Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign message is clear: She loves freedom and Donald Trump is weird.
In the week since President Joe Biden dropped out and the vice president became the front-runner, she has upended the Democrats’ campaign messaging, adding a sharp-edged contrast that borrows a lot from typically Republican rhetoric.
Instead of Biden’s more earnest approach, her campaign has leaned heavily into simple words with powerful emotional appeals.
In her first campaign ad, she recast the Democratic agenda as centered on “freedom,” saying the word four times to highlight her support for workers (“the freedom not just to get by, but get ahead”), gun safety laws (“the freedom to be safe from gun violence”) and access to abortion (“the freedom to make decisions about your own body”). In case you somehow missed the message, the minute-long ad is set to Beyoncé’s 2016 song “Freedom,” which repeats the word another 10 times.
She also used the word a dozen times in her short speech at the Democratic campaign headquarters in Delaware, tying it into a broader historical narrative that included bolstering the “sacred freedom to vote” on her agenda.
“Our fight for the future is also a fight for freedom,” she told the gathering of campaign staffers and volunteers. “Generations of Americans before us have led the fight for freedom from our founders to our framers, to the abolitionists and the suffragettes, to the freedom riders and farmworkers. And now I say team, the baton is in our hands.”
In Harris’ current campaign, “freedom” is favored instead of the more typical Democratic rhetoric about “reproductive rights” or “the right to vote.” She’s even recast labor rights as “the freedom to join a union.” In doing so, she’s reclaiming a word that the right has so dominated in recent years that an arch-conservative group in the House simply calls itself the Freedom Caucus.
At the same time, the Harris campaign and its Democratic allies have made a sharp turn away from Biden’s serious approach in describing Trump world, adopting a more mocking tone.
In a news release, the Harris campaign trolled the former president by saying that “Trump is old and quite weird.” After Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a potential running mate, posted a viral tweet calling Trump “weird” for a campaign speech riff on the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, he repeated the word multiple times in an MSNBC interview. For good measure, the Harris campaign also called Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, “weird and creepy” over old remarks in which he proposed stopping women from traveling across state lines to get an abortion.
In both cases, the strategy is reminiscent of Trump’s messaging: pick a simple theme and repeat it over and over and over.
In both cases, the strategy is reminiscent of Trump’s messaging: pick a simple theme and repeat it over and over and over, like his nicknames “Crooked Hillary” Clinton, “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” and “Sleepy Joe” Biden or his promise to “build the wall” and “make America great again.”
It’s also reminiscent of an approach pioneered by former Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich. In 1990, a political organization with ties to him sent a memo to Republican candidates who wanted to “speak like Newt,” urging them to describe themselves with positive words like “freedom,” “courage” and “strength” and their opponents with negative words like “bizarre,” “pathetic” and “sick.” (The memo even suggested calling rivals “traitors,” although in a moment that now feels quaint, the group’s head told The New York Times that was a mistake.)
The words underscored Gingrich’s scorched-earth approach to politics by clearly marking out tribal lines: Your campaign represented all that was good and normal, while your opponents were weirdos who would destroy society if given power. It also made sense, given the starkly different demographics of the two major parties. With a base of college-educated voters, young people and minorities, Democrats are much less judgmental and even embrace being a little offbeat, as shown by things like the famous slogan “Keep Austin Weird.” With a more homogenous base of voters, Republicans found it easy to single out a Democratic-leaning demographic for ridicule, casting random people like a pro-LGBTQ teacher or Black Lives Matter activist as being outside of the mainstream. Trump regularly called Democrats “crazy,” “pathetic,” “sick,” “weird” and “ridiculous.” But in an ironic twist, all that tribalism made Republicans vulnerable to the same attack. Over the last three decades, many conservatives have become increasingly skeptical of mainstream media, burrowing deeper into alternatives peddled by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan. With little pushback in these echo chambers and gerrymandered House districts, their ideas became increasingly extreme. Vance is a case study in this. His proposal to give parents more votes than adults who don’t have children came from a speech at a conservative organization, and his attack on “childless cat ladies” on Carlson’s now-canceled Fox News show. His idea of stopping women from crossing state lines for an abortion was aired on a far-right podcast and later followed up by a lobbying effort to allow police to access women’s health records. In a telling moment on that podcast, Vance described a bizarre hypothetical in which conservative bogeyman George Soros would send 747s full of Black women seeking abortions from Ohio to California. “That’s kind of creepy, right?” he told the host. Of course, Vance meant that his outlandish scenario would be creepy if it came to pass, but since nothing remotely like it is happening, he’s the one who ends up seeming outside the mainstream. And with its new focus on calling Republicans “weird,” the Harris campaign is determined to let the rest of America know that, too.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
