The 2024 presidential election is shaping up to be the weirdest in history—just ask Democratic political operatives. The party of “they go low, we go high” has asterisked that slogan: This year, they go low, we go side-eye.

Yes, the left’s latest talking point has emerged, and it’s passive aggressive and petty as hell: Those Republicans are straight-up weird. It’d be mortifying to actually vote for them.

Last Thursday, the campaign for Kamala Harris, whose brand-new presidential bid is off to a running start, said the quiet thing out loud in a press release reacting to an interview Republican nominee Donald Trump gave to Fox News: “Trump is old and quite weird.”

This was just one of the takeaways in the release, titled “Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance,” pointing out erratic and flustered behavior from Trump, and positing that “when Trump wasn’t lying, he was making threats.” Another bullet point reads, “This guy shouldn’t be president ever again.”

Harris has been beating the weird drum since at least 2018, when, CNN reported, she was confronted with the idea of debating Trump in a hypothetical 2020 run. During prep, she pondered how she’d respond if Trump reprised how he behaved during his debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016, stalking back and forth and lurking over her shoulder.

Harris said she’d simply turn around and ask him, “Why are you being so weird?”

It’s become the Democrats’ go-to taunt for their opposition.

Jesse Lee, a former senior official in the Obama-Biden White House, tells Vanity Fair that the revived messaging matches the candidate.

“There’s definitely more of an energetic and kind of feisty attitude,” Lee says of Harris’s aura compared to President Joe Biden’s. “I think it’s a smart recognition that part of how people vote, understandably, is kind of personality and just overall headspace. They don’t know every single detail of every single policy, but they have a sense of people. When you look at somebody like JD Vance…once the weirdness gets into the bloodstream and gets into the ether, everything sort of starts to feed into it. You start to see it everywhere you look. And that’s really the most effective kind of narrative and framing you could do, where it takes on a life of its own and people start to see things through that lens.”

Given the quick pivot the campaign has made to embracing internet culture and piggybacking on the virality of memes like Charli XCX’s anointment of “Kamala is brat” and dubbing the veep a “Femininomenon” à la Chappell Roan, it’s no surprise that the party’s talking points have shifted to mirror Harris’s take-no-shit realness too. Harris’s campaign and surrogates have effectively turned the entire GOP into a meme, with creators like Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose name has been bandied about as a potential Harris VP pick, gleefully lampooning the right in press hit after press hit.

“These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room,” he said of Republicans during a recent MSNBC interview. “That’s what it comes down to. And don’t get sugarcoating this—these are weird ideas.”

It’s in the framing: Banning abortion and limiting the messages doctors can share with patients sound like insurmountable policy issues that little old me wouldn’t be able to impact. These guys being “in your exam room”? Ick. Weird.

“I’m telling you: these guys are weird,” Walz posted alongside a clip of his appearance.

Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki, a former Biden administration communications official, tells VF that the message coming out of Walz’s mouth in particular is effective because it casts him as the straight-man foil to the GOP’s drunk uncle at the Thanksgiving table.

“He looks like a normal guy,” she says of Walz. “He’s the type of guy that your dad would be friends with. You know, he’s your former high school teacher. Just the ability for someone like him to kind of endorse that idea and say, like, ‘This is not normal behavior. These are not normal people,’ really added fuel to that fire.”

It’s fitting that to compete against a former reality TV star, the Democrats have invoked the art of the villain edit, highlighting the most outlandish and indefensible moments of the other side. In a New York Times op-ed in March, Primary Colors author Joe Klein argued that “Democrats need to stop playing nice,” calling Democrats “the party of identity politics, always sensitive to insensitivity, often to a fault.” Well, take a look at Harris there on top of the ticket: No more Mr. Nice Guy. Though, of course, as Lee points out, “calling somebody weird, saying they’re a little bit weird, is not the meanest thing I’ve ever heard. I’m not sure I would put that in, you know, the gloves-are-off category.”

It’s not new news, the “big weirdo” theory—it’s a strategy based on decades of bad vibes. Media Matters deputy director of rapid response Andrew Lawrence has long held the opinion that Republicans are “weird freaks,” and has peppered the phrase through his posts. He tells VF that naturally he feels a little vindicated, but also that “mockery is such an effective tool against these people.”

“I think it’s a very effective method, and I think it also has the benefit of being incredibly true,” he says.

Here’s Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, another potential running mate for Harris, after Vance commented that it was “very weird” that Beshear’s first job was at his dad’s law office, and that he “inherited” the governorship from his father (not how voting works, but sure!). That’s not weird, Beshear said.

“What was weird was [Vance] joking about racism today and then talking about diet Mountain Dew,” he said on CNN. “Who drinks diet Mountain Dew?”

Then there’s Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, who has declared his support for Harris, on CNN side-eyeing Vance’s criticism of Harris for having no biological children: “The vice presidential candidate for the Republicans is insulting women who own cats. He has a weird view of America, honestly.”

In the same way that a relative saying your choice of Thanksgiving stuffing recipe is “…interesting” with a barely restrained lip curl will forever live rent-free in your brain, these little jabs that make a person doubt the basic humanity and thought processes of people running to be in charge of running the country stick.

Even Republican cheerleader senator Mitch McConnell despairs over his party’s increasing weirdness.

In 2022, explaining away the GOP’s midterm election performance (read: not good!) he basically said, yikes, what can you do? “My view was do the best you can with the cards you’re dealt,” he said of his fellow Republicans. “Now, hopefully, in the next cycle we’ll have quality candidates everywhere and a better outcome.”

McConnell is the guy at the rager who’s telling people that he “came in with those guys, but not, like, with those guys” and hissing through his teeth at his colleagues to “try to act normal.”

No one is immune, no matter their political affiliation. Former president George W. Bush was ahead of the curve in fingering Trump and his cohort as weirdos, a sense of cringe transcending any party loyalties he might have. Officially, he attended Trump’s presidential inauguration in January 2017 to witness the peaceful transfer of power. Unofficially, he reportedly turned to his companions as they left the dais and said, “That was some weird shit.”

TikTok and internet culture aren’t the only fields Harris’s campaign has pulled from. Modern dating parlance lends us the idea of “the ick,” a term so relatable it was recently added to the Cambridge Dictionary.

It’s defined as “a sudden feeling that you dislike someone or something or are no longer attracted to someone because of something they do.”

Once you get the ick, you can’t un-ick. Ever. In dating, that might mean losing someone’s number. In politics, the Democrats are hoping that voters’ ick will translate at the polls. Picture senior Democrats pulling voters aside like they’re their closest girlfriends and muttering, “Really? Him? But he’s so…weird.” Politicos can’t go all in, Walter Masterson style, but they can get away with a deftly wielded light trolling.

Of course, the Unified Theory of Ick (Politics Edition) is nonpartisan, as evidenced by a severe case of the ick being the straw that broke the Biden-reelection-campaign-shaped camel’s back just days ago.

As Lawrence points out, “If you’re making an attack, and then there’s something that happens that reinforces that, it’s really hard to get away from it. The Biden debate, going into it, [Republicans said], ‘he’s old, he’s old, he’s old,’ and then he looked old. There’s just no turning away from that. You can’t get that out of people’s heads.”

Again, it goes both ways: “And so you have Democrats saying, ‘they’re weird freaks, they’re weird freaks, they’re weird freaks,’ and then old clips of JD Vance come out talking about cat ladies and talking about how people without children shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Donald Trump talking about Hannibal Lecter like he’s a real person. All of that stuff just kind of builds on itself until it becomes a part of the zeitgeist.”

Progressive voters are noticing this linguistic shift, and they’re on board.

One person on X wondered why “anyone at all” would vote for a Republican. “Hateful, cruel, misogynistic and like, vibey in a weird unsettling way,” they wrote.

“The most common model of republican to roll off the factory line is ‘weird uncle,’ so this tracks,” another said, attaching a post reading, “‘Republicans are weird’ is catching on and I’m here for it.”

Legacki underlines that while voters may disagree with one another on points at the policy level, there’s room for everyone to unite under the banner of pettiness.

“It allows for everyone to have their own preferences and beliefs, but it underscores this idea that Republicans have become so focused on telling other people what they can and cannot do in their own homes that it’s overshadowed every other thing that they claim to believe in,” she says.

“The kids would say that this is a vibes election,” she says. “First of all, you know, the vibes around Harris right now are very, very good. Everyone is excited. She’s raising a ton of money. There’s just clearly excitement. But then also, the thing that this weirdness frame allows is to create a negative vibe around Republicans, where rather than trying to debate the merits of specific policies in a very structured format, it just creates a vibe that they’re doing things for the wrong reasons.”

Surely, now that we’re firmly in the era of If You See Weird, Say Something, the Democratic faithful cheered when Senator Ted Cruz popped up on Fox News and said, “Kamala can’t have my guns. She can’t have my gasoline engine. And she sure as hell can’t have my steaks and cheeseburgers.”

My good sir, Kamala Harris is not asking for your gently used ground meats. Don’t be so weird.