Framing the Campaign: Why ‘Weird’ Works Better than ‘Scary’
By now you’re probably pretty familiar with the Democratic Party’s campaign to paint Republicans as ‘weird’. What started as an offhand comment by now Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz during a news interview has now become an organized and energetic effort by progressive campaigners to frame Republicans as outsiders.
The ‘Scary’ Frame
Things weren’t always this way. For decades, progressives have built campaigns around the scary ‘what-ifs’ of electing conservatives. Perhaps the most successful example of this type of campaign took place in the 1964 presidential race.
Sitting President Johnson, a Democrat, ran against hard-right Republican Barry Goldwater, who was known for holding extreme views and having no filter when he spoke publicly (sound familiar?). The race concluded less than a year after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Johnson, his Vice President, maintained a big lead in the polls throughout the election. But even with Johnson’s lead, the campaign is mostly remembered for a famous ad called ‘Peace, Little Girl’ — better known as the ‘Daisy Ad.’
After Goldwater mused about potentially using tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam should he become president, the Johnson campaign quickly released an ad depicting a young girl picking daisies. In the ad, she removes one petal at a time while counting them out of order, as children of that age often do. Once she’s picked all the petals, a voiceover takes over, counting down from 10, like you might hear during a nuclear launch. The camera zooms in on the girl’s eye, which turns into a nuclear explosion detonating as the voiceover reaches zero.
As the screen goes black, a new voiceover states, “These are the stakes to make a world in which all of God’s children can live are to go into the dark. We must either love each other or we must die. Vote for President Johnson on November. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” It’s truly powerful stuff.
The ‘Weird’ Frame
However, there was a second campaign ad that may have done as much as the daisy ad to help Johnson secure the third-largest victory in US presidential election history. That ad was called ‘Confessions of Republican’.
Here’s the transcript:
I don’t know why they wanted to call this a confession. I’ve always been a Republican. My father was, his father was. The whole family’s a Republican family. I voted for Dwight Eisenhower the first time I ever voted. I voted for Nixon the last time. But when we come to Senator Goldwater now it seems to me we’re up against a very different kind of a man. This man scares me.
Now maybe I’m wrong. A friend of mine just said to me, ‘Listen, just because a man sounds a little irresponsible during a campaign doesn’t mean he’s going to act irresponsibly.’ You know that theory, that the White House makes the man. I don’t buy that. You know what I think makes a President — I mean, aside from his judgement, his experience — are the men behind him, his advisors, the cabinet. And so many men with strange ideas are working for Goldwater. You hear a lot about what these guys are against — they seem to be against just about everything — but what are they for?
The hardest thing for me about this whole campaign is to sort out one Goldwater statement from another. A reporter will go to Senator Goldwater and he’ll say, ‘Senator, on such and such a day, you said, and I quote, ‘blah blah blah’ whatever it is, end quote.’ And then Goldwater says, ‘Well, I wouldn’t put it that way.’ I can’t follow that. I can’t follow that. Was he serious when he did put it that way? Is he serious when he says he wouldn’t put it that way? I just don’t get it. A president ought to mean what he says.
President Johnson at least is talking about facts. He says, “Look, we’ve got the tax cut bill and because of that you get to carry home X number of dollars more every payday. We’ve got the nuclear test ban and because of that there is X percent less radioactivity in the food.” But, but Goldwater, often, I can’t figure out just what Goldwater means by the things he says. I read now where he says, “A craven fear of death is sweeping across America. What is that supposed to mean? If he means that people don’t want to fight a nuclear war, he’s right. I don’t. When I read some of these things that Goldwater says about total victory, I get a little worried, you know? I wish I was as sure that Goldwater is as against war as I am that he’s against some of these other things. I wish I could believe that he has the imagination to be able to just shut his eyes and picture what this country would look like after a nuclear war.
Sometimes, I wish I’d been at that convention at San Francisco. I mean, I wish I’d been a delegate, I really do. I would have fought, you know. I wouldn’t have worried so much about party unity because if you unite behind a man you don’t believe in, it’s a lie. I tell you, those people who got control of that convention: Who are they? I mean, when the head of the Ku Klux Klan, when all these weird groups come out in favor of the candidate of my party — either they’re not Republicans or I’m not.
I’ve thought about just not voting at this election, just staying home — but you can’t do that, that’s saying you don’t care who wins, and I do care. I think my party made a bad mistake in San Francisco, and I’m going to have to vote against that mistake on the third of November.
It remains one of the most powerful political ads I’ve ever seen. And while it does talk about how scary Goldwater is, it also highlights how he and the political operatives who won him the Republican nomination are weird. Perhaps the ad’s most powerful line is this one: “When all these weird groups come out in favor of the candidate of my party — either they’re not Republicans or I’m not.”
Internal and External Politics
The reason why the line is so effective is the same reason why ‘weird’ works better than ‘scary’. Things that are dubbed ‘scary’ are almost always external factors outside of an individual voter’s control. In the 1964 race, the most pressing external factor was nuclear war. The best a voter could do was vote for the candidate least likely to drop a nuclear bomb. But they couldn’t do much about aggression from other countries, a lesson learned during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
‘Weird’, comparatively, speaks more to one’s individual identity and how that identity creates belonging within a broader group. During an election, voters look to political parties to reflect back their values. Those values are important to a voter on their own, but they also help make up a voter’s personal identity. When a party doesn't reflect back these values and this identity, it stirs questions in the voter about how their identity and the way they go about their daily lives will be impacted should that party win power. The campaign becomes less about what the parties will do and more about how a voter’s life will have to change depending on who wins.
Taking the Awe Out of ‘Scary’ Opponents
Painting an opponent as scary can have the unintended consequence of making that opponent seem more powerful, competent, and awe-inspiring to the voters you are trying to sway. Therefore, when a candidate or campaign is painted as ‘weird’ instead of ‘scary’, it also changes the power that candidate or campaign holds over an audience.
This is something actor Peter Cushing understood when it came to his character portrayals. Most people know him as Grand Moff Tarkin from ‘Star Wars: A New Hope.’ As that character, he’s probably the only member of the Galactic Empire’s Imperial Forces who still appears imposing and scary when sharing a frame with Darth Vader. His subordinates fear him and he is one of only two characters with the authority to give orders to the almost-all-powerful Darth Vader.
Now consider him as Osiric in the 1948 Oscar-winning adaptation of ‘Hamlet’. It’s a small role where he is still playing a villain of sorts who has helped to corrupt the governance of the state, in this case, Denmark. But in a play known for themes like suicide and murder, he plays the character as upbeat, silly, and weird. Two roles played by the same actor, but they elicited vastly different responses from the audience.
Ultimately, it’s easier to beat an opponent that is a laughingstock rather than a serious threat. That’s because a laughingstock is less likely to be seen as a serious option for consideration in the first place.
Winning on ‘Weird’
To win a campaign on ‘weird’, a party has to demonstrate that its values, behaviours, and identity are within the norm, that the majority of voters also exist within that norm, and that their opponents do not. The Democrats are expected to spend some of their convention doing just that by highlighting the notorious ‘Project 2025’, a 900-page roadmap for the fascist overhaul of America crafted by high-ranking Republicans.
While Democrats hope to use the existence of the document to fire up their base, they also hope to use it to separate independent voters and the traditional Republicans from MAGA extremists. Dubbing the promises of Project 2025 ‘weird’ more often than ‘scary’ is crucial to the success of this effort.
Cognitive scientist Nafees Hamid studies why and how people are drawn to join extremist movements. Through his research, he’s determined that people who hold extreme views are more likely to find their way back to the mainstream if they identify their beliefs as existing outside of those held by an in-group they believe to be important. For many voters, those in-groups are their local communities and their own families. That means for many one-time MAGA voters, the path back to normal is most likely to be found through re-alignment with these groups.
Letting the Air Out of the MAGA Balloon
Statewide elections in the fall of 2023 showed how this can work in practice. For years, the voting gap between genders has been widening globally. In 2020, a majority of men voted for Trump, while a majority of women voted for Biden. But on election night last November, elections in red states produced a surprising voter coalition — dads of daughters.
After the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, some political analysts noticed a reversal in the voting intentions of men who are the fathers of daughters. While many had voted Republican in the past and even supported Donald Trump and the MAGA plan for America, they had done so in a world where abortion rights were still constitutionally protected. Despite Democrats warning those rights were on the chopping block under Trump in 2016, many voters didn’t believe it would happen.
In fairness, that disbelief was not unique to that moment. Voters have limited imaginations when it comes to the harms a political movement might deliver. To most voters, both parties are more or less the same, beholden to the same special interests and only interested in the needs of voters in an election year. Voters also have short memories when it comes to politics. While Trump has a well-documented record in office from four years ago, not everyone remembers what that feels like now as whole new struggles have piled up for people over the last four years.
But unlike the ‘what-if’ scenarios of 2016, abortion rights are now actually on the ballot. And men who once identified with many elements of the MAGA agenda now find themselves at odds with it as it puts their own families — specifically their daughters — at risk. Back in 2022, The Cut produced an article called “The Dads Who Got Woke After Roe Fell.” It includes the following excerpt:
“For most of his life, John, who asked to go by his first name only, has leaned right. The 38-year-old was adopted from Colombia and spent nine years in the U.S. military, steeped in pro-gun values, patriotism, and hard work. Though John was sick of war after returning from Iraq in 2007, he has almost always voted for Republicans in Minnesota, where he lives, and on federal ballots. Now he feels betrayed by a country that sent him to fight for democracy abroad while gutting basic rights at home. There is no way he can look his daughter in the eye and say, “I’m going to vote for the government to tell you what to do if you get raped” and become pregnant.”
Last fall in red state Ohio, a ballot measure was put forward to create a constitutional right to abortion in the state. This was a state that, just one year earlier, elected a Republican to the Governor’s seat with 62% of the vote. But when it came to voting for or against abortion rights, 57% of state voters cast a ballot in favour of enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution. The sheer size of that victory tells us that at least some of them were past MAGA voters.
The Freedom Ticket
It’s no surprise then that Democrats are leaning into a campaign frame centred on how their party is the party of true ‘freedom’ that defends human rights while labelling the other guys as ‘just weird.’ These messages have found effective messengers in Harris, a woman and a former prosecutor who has protected people through the law, and Walz, a military vet, former teacher, and hunter who knows his most important job has always been ‘dad’. They are the America that is under attack from MAGA Republican extremism and act as perfect avatars for the vast majority of Americans who share similar life experiences.
Political commentators will give you a long list of reasons why people are drawn to specific political candidates, movements, and ideas. But it’s actually pretty simple: voters cast ballots for the candidates they believe would make similar decisions as they would if they were in their shoes. By targeting voters’ sense of identity and belonging and contrasting that to how MAGA Republicans behave, Democrats are making Trump and Vance’s misalignment with American values the ballot question. And that’s a ballot question Democrats can win.
Theresa is a Canadian communications professional who served as the Director of Communications to Ontario’s Deputy Premier and an election speechwriter for former Premier Kathleen Wynne. She has attended numerous political events in the US, including the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, which saw the historic nomination of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate.
