How Kamala Harris’ ‘Weird and Free’ Message Is Striking

“They’re weird.”

With this simple insult, coupled with an overall leaner message, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has shifted the debate away from the weaknesses of her boss, President Joe Biden, and toward his opponent, Donald Trump.

The change in tone was on full display at this week’s rallies, where she appeared with his new vice presidential pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim WalzWith Beyoncé’s Freedom as their soundtrack, the pair claimed they were there to protect American freedoms as their “weird” Republican opponents, Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance, threatened to take them away.

“We are not going back,” Harris told an enthusiastic crowd in Philadelphia, leading the chorus of what has become the de facto campaign slogan.

It’s a simplified version of Biden’s 2020 message that Trump is a “threat to democracy,” painting the former president as alien to American life.

Even the vice president’s press releases, sent out by a campaign that once served Mr. Biden, reflected the shift in tone from deeply serious to something lighter.

Just five days after Biden’s withdrawal, a spokesperson for Harris jokingly claimed that a speech by Trump had made him sound “like someone you wouldn’t want to sit down with in a restaurant.”

Campaign strategists say the new message appears to be resonating with Democratic voters because it makes voting for Harris seem more like a common-sense choice and less like a civic duty. But it’s too early to tell whether this newfound goodwill for a vice president who, until recently, has struggled to capture American voters’ attention will last until Election Day in November.

California Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis, a Democrat who calls the vice president a close friend, said the new campaign rhetoric reflects Harris’ “great sense of humor” and her ability to be “a good communicator at a very basic level.”

“The fact is that these things are proving to be his strengths, and his cheerfulness is making inroads into the dark and menacing tones of Donald Trump and his running mate.”

Meanwhile, Trump, who has long been known as an effective propagandist and a forceful activist since he entered politics during the 2016 presidential campaign, has struggled to fight back, especially against the label “weird.”

“They’re the weird ones. No one’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not weird,” Trump said last week in an interview with conservative radio host Clay Travis.

He returned to the theme at a rally in Montana on Friday, telling the crowd: “We are a very solid people. We want to have strong borders, we want to have good elections, we want low interest rates, we want to be able to buy a home.”

“I think we’re the opposite of weird, they’re the weird ones.”

According to polls, Harris, who was once trailing Trump, is now ahead.

David Polyansky, who served as deputy campaign manager for Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign, said the shift could be because Ms. Harris is beating Mr. Trump at his own game.

Since his first run for president, Trump has benefited from being the country’s leading political talking point, enjoying what political insiders like to call the “earned media,” or free press.

But it’s Harris’s spectacular rise to the top of the Democratic ticket, just weeks before the Democratic National Convention, that has dominated headlines and radio airplay in recent weeks — and she’s done it without sitting down to give a major media interview.

Ousting the former president, who was recently the victim of an assassination attempt, is no small feat, Mr. Polyansky said.

“It’s really remarkable,” he said.

His campaign appears further strengthened by the choice of Mr. Walz as his running mate.

A survey conducted by the New York Times and Siena College From August 5 to 9, Harris holds a 50% to 46% lead over Trump in three key swing states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

It comes after a recent YouGov pollconducted from August 4 to 6, which suggested she would win the popular vote, with 45% of respondents saying they would vote for her in November, compared to 43% for Trump.

This is a reversal of the trend. A similar poll conducted by YouGov, almost three weeks ago, showed that he was losing by three points.

Indeed, it was Mr. Walz who first used the label “weird” when he appeared in the media last month in support of Ms. Harris’s budding candidacy. He was quick to use it again at that Philadelphia rally with Ms. Harris when he spoke of their Republican opponents: “These guys are creepy and yeah, just weird as hell.”

Mr Walz’s down-to-earth manner seemed to resonate with several voters who spoke to the BBC. They said they liked the Minnesota governor because he was outspoken.

Between puffs on a cigarette, Tyler Engel, an independent voter from Ohio on vacation in St. Augustine, Florida, said Mr. Walz “seems like a regular guy, a family man.”

“And if there’s one thing we’re starving for in this country, it’s normal people,” Engel added.

Another voter, John Patterson of Chambersburg, Pa., said he found Mr. Walz “a very genuine person.”

“What you see is what you get with him,” he added.

Some political consultants have marveled at the effectiveness of the “weird” label. Many have said it was successful because it felt authentic, wasn’t a slogan or crowd-tested cliché, and came “fast and organic.”

Calling Trump and J.D. Vance “weird” effectively repackaged President Biden’s “threat to democracy” theme in a “very relatable, almost lighthearted way, maybe less severe and more conversational,” said Brian Brokaw, who worked on several of Ms. Harris’s campaigns and ran a super PAC that supported her 2020 presidential campaign.

He said the term immediately helped reframe the race from a referendum on Biden’s four-year term to a question of “Do we really want to go back to what we did during the Trump era?”

Republican pollster Frank Luntz was more skeptical.

Appearing on BBC Newsnight on Tuesday, he declared Harris the new frontrunner, saying she had gained new “momentum”.

But he dismissed the “weird” label as “weird in and of itself,” saying it didn’t resonate with voters.

The slogan appeared to resonate with several swing voters interviewed by the BBC. Jacob Fisher, an independent voter from Atlanta, said he thought calling Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance “weird” was appropriate and only mildly offensive in an era of political name-calling.

“I think that’s fair,” Mr. Fisher said. “You can’t say he’s very harsh because you have the other guy talking about how his opponents are parasites. So ‘weird’? I don’t know, but you can’t really complain if you’re Donald Trump.”

However, voters who said they supported Trump were not impressed by the campaign’s recent messaging.

Frank and Theresa Walker of Illinois shared the view that the United States was “going to hell” under a Biden-Harris administration, and Gem Lowery, a Trump voter in Florida, said she didn’t like Harris’s choice for vice president or the “weird” labels they used when talking about Trump, Mr. Vance and the Republican platform.

“I think Democrats are the weird ones,” Lowery told the BBC. “So no, I don’t think it’s fair to call Republicans ‘weird.'”

Mrs. Harris “naughty summer” It won’t last forever.

While Mr. Walz’s pick and the upcoming Democratic National Convention will surely help maintain Ms. Harris’s media dominance, experts agree that the campaign will soon need to shift gears.

Mr. Brokaw, a longtime adviser to Ms. Harris, said her campaign would have to work to maintain the momentum it has enjoyed since the vice president became the Democratic nominee.

“The highlight of the honeymoon period is the convention, and then it’s a grind for two months, probably with some debates,” Mr. Brokaw said. “This is an exciting time, but at some point you get back to reality and then you go.”

“If in October there was still talk of Trump and Vance being weird, I think I would be surprised,” he added.

David Polyansky, a Republican strategist, said the label “works well from a 60,000-foot perspective,” but believes a message about the economy and immigration will ultimately sway voters in November.

“So it’s crucial for Trump not to fall for it, to focus on his message and to remind people of his record and the administration’s failures on both issues.”

Additional reporting by Mike Wendling and Rachel Looker