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There are no magic words. But moral attacks your base loves are the core of a winning strategy.
There are no magic words. But moral attacks your base loves are the core of a winning strategy.
This is a guest post from FrameLab contributor Jason Sattler. Jason is LOLGOP on BlueSky and pretty much any other social media platform. His writing has appeared in USA TODAY, Wired.com, the New York Daily News and Alternet.
Do you remember "weird?"
That one word helped rocket Tim Walz from the governor of the state with the best record of progressive accomplishments in the 2020s to Kamala Harris's running mate. Launched from Walz's stellar early summer appearances on cable news, the word became a meme that spread like wildfire in the summer of 2024.
Then, “weird” disappeared.
For decades, Dr. George Lakoff has explained that framing isn't “magic.” There is no one spell that Democrats could have cast that would have helped Harris/Walz overcome the global wave against incumbent parties multiplied by the massive horde of capital Elon Musk marshaled to buy Trump's win. And no magic word can fill in for the lack of an effective political strategy.
However, Walz's fleeting success with “weird” gives us a perfect case study. Like a snapshot frozen in time, it reveals why Democrats have such a hard time with effective communication.
“Weird” also helps explain the growing divide inside a Democratic Party roiling with a battle for the movement's future as America's freedoms face an existential threat coming from inside the White House. It even suggests a roadmap for countering the propaganda that powers Trump, Musk, and MAGA.
Last summer, the one-two punch of Joe Biden's abysmal debate performance and the Republicans on the Supreme Court conferring “absolute immunity” on Donald Trump left the Democratic Party plunging into an abyss. Any hope of Trump suffering any real consequences for his traitorous betrayals of his country had vanished … in a week.
Then, things got good—for a while.
Kamala Harris's swift elevation as Biden's successor and her choice of Tim Walz as her running mate sparked a remarkable turnaround for Democrats, which was even more impressive given Trump's triumphant Republican National Convention after a failed assassination attempt.
With “weird,” Walz had found a fun, quick way to sum up much of the country's dismay with the state of the GOP. How else could you describe Trump's slithering back to power, his running mate pick being a hostile 40-year-old freshman Senator whose only job experience was as a mascot for billionaires, and the mainstream press' insistence on treating the whole thing as business as usual?
And the Democratic base loved it.
In many ways, the governor of Minnesota felt like the perfect antidote to Trump and Vance.
A folksy football coach, Walz had passed a historic array of life-improving policies—including free lunches for all kids. He seemed to possess the uncommon clarity of an average American, a trope this country has loved since Benjamin Franklin.
For those who care about framing as a defense of democracy in this dangerous moment, Walz possessed two sparkling credentials. He'd been at the top of the ticket as Democrats in Minnesota ran a coordinated “Greater than Fear” campaign that launched one of the best efforts to message against Trumpism. And he wrote a master's thesis on Holocaust education!
With “weird,” Walz wasn't just being funny. He was projecting a profound moral concern, something Democrats have generally struggled with expressing when faced with the incomprehensible immorality of Donald Trump. He wasn't calling Trump a “betrayer” or a “loser”—as Dr. Lakoff has long suggested to undermine Trump's role at the top of the right's strict father hierarchy. But he was implying both of those things.
The message was: You can't trust this man, not just because he's a liar. He has no values except his right to dominate you. We know this because he turns on almost everyone eventually, including his last running mate. He's a loser who can't accept a loss.
“Weird” just made sense, and it worked. Trump seemed uniquely off-put by the suggestion that he or his running mate might be in any way odd.
And then it was gone
So what happened to “weird”?
As far as I can tell, Walz has never spoken about why he stopped using the term, which I believe he has not said since before the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
Why? CNN reported in August of last year:
Three weeks into her presidential run was the first time the Biden campaign's pollsters — now hers — held a deep-dive call with Kamala Harris' inner circle to discuss what she's been saying on the stump.
Over the line came a lot of praise, but also some suggested tweaks. First, said veteran Democratic numbers man Geoff Garin, summarizing their analysis, stop saying, "We're not going back." It wasn't focused enough on the future, he argued. Second, lay off all the "weird" talk — too negative.
The Harris campaign ultimately stuck with the “We're not going back” chant because they had no choice—her crowds wouldn't stop chanting it. But “weird” was gone.
Instead, the plan seemed to turn Walz into the Ambassador to MAGA. His prominent cable news appearances were on Fox News. And—most notably—he treated JD Vance with kid gloves during their one debate, repeatedly praising Vance as someone who wants to solve problems, even after Vance had sicced the worst racists in the country on his own constituents by personally spreading a neo-Nazi lie about Haitian immigrants.
Walz appealed to the public as someone who would call out the lunacy before our eyes. Suddenly, he was normalizing it.
Pushing Walz toward the “middle” represents one of the Democratic Party's tendencies that has made its framing so weak—the belief that “the middle” exists.
The Harris campaign decided its path to victory was picking up the disaffected Republicans who had turned out for Biden in 2020. That explains the high-profile appearances with Liz Cheney and the generally safe approaches to campaigning that essentially left the right's attacks unanswered.
Harris warned that Trump's tariffs were a “national sales tax” that would worsen inflation. However, that measured approach never called out how a wanton approach to tariffs could destroy our economy—as Trump appears poised to do—by giving us the worst of both worlds, skyrocketing prices while killing millions of jobs.
Meanwhile, Trump/Musk countered with fake ads and a phishing attack-like approach to campaigning. They used disinformation to maximize people's fear to either turn Harris voters off or charge non-voters toward Trump.
Harris/Walz aimed for the middle and found no new voters. Trump/Musk aimed everywhere with a fear/money cannon, and Republicans won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years.
The demise of “weird” and the conscious choice to pull Walz off cable prove something Adam Serwer of The Atlantic has said many times:
American politics makes a lot more sense when you realize that the GOP is afraid of pissing off the GOP base, and the Dems are afraid of pissing off the GOP base, but neither party is afraid of pissing off the Dem base.
The consultants were afraid of Walz getting called out for hurting Republicans' feelings. They missed an opportunity for Walz to expand on “weird” by connecting it to Trump's actions against our democracy and values.
That's how we get safe “popular” campaigns that poll well yet lose.
This highlights the central division in today's Democratic Party.
Vanity Fair's Molly Jong-Fast describes it as “Team Fight v. Team Cave”—fitting when consultants like James Carville insist that “playing dead” is the best strategy for countering Trump.
Lakoff fans may see the divide differently. “Team Frame” actively tries to frame the assault on democracy, including both “centrists” like Chris Murphy and progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They see their job as activating the pro-democracy base and creating a mass movement.
“Team Get Framed” surrenders to Republicans. This side believes the only way to win is by appealing to voters as the second-best Republicans. It's been the dominant mode of the party for most of the last 50 years.
To be honest, this strategy occasionally works—but only because Republican presidents have inevitably driven the country into increasingly deeper ditches. Today, however, it's a recipe for surrendering to autocracy.
Tim Walz has shown that people can move from team to team. And after his recent comments about the #TeslaTakedown, Elon Musk is a hit dog doing the hollering.
And what can you call the wealthiest man alive, a man who has turned against his daughter, a man behind the mass layoffs and destruction of our federal government, a man who has campaigned against “empathy,” trying to play the victim?
Weird.
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