Democrats insist they are learning from their mistakes — and are ready to attack the Donald Trump-led 2024 ticket full-bore, and hit below the belt if they feel like it.
“Shaking off the stink of … ‘when they go low, we go high,’” is how one Democratic operative put it, as they celebrated the sudden vibe-shift and re-energized messaging strategy within their party in the days since President Joe Biden bowed out of the 2024 race.
The operative made the comment this week in a running group message — screengrabs of which were shared with Rolling Stone — that includes Barack Obama alumni, former Biden administration officials, Hollywood liberals, and veteran consultants of national Democratic campaigns.
This individual, along with several others in the chat, was exploding with glee over how prominent Democratic politicians and their allies were now — with Vice President Kamala Harris now the presumptive nominee — beginning to coalesce around an election-year rhetorical strategy of trashing Trump, J.D. Vance, and other conservative leaders as abhorrent policymakers who also act and talk in “weird” ways.
The operative was cheering on the apparent eschewing of then-First Lady Michelle Obama’s mantra of “when they go low, we go high,” a phrase later adopted by 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to suggest that she and other Dems would high-mindedly refuse to sling the kind of mud that Trump was slinging at her. Trump’s mud tactics worked, in the sense that he defeated Clinton in their race for the presidency.
That particular era of strained decorum is — or at least should be — over, with Democrats giving as good as they get, the group chat’s participants stressed.
“This is how you do it,” wrote one former senior Obama administration official, sharing a video clip of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (who is among the list of Democrats being vetted as a potential Harris 2024 vice presidential pick) telling MSNBC on Tuesday, “These are weird people on the other side,” and they “want to take books away, they want to be in your exam room, that’s what it comes down to … These are weird ideas.”
It, of course, wasn’t just Walz who realized the potential potency of this line of attack, as Republicans and Democrats entered the final, uniquely chaotic three-month stretch of the presidential campaign. According to CNN, Harris had actually intended to use such an attack on Trump in 2020 debates, if she had been the nominee.
The weirdness-decrying pitch to voters now has been heavily deployed by an array of Democratic politicos and organs within the week since an embattled Biden passed the baton to his vice president, and now presumptive nominee, Harris. She and her 2024 campaign have already happily gotten in on the action, blasting out their own talking points on how emphatically “weird” Trump is.
According to an Democratic lawmaker on Capitol Hill who is regularly in contact with Biden-Harris (now just Harris) officials, one idea fueling this push is to hammer home an easily memorable point to swing voters about how Trump, Vance, and the GOP and MAGA elite are a bunch of “weird, sick freaks who everyone hates, and who want to take basic rights away.”
The lawmaker adds: “Put it on a bumper sticker.”
In a sense, Harris and the rest of the Democratic upper ranks already are. Especially when it comes to the Trump-Vance ticket, various liberal political operations are currently going out of their way to assail both their style and substance as deeply awkward, even unnerving.
On Friday, the Harris campaign sent out an email saying: “J.D. Vance Is a Creep (Who Wants to Ban Abortion Nationwide),” adding that “Vance is weird. Voters know it — Vance is the most unpopular VP pick in decades.” Similarly, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee posted a message reading headlined: “House Republicans Privately Admit What We All Know: J.D. Vance Is Weird, Creepy, and Extreme.”
The DCCC wrote that “House Republicans are couching their public praise of Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee with private criticism,” a rather obvious reference to the baseless, viral online jokes made recently at Vance’s expense that he once wrote about having sex with a couch. (Weird, right?)
EMBED: https://x.com/brianschatz/status/1816280968216395822
EMBED: https://x.com/KamalaHQ/status/1816924798099874092
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Trump’s campaign has tried to respond to the fusillade by calling Harris “weird,” too. So far, the frame appears to be working better for Democrats because it’s a plausible way to describe many of the new MAGA ticket’s sentiments: Vance’s past comments and views on a range of social issues are quite extreme.
As Rolling Stone reported, Vance previously argued that a national abortion ban would be necessary to prevent women in states with bans from traveling to other states to obtain abortions — though the way he put it was weirder: “Let’s say Roe v. Wade is overruled,” he said. “Ohio bans abortion … you know, in let’s say 2024. And then, every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity.”
He made those comments on the podcast hosted by Aimee Terese, a reactionary Australian pundit whom only the most chronically online users on X (formerly Twitter) would recognize. (When the Harris campaign highlighted Vance’s appearance on Terese’s podcast, she did not take it well.)
In July 2021, Vance complained that America is being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies, who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” clarifying that he was referring to Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
“If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance said. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Harris has two step-children through marriage, a fact that is apparently immaterial. (Buttigieg and his husband adopted two kids in August 2021.)
“I was sitting at a coffee shop in Milwaukee just outside the perimeter of the [the 2024 Republican National Convention last week], watching the MAGA base walk in and out, and meanwhile my research team kept sending me all these clips and highlights from the gigantic archive of footage and tape we’ve put together on J.D. Vance,” says Pat Dennis, president of the Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century. “And while going through it all, it just crystalized it for me at that moment: So much of this race is going to boil down to ‘these guys are very weird and off-putting.’”
Dennis continues: “Because the Trump-era GOP is so extremely online, more and more races these days are just boiling down to getting the message out to enough persuadable voters that this is so weird and off-putting. In the past, the message was more about how these Republicans don’t care about people like you. But now, even more so than before, these candidates, not just Vance, act and talk like they’re from a different planet… And it’s because they largely exist in these insular, conservative, internet communities that warp the way they communicate, and that leads to people like J.D. Vance going out and saying all these things publicly that are just so far outside the experiences of everyday people.”
On Friday, Vance attempted to clean up his “childless cat ladies” comment in an interview with Megyn Kelly, and he ended up doubling down — saying he was merely criticizing Democrats for being “anti-family and anti-kid.”
“I’ve got nothing against cats. I’ve got nothing against dogs,” Vance said, adding: “People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said, and the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it’s true.”
Vance’s comments quickly generated national headlines. They were weird, too.
