Dem
51
GOP
49
For several months, Gov. Tim Walz (DFL-MN) has been describing Donald Trump as "weird." That descriptor did not land for a good long time, but then J.D. Vance joined the ticket, and... it took off like wildfire.
It is not too surprising that Vance was the tipping point here. To start, a lot of his ideas are, well, weird (see above). Maybe not to the people he's pandering to, but to pretty much everyone else. On top of that, we currently live in the television age. And whether it is fair or not, a politician's appearance is a big part of how people respond to them. In Vance's case, well, he's got a weird face. It's overly round (oval is instinctively preferred), he's got a weak chin, his eyes are slightly asymmetric, are unusually narrow, and are blue. All of these things tend to work against him on a subconscious level. Vance clearly knows this, and grew a beard to obscure some of his less appealing features. Maybe it was an improvement, but it also means he looks sinister. There is a reason that the last time the U.S. elected a bearded president was 130 years ago.
In any case, the "weird" bit has spread widely in the last week; even the Kamala Harris campaign has embraced it:
As you can see, the Harris campaign agrees with us that Project 2025 is one of the millstones that cannot be removed from the necks of Trump and Vance.
Some commenters have expressed the view that this sort of personal attack amounts to playing the game on Trump's terms, and could rebound on the Democrats. For example, The New York Times' Thomas Friedman writes:
For a few days this last week I started to believe that Kamala Harris and the Democrats could come from behind and beat Donald Trump. But then I started to hear Democrats patting themselves on the back for coming up with a great new label for Trump Republicans. They are "weird."
I cannot think of a sillier, more playground, more foolish and more counterproductive political taunt for Democrats to seize on than calling Trump and his supporters "weird."
There have been other pieces like this in the past few days, though it can be hard to know which ones are expressing real concerns, and which ones are more like concern trolling.
For our part, we are inclined to disagree with Friedman, et al. There are a number of pluses to "weird":
We suspect that the Harris campaign will probably back off of using "weird," but maybe not. And even if they do, it's entirely plausible that the characterization could have real staying power, to the detriment of the Republican ticket. You can never know what word or phrase or idea will do the trick, but when you find one, you run with it.
(Z) may have told the story of the time, in 2004, that he assigned students to write an essay responding to the outcome of the presidential election. And every single student, more than 150 of them, regardless of their political leanings, mentioned the phrase "flip-flopper" in their assessment of why John Kerry lost. Clearly, that framing penetrated deeply the psyche of the electorate. "Weird" is much less calculated and deliberate than "flip-flopper" was, but could it have a similar impact, particularly now that we are in the social media age? We wouldn't bet against it. (Z)