Has 'Weird' Frame-Shifted the Race?

Over the weekend, I twice ran into the Harris campaign's attempt to label Republicans weird, and I wasn't particularly looking for it.

Scanning headlines, I found a Salon piece titled "'Pointing and Laughing:' Democrats Leaned in on 'Weird' and Experts Say It's Working."

Around the same time, a glance at a social media feed showed me J.D. Vance trying to fight back:

The people who call me weird want to give hormone therapies and sterilize 9-year-olds.

I think that's a lot weirder than me just living a normal life with my kids and my wife.

There is no need to rehash Vance's insulting characterization of a large swath of the voting population or his anti-abortion rhetoric to know why some might find Vance at least as weird as the people Vance is tweeting about.

I'm not a fan of either side, but I do. I replied in part:

Two groups of people can be "weird" and wrong at once.

Setting aside my assessment of the puzzling obsession with sex-related matters evident on both the far left and the alt-right, I have to hand it to the Democrats: This line of attack is brilliant.

Why?

First, there is an easily-grasped element of truth to it. Anti-abortionists qualify as weird on at least two levels: First, they're out of step with about two thirds of Americans. Second, they have no rational grounds for their religious-based fears that, somehow, not treating women as breeding animals is going to bring ruin and destruction down on our great Republic.

To be fair, noting this does not in any way mean that the left has anything close to a solid case for its cause du jour of performing ... rather invasive and possibly irreversible ... medical procedures on minors in the name of treating some newly-minted and hardly indisputable psychological condition diagnosis currently popular in places like California.

But this does lead to the second point: Putting all the attention on the alt-right's weirdness certainly puts the public to sleep regarding the far left's own even as it alerts the public to the issue.

Vance knows this, as his reply shows, but guess how much good it will do past his base? I'm thinking approximately none.

Worse for that camp, it shows that they are on the defensive.

Worse still for the GOP, the Democrats are making them the butts of jokes -- which is part of what Trump had been doing to them:

His rumored use of eyeliner doesn't help. (Image by U.S. Congress, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)

"I haven't seen a rhetorical strategy this good, effective and fun in a long time. This was really sharp," David Karpf, a professor of strategic political communication at George Washington University, told Salon. Much of that sharpness, he argued, can be attributed to the "intervening eight years" between Trump's 2015 political debut and now, when "all the normies have been driven out of the Republican party."

"When Democrats are now saying, 'These guys just sound a bit weird,' it's because they've all been talking to each other for long enough that if you're not part of the Republican cinematic universe, none of it makes any sense," Karpf said. "When you take a step back, their policy proposals are serious and dangerous, but they're also just so off-putting and ridiculous." [bold added]

Trump's opponents are having FUN. Let that sink in for a moment.

The rest of the article is also worth reading, and I think it is indirectly on point regarding something I have complained about a lot in this campaign, namely the fact that neither side can be bothered to try to make a positive case to non-partisans:

The emphasis on the absurdity of the current Republican platform strikes a marked contrast with the more serious refrain of the Biden campaign, which sought to highlight the potential danger of the former president winning back the White House: Trump and his policies pose a "threat to democracy."

Neiheisel said he suspects that the Democratic Party found that mobilizing the electorate on an "abstract concept" didn't amount to the "home run that they hoped it would be" and shifted gears as a result. [bold added]

Normie, once-usually-Republican voter here: The GOP is out of touch and people are laughing at it.

This is not the sort of appeal to values I was hoping to see, but absent one, I expect it to work, all things being equal.

-- CAV