There’s no single reason Kamala Harris lost the election. But as the dust settles, it seems that one of Harris’s weaknesses—surely the most ironic of them—was that voters kinda thought she was a bit weird.

The Harris campaign worked hard to stick Trump-Vance with this label, but it appears to have attached itself to the Harris-Walz campaign.

Occasionally a voter will just say it explicitly, as did one member of the New York Times’ focus group of late deciders, who implored Harris to “stop with the gibberish. Stop with the cackling. Stop with that weird word salad that ends up meaning nothing. And just give us some very straight facts.”

Other times, it’ll be apparent in the reports on what arguments or ads were effective. The most prominent example of this category is the Trump campaign ad that already has its own Wikipedia page: “Kamala is for they/them.” The crux of the ad, for the few who haven’t seen it or heard about it, is Harris’s pledged support for taxpayer-funded sex-change surgery for U.S. prisoners.

According to NPR, as of the third week in October, the Trump campaign had spent over $17 million on the ads, which “aired more than 30,000 times, including in the key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The campaign has placed a particular focus on NFL and college football broadcast audiences.”

Why focus on football audiences? Because the highest-profile issue surrounding gender transition was whether biological males may compete in the women’s division of scholastic athletics.

Certainly Republicans had the better of public opinion on this issue. But to focus solely on the policy was to miss a not-inconsequential aspect of the story: that the Harris quote at the center of the ad was really weird. It’s not as though taxpayer-funded gender transitions are breaking the budget. But in 2019, Harris was being dogged by criticism from trans activists on the issue, and she defended herself by taking credit for the California prison system’s change in policy that approved such surgeries for prisoners, including those in immigration detention. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop noted, with “no one else seeming to care much about the topic, Harris tried to appease the advocates, thus providing the clips that Trump later used in his ads.”

It was so strange, in fact, that journalists couldn’t hide their surprise when the issue was relitigated this fall. When CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported on Harris’s 2019 comments, anchor Erin Burnett responded: “taxpayer-funded gender transition surgery for detained migrants—she actually said she supported that?” Burnett later added, “these are things that—it would be hard to think that you would come up with taxpayer-funded gender transitions for detained migrants.”

In other words, as an individual policy, it’s perhaps not terribly meaningful. But it’s weird.

In a new essay for New York magazine, Simon van Zuylen-Wood writes about “the Democratic Party’s break with reality,” as seen through the lens of Donald Trump’s increased voter support in New York City, of all places. He recalls that he had thought Harris might be in trouble earlier in the campaign when he started seeing the surging popularity in Brooklyn of the camouflage trucker hats sold by the Harris-Walz campaign. It was one of the cartoonish ways in which the Harris campaign tried to appeal to “normal” voters.

“Scanning as working class, the hats seemed to be worn exclusively by people who didn’t match that description,” van Zuylen-Wood notices. “They reminded me of the Big Buck Hunter arcade game at a bar near the campus of my elite college, which lent wry ‘authenticity’ to the setting and whose plastic rifles were the only kind most of us had any interest in handling. I wondered if some of the hat wearers were in on the joke or simply liked the aesthetic. But some of these people looked sincere, as though they felt the hats really reflected the campaign’s resonance with regular folks.”

Sure enough, it turned out that the people who bought the hats and voted for Harris were all just guessing at what normal people were like. The whole attempt at simulating normalcy was weird.

Normally we wouldn’t be talking so much about something so subjective and seemingly juvenile, except the Harris-Walz campaign very much wanted us all talking about who or what we found weird. The Democratic ticket, for example, found Trump and his veep nominee JD Vance weird. “Democrats are applying the label with gusto in interviews and online,” the AP reported.

It was, we were told, a stroke of genius. “I don’t know who came up with the message, but I salute them,” David Karpf, a strategic communication professor at George Washington University, told the AP. NPR insisted the strategy was “helping the Democrats in a BIG way.” The BBC claimed, with a backhanded compliment and a warning, that it was working: “Campaign strategists say this new messaging appears to be cutting through with Democrat-leaning voters because it makes voting for Ms Harris sound more like a common-sense choice, and less like a civic chore. But it is too early to tell if this fresh goodwill for a vice-president who, until recently, struggled to grab the attention of American voters will last until November’s election day.”

Spoiler: It didn’t. And it would have been pretty weird if it had.

+ A A -
You may also like
45 Shares
Share via
Copy link