WASHINGTON (AP) — Even before he was on the shortlist for vice president, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz tried to portray Donald Trump and the Republicans to the American public as “just weird.”
“They are strange people on the other side. They want to take your books away. They want to get into the exam room,” Walz said in a television interview last month.
The message began with news interviews and eventually spread like wildfire on social media with the lend a hand of young Americans. The uncomplicated terminology of calling the other side “weird” or “odd” is neither revolutionary nor sophisticated in American politics, but it represents a modern formulation for Democrats who have spent the past eight years trying to defeat Trump and Trumpism by personifying him as the greatest threat to democracy.
At his first rally with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday, Walz repeated this reference, saying of the Republicans: “These guys are scary and, yes, just hilarious.”
“The opposite of normalizing authoritarianism is to weird it out, to denounce it, to sort of mock it,” says Jennifer Mercieca, a historian at Texas A&M University who has written a book on Trump’s rhetoric. “To say, ‘Hey, that’s a weird thing you’re doing, calling your opposition enemies instead of saying they’re good people who have different political preferences.'”
Now the party is entering a modern chapter: A modern generation of candidates is seeking not only to appeal to Americans’ fears of a second Trump presidency but also to cast the Republican Party’s policies and actions as abnormal. And Democrats see no more effective messenger for this modern assault than Walz, the 60-year-old Midwestern father who was chosen as their vice presidential candidate on Tuesday.
“Governor Walz can do the job and will help reaffirm that we are a normal team,” said incoming Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio in a statement Tuesday. “We are pragmatic, reliable and bipartisan.”
Walz’s ability to talk about politics and policy in layman’s terms, coupled with his knowledge of the internet zeitgeist, has helped catapult the little-known politician onto the national stage and onto the “For You” social media pages of millions of Gen Z voters whose support will be critical for Democrats in November.
Online, Walz was dubbed “the cool dad.” News that Walz would become the Democratic running mate sparked a flood of online memes, including one captioned “Out the window to the Walz,” a reference to Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz’s 2003 rap hit “Get Low.” On TikTok, users created 60-second montages of Walz discussing the phenomenon of Charli XCX’s modern album, “Brat,” which he said his young daughter explained to him, along with footage of him slamming Republican vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance for his comments about “childless cat ladies.”
“Keep going and vilify people. Keep going. My God, they’re targeting cat people. Good luck with that,” Walz says in an MSNBC clip that has more than 150,000 likes on TikTok. “Turn on the internet. See what cat people do when you attack them.”
But the same characteristics that put Walz on the Democratic ticket are already being used against him by Republicans. In the last few hours, they have called him “strange” and “radical.”
Trump sent a fundraising email on Tuesday calling Walz a “dangerously liberal” and suggesting he would “unleash hell on earth.”
But Walz’s legislative accomplishments on issues such as protecting abortion rights, legalizing recreational marijuana and restricting access to guns have helped him gain popularity among young voters beyond his own firmly Democratic-dominated state in communities across the country.
Voters of Tomorrow, a Generation Z-led organization representing young political activists and voters, pledged its full support to Walz after weeks of campaigning, saying he had “dedicated his life to educating and empowering young people as teachers and public servants.”
“Governor Walz gets bonus points for expressing exactly what young Americans think about Donald Trump and JD Vance: They’re weird,” Santiago Mayer, the group’s executive director, said in a statement. “Trump and Vance are weirdly fixated on taking away Americans’ freedoms and weirdly obsessed with culture wars.”
