New York Times just didn’t know that much about her. They saw her as a blank slate that wasn’t as old as Biden but they also struggled to name Kamala Harris’s positions.

It’s clear Democrats, myself included, are just energized and relieved to not have Biden at the top of the ticket anymore and have the focus of national conversation be Biden’s age, mental acuity, and cognitive performance. When I watched the debate that catalyzed many of these conversations and open rebellion in the Democratic Party, I actually did not think Biden did that bad, as I’ve been long aware of his stutter.

However, I opened the news the next morning to see several podcasts and op-eds from liberal columnists and pundits who thought it was an absolute catastrophe and that Biden needed to step down. This went on for weeks and it’s all my friends and I talked about when the topic turned to politics. The fact that the topic of conversation is no longer about Joe Biden and his age and is about what Republicans and Democrats actually stand for is a much healthier place, and much more advantageous to Democrats, which is also reflected in the polling.

Should Kamala Harris and Tim Walz take an extreme position on the most sensitive issues dividing the party, from the War on Gaza and crime and policing? Not necessarily — but with only a little over three months left before the election, if the angle is that Republicans are weird and Democrats are normal, then we should try to define what normal is, rather than having a blank slate.

Republicans are already trying to take advantage of the “blank slate” many people associate with Harris and Walz in a negative way. They have accused Harris of being the “border czar” and “radical” and Walz of having “stolen valor” in his military service. Trump has falsely questioned Kamala Harris’s race as a biracial Black and Indian woman. Normal is not being 82 years old and having constant questions of mental fitness and coherence like Biden, and not having 34 felonies, having incited an insurrection, and having fomented incredible division with your racist and misogynistic rhetoric like Trump (or now Vance). As a relatively youthful politician, prosecutor, and effective orator, Harris has a chance to project a normalcy that wasn’t possible with Biden.

On the issues, however, it’s up to Democrats to define themselves instead of letting Republicans do it for them.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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