“Woke” is out — but “weird” is back in.
In 2024, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz helped Democrats land on a clear message: President Donald Trump and his allies were “weird.” Two years later, facing steep midterms odds, Republicans are giving Democrats a taste of their own medicine.
Some of the GOP’s standard-bearers keep trying to make “weird” great again.
Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., needed less than 10 minutes at the Republican convention in Dallas earlier this month to call Democrats “dangerous, radical, and weird” three times, singling out Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. Vice President JD Vance also called El-Sayed “evil” and “weird” after the Michigan Democrat mentioned Vance’s wife.
Even President Donald Trump has joined in, repeatedly calling Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico “weird” for his past remarks on gender identity, Christianity, transgender children and for allegedly being a vegan (Talarico says he is not). On Friday, the president’s super PAC, MAGA, Inc., released a 30-second ad that opens by calling Talarico “weird — very weird.”
The GOP’s turn to the schoolyard taunt comes as Republicans face stiff headwinds in the midterms. Trump is historically unpopular, consumer confidence continues sliding as inflation persists, and gas is still above $4 a gallon, with the war in Iran raging more than seven months after it began.
“When you can’t talk about your successful record on the economy, you do ridiculous things like calling people ‘weird,’” Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican strategist who co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told MS NOW.
Madrid said the tactic “reeked of desperation” when Democrats used it in 2024, “and it’s even more desperate now because it’s not even original — it’s a photocopy of desperation.”
The term took off in July 2024, when Walz called Trump and his allies “weird” during an interview on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” two weeks before then-Vice President Kamala Harris named him her running mate. Walz later told “60 Minutes” he was describing Republicans’ “behaviors,” including “being obsessed with people’s personal lives in their bedrooms and their reproductive rights, [and] making up stories about folks legally here eating cats and dogs.” Walz’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The “weird” label quickly became a cornerstone of Democrats’ otherwise muddled messaging in the frantic run-up to the 2024 election. It seemed to work as a rejoinder to Republicans’ insistence that Democrats’ stances on issues like abortion, transgender rights and education were outside the mainstream.
Part of its appeal was that it played on people’s innate desire to belong, and on the assumption they wouldn’t want to support a candidate considered “weird,” according to Maddy Jalbert, an assistant professor of psychology at Western Washington University who wrote about the Democrats’ use of the term in 2024.
“These more extreme, harmful ideas, when you call them ‘weird,’ it communicates that they don’t have social consensus,” Jalbert said.
In a 2024 essay, Jalbert and a colleague called the tactic “weird-checking.” They argued that in a post-truth era, it could land in a way that fact-checking just doesn’t.
“This is a way to call out opinions and ideas that doesn’t require that you actually dig at all into the facts behind things,” Jalbert told MS NOW.
But ultimately, “weird” wasn’t a winning message.
“Voters wanted to know in 2024, and want to know now, who will make their lives better or worse, and ‘weird’ does not really get to that,” said Geoff Garin, president of Hart Research, a polling firm that worked with the Harris campaign. He told MS NOW the “weird” attack did not poll well internally. (A Democratic National Committee spokesperson declined to share specific data.)
A Democratic operative told MS NOW that Republicans’ reliance on “weird” suggests they are “in panic mode.”
Republicans, though, seem undeterred.
Asked for comment about Republicans’ use of the term this cycle, Bernadette Breslin, national press secretary of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, was unapologetic. “A Democrat in Maine procreated with his cousin, Abdul El-Sayed equated transgender surgeries to circumcision, and Mary Peltola required staff to feed her pet chameleon,” she said. “Weird is an understatement, and unlike Democrats, our reasons are based on facts.” (The “Democrat in Maine” is a reference to Troy Jackson, whose longtime partner is his second cousin.)
Natalie Baldassarre, national press secretary for the Republican National Committee, dismissed a question about whether Republicans floated the term in focus groups before deploying it.
“No studying is needed to see that an unmarried 37-year-old man who’s obsessed with trans kids or a very angry little man who makes cringey social media videos are both, in fact, weird,” she said, referring to Talarico and El-Sayed, respectively.
In response to a request for comment from MS NOW, Cole Wozniak, a spokesperson for the El-Sayed campaign, said the candidate is “not concerned about the sounds coming from Washington — he’s going to continue to crisscross Michigan talking to voters about his plans to get money out of politics, put money in your pocket, and pass Medicare for All.”
A spokesperson for the Talarico campaign did not respond to a request for comment from MS NOW by publication time.
This is not the first time that Republicans have co-opted language previously used by Democrats. They famously turned “woke” from an earnest progressive watchword into a derisive shorthand for virtue-signaling.
But “weird” lacks the punch of “woke,” according to Drew Westen, a psychology professor and longtime political strategist. He said “woke” captured “a pervasive feeling among the public, across party lines,” about policing speech and identity. “Weird” doesn’t wield the same power — especially when it’s deployed against some of the Democrats’ most magnetic speakers, like Talarico or El-Sayed.
“They’re trying to turn charismatic candidates into ‘weirdness,’” said Westen, author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.” “I think Republicans are throwing spaghetti against the wall because they’re so disliked by the public.”
With voters seemingly more worried about their wallets than “weirdness,” Madrid said the strategy is likely to fall flat for Republicans, just as it failed for Democrats.
“If it’s the difference between putting in somebody who’s ‘weird’ and driving up the price of gas,” he said, “we’re at the point now where the average old white Republican is going to say, ‘Give me the weird guy.’”
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