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Democrats have without question had an incredible 10 days. Since President Biden finally dropped out of the race to make way for Vice President Kamala Harris, the party has unified around their new nominee swifty and enthusiastically. Fundraising is through the roof, the polls have tightened, and in Harris, the party may have inadvertently landed on precisely the kind of happy warrior that is the perfect contrast to former President Trump's relentlessly dour and apocalyptic vision of America.
It's about as thorough a slate-wiping as we've seen in politics, and if nothing else, it has rank-and-file Democrats who had grown pessimistic about Biden's prospects feeling like they at least have a chance in November.
But I'm a little worried that the Left has decided that its new "These people are weird" angle is a strategic masterstroke. It's a line of attack that has been deployed most prominently by veep-hopeful-of-the-moment Tim Walz, the popular governor of Minnesota, and his cable news appearances have gotten the viral treatment as a consequence. The Harris campaign has also depicted both Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), as weird. And while it might be effective to target specific MAGA-aligned candidates with a charge of weirdness, Democrats need to be extremely careful not to slip into a mode of condescending mockery of white working class culture as a whole.
Democrats should have learned the hard way in 2016 that things can actually get consequentially worse with groups of voters that you are already losing decisively. In 2012, there was a steep and worrisome drop in President Obama's support with non-college-educated white voters that the party brushed aside in the glow of victory. That overconfidence led to perhaps the most politically damaging remark of the past decade, which was Hillary Clinton's 'basket of deplorables' fiasco from September 2016, something that a lot of people on the Left defended at the time as a perfectly reasonable appraisal of the average MAGA voter.
Before long, half of right-wing Twitter users had "deplorable" in their handle, and Clinton went on to lose white voters without college degrees 64-28, by far the worst performance by any Democrat with this group in modern history, including years where team blue got blown out of the water by Republicans, like 1980. A Pew analysis found that Biden made a modest 5 percent gain with this group in 2020, which was just enough to put him over the top. Democrats can truly not afford to return to their 2016 numbers.
That's why it worries me to see people talking about how weird the Hulk Hogan appearance at the Republican National Convention was. Look, was the speaking roster at the RNC my jam, culturally? Absolutely not. But Democrats need to win a certain number of voters who think that Hulk Hogan is a beloved cultural touchstone, and pretending otherwise is self-defeating. It's not like Democrats don't lean hard on their celebrities when they need them, and some of ours are pretty goofy.
Delight in painting Democrats as childless, apartment-dwelling weirdos who love seeing department stores get sacked and talking openly about how they are all un-American and beneath contempt is actually one of the MAGA movement's chief weaknesses. They've been saying this stuff out loud ever since Sarah Palin deemed rural areas the "real America" during the 2008 campaign, and it is clear that they have still not realized how damaging this posture is. You can defend rural life and its culture without descending into theatrical loathing of people in New York and San Francisco.
Imagine what the last two decades of national elections would have looked like if Republicans could have eked out an extra 5 percent of the vote in big cities. Imagine if Democrats talked about any place in the United States the way that Republicans have turned the word "Chicago" into a pejorative.
Instead of talking about how "weird" J.D. Vance is, refer to his extremism. Let his position that people who send their children to daycares are abnormal do all the work, recognizing that there is a clear difference between someone wanting to stay home with their kids and wanting all women to stay home with their kids as a matter of state policy. Point out that even if this were what most women actually wanted, it is virtually impossible to get by in America on one salary, thanks to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few hundred billionaires—a problem that Trump and Vance are promising to exacerbate with more tax cuts for the rich. Attack the position without deliberately alienating people who are sympathetic to it. That's what Vance could do about things like universal daycare, but he has chosen instead to lean into the culture war.
Remember also that lots of people who share some or all of Vance's extreme social views might vote for Kamala Harris—unless they think they are being mocked and looked down on. Figure out a way to defend the honor of people who make the perfectly reasonable decision not to have kids without drifting into contempt for those with big families.
Instead of fixating on his "weird energy," talk about how Vance's obvious and comical disgust with the idea of eating a bag of Lay's potato chips shows that he is a fraud who just wants to get back to his boutique hotel room for a $200 Wagyu steak.
Have polls gotten better for Harris as they have rolled out the weirdness offensive? Sure. But I would be very careful not to conflate a sense of relief and elation among Democrats that is now reflected in polls with the idea that the two variables are causally correlated.
Poking fun at the antics of Trump and Vance is one thing, but Democrats are walking a very thin line here. And it would be really, really weird to throw away a chance at salvation from a second Trump term by taking too much pleasure in mocking his supporters.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
