Democrats Have Finally Abandoned Their Worst Strategy—and It Feels Thrilling

Back in 2008, four presidential election cycles and at least 10 lifetimes ago, there was one moment that made John McCain the talk of the town. At a Minnesota town hall, a racist voter commandeered the mic to say: “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him. He’s an Arab.”

McCain took the microphone from her, cutting her off. “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man and citizen,” he said. “He’s not. Thank you.” He quickly went to the next question.

When McCain died in 2018, the bipartisan commemorations and obituaries about him waxed poetic about how generous he had been to once “defend” his opponent. Don’t forget: The bar for decency in politics resides in hell! This shouldn’t have really been a profound moment for McCain at all—you can very easily be Arab and a “decent family man” at the same time. But over the decade between his comment and his death, Republicans made sure to sink that bar of decency even deeper into hell. By that point, it was tough to find a Republican who would even correct the record that Obama was not indeed “an Arab.”

Donald Trump was never one of those Republicans. Going back to 2011, his noxious energy helped force Obama to release his birth certificate to prove that he was, indeed, not a Kenyan hiding in a foxhole. That was before Trump was even a candidate; now he’s a one-term president with still-decent chances of assuming the office yet again, this time alongside possible Morphe influencer J.D. Vance. Much like during his past two campaigns, Trump is scraping the bottom of the barrel behaviorwise, suggesting that if he becomes president, we’ll never have to (get to?) vote again. Trump is already calling Kamala Harris a “play toy” while refusing to show up for a televised debate. At this week’s conference for the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump was invited onstage with three moderators, an appearance that did nothing but give him time to question Harris’ biraciality. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” he said. “I don’t know: Is she Indian? Or is she Black?” Just wait until he finds out about all those white people with 23andMe results bragging about being 12 percent Chippewa!

How to respond to Trump’s yearslong parade of luridness? Eight years ago, Michelle Obama gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention, one that would inadvertently shape the way the Democratic Party would handle Republican attacks for years to come. “When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level,” Michelle said. “Our motto is ‘When they go low, we go high.’ ”

It’s a nice idea. It felt good at the time for Democrats to at least be able to pat themselves on the back for their own morality. But it’s one that has not ever really won elections. Hillary Clinton famously lost in 2016, proof positive that staying above the fray wasn’t an effective strategy for this new type of Trumpian Republican who does not care about having a fair, clean fight. Maintaining the high ground in politics has been a failed strategy for almost a decade now. In 2008 you could reliably hope that a candidate’s decency would stop a voter from running her mouth at a town hall about how the Democratic candidate was a maybe-terrorist. Now you’re almost guaranteed he’ll join in. (“He is the founder of ISIS,” Trump said of Obama in 2016.)

But boy are things different now: Vice President Kamala Harris is polling like a candidate who could win, all while her campaign takes a decidedly different approach from Democrats before her. Harris’ campaign seems happy to get dirty. Under Harris’ name, the campaign is writing saucy emails, posting clever tweets, and producing semiviral TikToks. Her political allies are proving to be fierce advocates for her on television and at rallies. While leaning into the coconut of it all, Harris has found her campaign voice, and you know what? It’s kind of serving cunt.

Harris’ campaign hasn’t just decided to meme its way through this election. It hasn’t just decided to jab back at an unruly political foe who seems to operate well beyond the bounds of reality. What the Democrats appear to have finally figured out is how to go low—and just how good it feels to do it.

In mere weeks, Harris’ campaign has made a real meal of Vance in particular. I mean, have you heard the hoax that J.D. Vance once fucked a couch? It’s not real, but imagine if it were! And Harris’ campaign is certainly treating it seriously, if not sincerely. “JD Vance does not couch his hatred for women,” @KamalaHQ posted on X earlier this week. Clever and mean! At last.

The Kamala HQ X account is a catalog of old interviews from Vance, in which he rants about how we should punish childless people, criticizing childless single women above all, especially if they have cats. Most impactful, maybe, has been the way Harris’ campaign has doubled down on the idea that the Trump–Vance ticket is, simply put, full of fuckin’ weirdos. “Trump is old and quite weird?” read one email from the Harris campaign, after Democrats realized that calling Republicans weird really seems to bother them. Another opened simply with “JD Vance is weird.” It’s a criticism that’s perfect in its simplicity. What exactly is Vance supposed to do to make himself seem less weird? The weirdness is inherent, as if it’s a part of the Republican platform to be a creepo.

In 2016 Democrats were stuck with the tedious rhetoric “This is not normal.” They thought that this was a clarion call to action; the rest of us were uninspired by another insipid election cycle. It was their only consistent messaging around the aberration that was a Trump presidency. Such a strategy won’t work anymore, since now Trump is the party. This version of the GOP is indeed the new normal, as “weird” as it may still feel.

But the Democrats’ pathology around going high predates Trump’s political rise. During Obama’s administration, they were pandering to Trump, offering up Obama’s birth certificate under the belief that it would shut him up. (Would you believe that no one, anywhere, has figured out how to get him to shut up?) As he gradually took over the party, the Democrats tried to maintain the high ground during all of Trump’s lowbrow attacks, from his encouraging crowds to yell “Lock her up!” to his personal insults to journalists to his refusal of basic fact-checking (still ongoing, that one, but I’m sure this is the year he’ll agree to it!). Clinton too seemed to think that the high ground was more likely to get her to the White House and, during the 2016 presidential campaign, took to repeatedly quoting Michelle’s doomed credo. Guess what happened! No, no. You go Google it. I’ll be here when you find out.

But “weird” is an excellent retort in times like these because, much like a lot of what the Republicans have been saying for years, it’s not rooted in facts. Anyone can be weird; weird is in the eye of the beholder, or the person wearing giant clown shoes. There are several videos of J.D. Vance in which he talks about how much he loves to crush a Diet Mountain Dew, and it’s just … weird! That’s like bragging about having a hot cup of Sanka every morning. Worse—worse than Diet Mountain Dew??—Vance has given interviews in which he seems to suggest that he loves his brown wife in spite of her ethnic background. There’s no point in taking any of this as seriously as we once did in 2016. It’s too weird, and too wretched, to not take the piss out of it.

Going low is, above all, funny, and a sense of humor is what the Democrats have been sorely lacking for years. First, they treated Trump like an odd blip on the road toward centrism, a deviation as opposed to a devolution. Then they treated him like a danger, something to take seriously even when he wasn’t acting like a serious person either. But you know what Trump is? He’s funny. And what Democrats never understood is that getting a laugh—intentional or otherwise—can also get you elected. The whole party, once so worried about getting in the dirt with its opponents, has suddenly realized what every youngest child already knows: If you make the grown-ups in the room chuckle, you can get away with a lot.

But there are more adult versions of going low too, like how Pete Buttigieg has appeared on just about every news show in the past week to directly and incisively go after Trump and his acolytes. Recently, on Fox News, he went after Trump’s advanced age—using the exact same rhetoric that Republicans deployed when talking about Biden’s age, up until he dropped out. “Republicans will take a look at Donald Trump and say he’s perfectly fine, even though he seemed unable to tell the difference between Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, even though he’s rambling about electrocuting sharks and Hannibal Lecter,” he said. “We don’t have that kind of warped reality on our side.”

On TikTok, meanwhile, Harris HQ is speaking the language of the internet: clapping back, petty if need be. “Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage,” Harris says in one edited clip of a recent campaign event. “As the saying goes, ‘If you got something to say, say it to my face.’ ” That one has 1.8 million likes so far. Another is a carousel of all the “weird” things about Vance, including his belief that women should stay in marriages even if they’re violent and his rigid stance on abortion. The caption is simple: “weirdo.” In another TikTok, Harris HQ uses audio from Brooke Schofield, an influencer and podcaster who recently went viral for outing her loser ex-boyfriend for lying to her for months. “Honestly, you guys,” the audio says over footage of Harris and a screenshot of the Trump campaign asking for more money, “do him a service. He needs money. For therapy!” More than 2.5 million likes on that alone. Going low remains more effective, and much more satisfying. Finally, the Democrats are starting to ditch the high ground; no one could hear them up there anyway. It almost seems as if … they’re having fun? In politics? During an election cycle? No one would believe me if it weren’t happening before our eyes.

What’s funny about these TikToks in particular are the comments; underneath every viral video is some variation of the same question. Is this really the same Democratic Party from four years ago? Is it the same one from eight years ago? Why did it take so long for them to come alive? Maybe The Simpsons got it right in a 1994 episode wherein the DNC is lousy with banners proclaiming “We Hate Life and Ourselves” and “We Can’t Govern!” For 30 years, the Democrats have been synonymous with punching themselves in the face instead of going after their opponent. That is, until last week, when they suddenly decided they wanted to be a contender.

But hey, that’s the thing about no longer having anything to lose! Right up until the moment Biden dropped out, the Democrats were at their nadir: Biden was flailing, and donors were threatening to pull their funding. His approval rating was the worst it has been throughout his presidency, and it seemed all but inevitable that Trump would take a second term. It was becoming clearer and clearer that their three-decade-long strategy of doing absolutely nothing would continue to not work. The high ground is a nice place for a stroll, but it won’t get you far if your opponents are shooting from sewer grates.

So they shifted gears. And now what do we have? Democrats going for the jugular of their political foes? Going on the attack instead of meekly hoping that voters like their little slogans? Using some of the same strategies that beat them in 2016? Harris and her supporters are right: This shit is so weird.