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Tbh I think the use of weird itself is a failure. All of the things they tried in the past — policies, threat to democracy, Project 2025, the economy, etc. have been neutralized more or less. Calling a candidate a threat to democracy after he’s been shot opens them up to charges of poisoning the discourse with violence. Trump isn’t behind P2025, so when they start that, he can simply say “I have nothing to do with that.” Policies don’t work either because most of what Biden Harris tried to do either failed or were unpopular. The economy is a huge loser for Harris because millions of people struggle to afford groceries and wistfully remember the Trump era as the era of cheap food, gas, housing and low unemployment. What’s left is “weird”, up to and including Vance apparently humping a couch. And I just don’t see that landing because it’s a fundamentally unserious accusation that betrays the fact that they have nothing serious to offer. It’s basically an admission of inferiority “look, I know I don’t have many accomplishments, and I know my ideas are unpopular, but those guys are weird and I’m a normal person.”
Coming from the left, I also find this intentional, cynical attempt to negatively label opponents as "weird" rather unfortunate. We've been celebrating weirdos and weirdness, using those exact words, for at least the past 3 decades, probably more. It was part of an explicit effort to raise the status of people who were denigrated by society for not being normal enough, by associating the term with positivity.
And now, it seems that a significant portion of the Democratic machine has turned on a dime to say weirdness is bad, actually, and it's the other guys who are weird, not us. It'd be one thing if these were just off-hand comments here and there, since "weird" still retained a colloquial negative meaning, but the way so many people coalesced around the term within an instant (I personally doubt there was any conscious intentional coordination around the term, which actually makes it worse) is something else. It's got the same energy as "I'm so grateful to the Party for raising our chocolate rations despite our ongoing war against Eurasia."
Not really. It appeared that way. But in fact, it wasn't. Instead, there were a bunch of shell games played with the words and the referents. Now "weird" no longer referred to "people denigrated by society for not being normal enough", but instead to "people celebrated by society". And the group of people who were actually denigrated by society changed, from e.g. homosexuals to conservative white men (referred to as "squares" in an earlier iteration). Some groups moved in and out, e.g. male "nerds" were first in, and then moved back out as the culture war progressed. Th left going back to the original label used by their longtime opponents looks strange, but it isn't a difference in kind.
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It also doesn't help the online right has just returned the charge with pictures of a Biden cabinet members surrounded by people in dog masks, Harris with a drag queen (or possibly a clearly non-passing trans woman in woman coded dress), etc etc. It is very difficult to celebrate "queer identities" and then call your opponents "weird" when they are, at least publicly quite normie, (with exceptions of Trump's bombastic used car salesman style speeches, which are at least "normal" in the cultural context of people being used to used car salemen).
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