The Vibe Shift in the 2024 Election

Kamala Harris has used a different register to go after Trump/Vance. Will it work?

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

In the grand scheme of things, Kamala Harris’ first week as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president has gone about as well as Democrats could have hoped. She worked the phones and, within 24 hours, had the nomination all sewn up, minimizing the messiness of President Biden’s withdrawal from the face. She inspired a mammoth surge in Democratic Party enthusiasm, as measured by fundraising, volunteers, and crowd size. Her campaign speeches during the first week were crisp and effective. The polling on the election is going to be wonky for the next few weeks but early indications are that she has recovered the ground that Biden lost in the weeks after his debate debacle. Harris, in contrast to Biden, has multiple pathways to get to 270 Electoral College votes. Her performance has been good enough for multiple commentators to reappraise her political skills.¹

For the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, however, the most interesting shift in the transition from Biden to Harris has been the different register used to attack Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the GOP.

Biden’s communications team stressed the dangers that Trump poses to the polity and the economy. With Harris as the nominee, the very same communications team are now couching their rhetoric in a different way. NBC News’ Sahil Kapur notes that even though it’s “the same staffers writing these statements,” the campaign’s messaging has shifted in tone from “Workers Cannot Afford a Second Trump Term” to “J.D. Vance is a Creep (Who Wants to Ban Abortion Nationwide).” Another recent campaign statement included the sentence, “Trump is old and quite weird.”

That seems interesting! Kapur explains this by noting that “the Harris campaign seems more willing to embrace” the online crowd. Politico’s Eli Stokols and Elena Schneider offer up a fuller explanation:

In the days since Vice President Kamala Harris has taken over the campaign against former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance, Democrats are leaning into a new attack line against the Republican ticket: that they’re just really weird.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz , a potential Harris running mate who’s been using this description for months, said it during his first viral TV appearance of the week, and then in others. The Democratic Governors Association, which Walz leads, amplified it on social media. And the Harris campaign has adopted it as well, incorporating the label repeatedly this week in press releases and posts on X and TikTok….

As this simple and quintessentially Midwestern description of Trump and Vance catches on, it marks a notable rhetorical shift — away from Biden’s apocalyptic, high-minded messaging toward a more gut-level vernacular that may better capture how many voters react to far-right rhetoric of the kind Vance in particular trades in.

Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez report on the same vibe shift:

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.”….

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.  

So what is going on here? Will this new mode of criticizing Trump and the GOP as “weird” and “creepy” rather than “dangerous” work?