The party of “Karens for Kamala”, Sam Brinton, and the infamous Joe Biden monkeypox coordinator are now — rather confidently — making accusations of “weirdness” central to their campaign against Donald Trump.

This is why the GOP spent much of its convention framing the election as one of normies against weirdos. Arkansas Governor Sarah Sanders started using this dichotomy of “normal or crazy” more than a year ago when she delivered the GOP response to Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address. Sanders now deploys it regularly, as do other Republicans. Conservatives are also juxtaposing images of J.D. Vance and his family with, for instance, images of Kamala Harris and drag queens.

The Right is clearly frustrated by how easily this new Harris talking point is taking off — and that’s the bad news for Republicans. Liberal media outlets find gun owners, churchgoers and “Moms for Liberty” weird. They do not find Robin DiAngelo readers and advocates of trans ideology for children to be weird.

This, of course, goes both ways. If you’re a daily Fox News viewer, you’re only about 12% of American adults. If you believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, you’re also about 13% of the country.

Charles Murray detailed this trend more than a decade ago in Coming Apart, a book that arguably previewed the Trump era better than any other. “Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America,” Murray wrote. “At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.”

Back in 2012, Murray contrasted the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement.“People are starting to notice the great divide. The Tea Party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line,” he noted. “The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality.”

Now, these divides are much worse — and they’re forcing each of the two major parties to get weirder and weirder. To some extent, new media allows politicians to silo their messages more than they could in the era of mass media. But what Vance said on a Right-wing podcast before entering politics can easily find its way from conservative media to other channels, and the same is true of what Harris said on a radio show during the 2020 primary election.

We’re increasingly weird to each other. The important cultural difference between today’s haves and have-nots is that their tastes and experiences and daily lives aren’t just about luxury goods: they’re also about luxury beliefs. Because, as Murray documented, educated elites are now concentrated in urban professions such as journalism, their sense of normal is skewed and that bias is powerful in a way the less educated and less wealthy cohort is not.

Politically, this will mean that Speaker Mike Johnson’s advice to his fellow Republicans will be the Trump campaign’s strategy — on paper, at least. “Focus on policy not personality,” he reportedly said last week. Democrats, on the other hand, will likely lean hard into their “weirdness” strategy, and they’re not wrong to think it’ll work. The Left and Right may be increasingly responsive to their weirdest voters, but only one side’s biases is checked by the establishment media.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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