The 2024 election is shaping up to be a partisan ‘weird-off’

Republicans and Democrats have found a new way to attack each other, and it’s neither policy-based nor an existential warning about the nation’s fate: It’s calling each other “weird.”

The dig appears to have originated in an answer Vice President Kamala Harris gave her staff in 2020 when asked what she would do if Donald Trump walked behind her during a debate, as he did to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Harris said she’d turn around and ask him: “Why are you being so weird?”

But in the days since President Joe Biden bowed out of the 2024 election, both parties have leaned into the jibe.