Calling Republicans Weird Is a Provably Good Idea

By Jacob Weindling  |  July 30, 2024 | 11:30am
Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
Elections Republican Party
Calling Republicans Weird Is a Provably Good Idea

Thomas Friedman, famed Iraq War enthusiast, inventor of the fictional “reformer” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and all other sorts of idiotic ideas dressed up as Very Serious Thought, wrote in the New York Times that “Democrats could regret calling Trump and his supporters weird.”

That’s it. That’s the column. Thomas Friedman thinks it’s a bad idea and therefore it is provably good.

But in the interest of further reinforcing this point, I’ll introduce some evidence that could penetrate even Friedman’s thick skull. Here’s his thesis that melts like sugar in water the moment it meets reality.

It is now a truism that if Democrats have any hope of carrying key swing states and overcoming Trump’s advantages in the Electoral College, they have to break through to white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women, who, if they have one thing in common, feel denigrated and humiliated by Democratic, liberal, college-educated elites. They hate the people who hate Trump more than they care about any Trump policies. Therefore, the dumbest message Democrats could seize on right now is to further humiliate them as “weird.”

You mean college-educated elites who hate Trump like JD Vance? Friedman apparently is still existing in a world where Hillbilly Elegy is treated seriously, yet even the most mediocre thinkers in mainstream media have figured out the ruse that was played on them by now. As anyone who has read that horrid book knows, Vance treats his own family like shit in service of confirming Thomas Friedman’s bias that some folks in middle America are poor and sick because they do drugs and failed at meritocracy, unlike Friedman who definitely earned his way into MBS’s PR shop.

Actual reporters who have their finger on the pulse of people whose net worth are under nine figures know that Vance was chosen because of Trump’s own concerns over white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women, and that Vance hasn’t exactly assuaged them. The folks who dive into the data on stuff like this all mostly say the same thing: it’s not great!

Just to repeat what Harry Enten said for the people still in MBS’s pocket reading the most mid-curve book ever written: “the JD Vance pick makes no sense from a statistical polling perspective.”

Vance’s underwhelming election results in Ohio are backed up by a recent YouGov survey conducted from July 15th to the 19th that had Vance at 34 percent total favorability among white people versus 36 percent who view him unfavorably, with the largest proportion after “don’t know” (30 percent) being very unfavorable at 28 percent.

This dynamic follows down the income ladder too. While the YouGov survey does not differentiate by college educated or not, people who don’t go to college generally make less money than those who do, and among all of those with a reported net income below $50 thousand per year, Vance’s total approval rating lands at 28 percent, while just his very unfavorable rating is 26 percent. The notion that attacking him equals attacking white working-class folks has no firm basis in reality.

So tell me again why we should listen to this NYT blowhard lecture us how this Yale grad is actually loved by a bunch of working-class people he has never known for longer than a day? Again, the argument was over as soon as I introduced the most wrong man alive as a counterpoint, but just to reinforce the facts about JD Vance and the burgeoning extremely online right-wing movement he represents: these guys are fucking weird!

Screenshotting this one since I surmise he will be dogpiled into deleting it

Not to mention that it’s clearly getting under their skin. The hyper-online right this iteration of Vance was borne from has been talking nonstop about being called “weird” since Tim Walz made it a broad-based Democratic talking point. Democrats who believe this to be a bad strategic route are ignoring one of the most classic rules in politics: putting your opponent on the defense is good because it detracts from the amount of time they have to attack you.

It’s also smart to call them weird as a soft pitch to normie America. Thomas Friedman’s perfectly medium-sized brain is easily impressed by superficial calls to “dignity” and democracy and blah blah blah, and it’s clear by now that he wishes presidential elections took place in his high school debate club, but that’s not how politics has ever worked, and certainly not these days in our Trumpified universe.

Smashing people over the head with calls to defend democracy sounds nice in a demented Aaron Sorkin script, but in the real world, it takes a more delicate and human touch to connect with voters, especially since polls indicate most swing state voters don’t trust the Democrats on this issue. I know that I certainly don’t.

Calling people weird also has actual electoral weight behind it, as this was part of the Arizona Democratic Party’s strategy to bury Blake Masters with his own videos in 2022 en route to Mark Kelly soundly defeating him in the Senate race.

Opening with “hey this guy wants to try to kill you if there are certain complications with your pregnancy” is very heavy and doesn’t always convince folks of its efficacy given how hyperbolic it sounds, even if it is true. The soft sell of “this guy’s weird” is a great way to get a politician past every voter’s cynical outer shell, and it makes the “hey but seriously…” part of the pitch easier. Friedman’s belief that this should be about dignity and all that high falutin nonsense is just acting out the exact character he says Trump’s base hates.

And a lot of these people hate JD Vance too! Especially the ones in battleground states, further pushing back on the implication made by Friedman’s white working-class caricature who supposedly the Dems need to court in order to hold on to the Midwest firewall (that contains a portal to hell where BidenKamala and Trump tie).

Going back to the YouGov poll, Vance’s largest very unfavorable ratings are in the Midwest (30 percent) and West (31 percent), versus his combined very and somewhat favorable ratings of 31 percent and 29 percent in each region respectively. Vance plays the best in the south according to this poll, and his highest somewhat favorability rating resides in the northeast at 18 percent, which I would bet big money is boosted by people that Thomas Friedman is friends with.

One poll is just a snapshot in time, so it’s possible that these could change or be wrong, but it is broadly representative of the averages CNN’s Harry Enten talked about above, and they also follow the trends of actual election results for weird guys like Masters and Vance. There is really no evidence that voters are enthusiastic for Vance outside the weird revanchist hyper-online right, and assuming that he is broadly popular with white working-class people only confirms the caricature Vance tried to create in the minds of simpletons like Thomas Friedman.

That Trump himself is struggling with this demographic and felt the need to shore up his support indicates that many in this cohort have seen the raw deal they got from the former president, which makes them smarter than effete NYT columnists pretending that they understand an old white guy in a Midwest diner for the ten billionth time. Friedman opposing this idea is a beacon of its righteousness, and as Sonny Bunch pointed out on Twitter, if the Republican Party doesn’t want to be charged with this very accurate attack, don’t nominate weird people!

 
Join the discussion...