“Weird” has been the word of the month in politics. If Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has its way, it will be the word of the year.
In an election that, even more than most, leans more on vibes and less on substance, it has become an especially useful dodge. With Harris, an untested, unprimaried candidate thrust atop the Democratic ticket, one can easily understand the flight from issues to feelings. When Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) called former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), “weird,” it gave the Democrats the substance-free critique they needed. It might have even helped Walz end up as Harris’s running mate.
But how, exactly, are Trump and Vance “weird?”
The psychology of Trump has been analyzed to death already, but one thing that clearly makes him different from other politicians is that he says whatever he’s thinking. In Vance, Trump has found a running mate who functions along similar lines. Both men are politicians now, but they both spent most of their lives outside politics and, in Vance’s case especially, outside political circles altogether.
Trump talks like a businessman. Vance talks like a writer. Neither sounds anything like what the political class is used to hearing.
That sort of political freestyling has become vanishingly rare. Bill Clinton perfected a long-term trend when he made his administration into a permanent campaign. The business of governing went on but often took a back seat to the messaging, poll-testing, and optics — the fine art of telling the people what they want to hear.
It was probably inevitable that the magic of Madison Avenue advertising would come to politics — surely it came to everything else in public life. But the constant inauthenticity is also grating and makes people long for a politician who says what he or she is really thinking.
Enter Trump. His messages have never seen a focus group. Sometimes they come together on the fly, in the middle of an otherwise well-crafted and edited speech. And plenty of those listening, having gotten the authentic speaker they had been asking for, now screamed, “No! Not like that!” But plenty of others also liked it.
We don’t know what to do with an unscripted politician set loose in the buttoned-down Washington crowd. But Trump, in picking Vance, has doubled down on the effort. Weird? Sure, but if Washington is normal, many people on the outside would be happy for some weirdness.
Still, it’s not all good. Sometimes being different wrong-foots the voters, and they miss the point amid the furor.
Vance’s ideas on the American family are a perfect example of him stating some normal thoughts in an abnormal way, to his detriment. The left-wing machine has been digging up all manner of “weird” things Vance has said over the years and will continue to do so from now until November. The first millennial on a presidential ticket has a sizable internet footprint. But the biggest misstep from his past so far has been his treatment of “childless cat ladies.”
This wasn’t even a deep dive by the Democrats: Vance said this a month into his campaign for the Senate in 2021: “We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” Vance said. “And so, they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
That is absolutely something you might hear from a pundit. One of your friends might utter it at a barbecue and would probably get a few laughs — though he’d look over both shoulders first to make sure your unmarried sister wasn’t within earshot. It’s a normal thing to hear in the world, where one encounters all manner of opinions that aren’t particularly sensitive or well considered. What’s weird is that a politician would say it.
Why? Because successful politicians don’t typically single out a sizable, even growing, voting bloc and disparage them on national television. Cat ladies vote, too! Some of them even vote Republican. Vance’s comment might make a good line in a polemic, but a professional politician would know better.
Instead of dragging “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” a more skilled operator might have said something about making it easier for people to start families in these tough times of belt-tightening and high prices. It won’t get as many likes on social media, but it won’t drive people away, either.
On the larger policy point, Vance is concerned about a real problem: low birth rates. The total American fertility rate in 2023 was just 1.62 births per woman — the lowest ever recorded in the country. Other Western nations are suffering from even steeper declines. It’s not just a matter of who will take the places of those now living: Our social welfare schemes are built on the presumption that large numbers of working-age people would support retirees and the disabled. As that becomes less true with each passing year, and the welfare state keeps getting expanded, it will force hard choices.
Beyond the finances, there is a real feeling behind Vance’s words that families are the building blocks of communities and that atomized individuals and couples, without that deeper connection to their neighbors, worsen the trend of the last generation: the decline of institutions and the isolation of too many people.
One part of Vance’s solution is to use the tax code to encourage family formation. As he told Charlie Kirk in 2021: “If you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don’t have any kids. It’s that simple.”
Higher taxes on the childless! The horrors! It’s…exactly the same thing Democrats have been saying for years. It’s called the Child Tax Credit. The Biden administration touts the recent expansion of it as one of its signature achievements, and it has considerable cross-party appeal. There is really nothing weird about it.
What’s weird? Choosing to say “childless couples should pay more taxes” instead of “couples with children should get a tax break.” It’s literally the same thing, two different ways of expressing the same mathematical concept. But one makes people frown and the other makes them smile. Knowing the difference is crucial: A writer might be happy to make people mad if it furthers his point. A politician wants smiles and good vibes.
And it really is all about the vibes. The “weird” talking point is not just this surface-level look at two candidates who don’t talk like conventional politicians. It is a one-word summary of the elite/populist divide. It’s the in-crowd pointing at an outsider and saying that he can’t join their club. It’s the 21st century version of a snooty grandmother saying, “He’s not our kind, dear.”
That’s not just about Vance’s humble upbringing. Our new meritocracy welcomes people from all different backgrounds. And they welcomed Vance, once, when he first made it from Middletown, Ohio, to Yale Law School and published a book that seemed to blame poor white people for their own problems. When reading Hillbilly Elegy to be a confirmation of their own blamelessness, the meritocratic ruling class was happy to bring Vance into the fold.
It was only when he rejected their embrace that things got complicated. Many of the people in Vance’s memoir did suffer from failures that they, to some extent, brought upon themselves. But when author Vance became think tank Vance and later candidate Vance, his more nuanced view of the hollowing out of American communities caught the powers that be off guard. He told them that their policies — their offshoring of our manufacturing, their Great Society programs that encouraged broken families, their endless wars that were fought with other people’s sons and daughters — these things were also part of the problem.
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Vance rejected the comfortable life of a Yale law graduate and venture capitalist and all the elite adulation that came with it.
To the people on the inside, there is nothing weirder than that.
Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty.