How Tim Walz became beloved by young voters with a message that the GOP is ‘weird’

WASHINGTON (AP) — Even before he was on the shortlist for vice president, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was working to portray Donald Trump and Republicans to the American public as “just weird.”

“These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room,” Walz said in a TV interview last month.

The message started with news interviews and eventually spread like wildfire across social media with the help of young Americans. The simple terminology of labeling the other side as “weird” or “odd” is not revolutionary or sophisticated in American politics but represents a new framing for Democrats who have spent the last eight years trying to defeat Trump and Trumpism by personifying him as the greatest threat to democracy.

Walz went back to the reference at his first rally Tuesday with Vice President Kamala Harris, saying of Republicans: “These guys are creepy and yes, just weird as hell.”

“The opposite of normalizing authoritarianism is to make it weird, to call it out and to sort of mock it,” Jennifer Mercieca, a historian at Texas A&M University, who wrote a book on Trump’s rhetoric, said. “To say, ‘Hey, that’s a weird thing you’re doing, calling your opposition enemies instead of saying that they’re good people who have different policy preferences.’”

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