Who is normal and who is weird? When it comes to those of us in the American media, it’s obvious that we are all weird and way too online. Yet part of our job is to gauge, and sometimes even inhabit, the mind of the normie voter. There’s a bit of theatre to this process, in which a cast of supposedly regular people—cabdrivers, people in diners, truck drivers, elementary-school teachers—is paraded upon a stage so that each can deliver a soliloquy about the candidates and the state of the nation. We in the media, the producers of this little play, adjust the lighting and hit the Applause button.

But we are mostly guessing about who these average voters may be. Highly educated upper-middle-class people are hugely overrepresented in the ranks of the national media and national politics, two labor forces with a lot of overlap—many journalists at prestige networks have at least one or two classmates who work on a campaign or on Capitol Hill. The “average voter” gets defined through the speculative synergy of these two groups, and elections can sometimes come down to an imagined common man. This has been happening for a while. In 2006, for example, Rahm Emanuel, then acting as the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, helped spearhead a campaign to win a House majority by recruiting centrist and even right-leaning Democrats who would have Everyman appeal, including the former N.F.L. quarterback Heath Shuler. Whenever the Democrats are in crisis, it seems, someone will point out that the Party’s leaders all come from the same élite and out-of-touch background; those leaders will then shuffle a few steps to the right and venture deeper into the suburbs or the countryside in the name of the common man and what he allegedly wants.

Kamala Harris, by this logic, should tack right. She is a Black and Indian American woman from the Bay Area who ran on a progressive platform in 2020, parts of which she has already, in just the past two weeks, repudiated. But it’s not entirely clear which center-coded turns actually matter to the voters she needs to reach and which ones might just be ignored. Consider the discussion over her Vice-Presidential pick. The conventional wisdom holds that she must choose a white man who can talk to the “common voter,” preferably one from a swing state where he enjoys broad popularity. Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, does not fit the last billing—his state is reliably blue—but his star turn during the past two weeks has depended on video clips in which the former high-school football coach tells viewers that the Republicans are “weird” and want to invade your bedroom and set up a whole bunch of nonsense laws aimed at restricting your freedoms. He has also called Donald Trump a “robber baron” and J. D. Vance a “venture capitalist” and has said, “My hillbilly cousins did not go to Yale.” His appeal, according to the New York Times, can be captured by a string of adjectives that all mean more or less the same thing: “steady,” “down-to-earth,” “everyman.” There is no question that Walz is a talented speaker who can sell a type of Midwestern authenticity without strain or self-importance, which, hypothetically, could sate the concerns of voters who might have misgivings about Harris being Black, or being South Asian, or being a woman, or being too progressive.

But are voters actually swayed by this kind of ticket-balancing? Does it win anyone over? Or is someone like Walz actually more of an aspirational figure for those of us who aren’t bothered by any of Harris’s various identities, because he helps convince us that our political beliefs, however incoherent, fractured, or self-serving, are actually in line with the heartbeat of the country?

In its first two weeks, Harris’s campaign has tried to define both the presumptive Democratic nominee and her supporters as average, and Trump as the fringe radical who wants to unleash Project 2025, a nine-hundred-page blueprint for a revanchist takeover of the country. Walz, with his talk of “weird” Republicans, has been the viral flag bearer on this messaging crusade, but that word has been repeated by a whole host of surrogates, including Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and the senators Chris Murphy and Brian Schatz. The campaign has been lauded by the press for this rhetorical strategy. And “weird” does seem to have tapped into a great sense of relief among liberals who spent the past few months inundated by bad polls, catastrophic campaign performances by President Joe Biden, and then the weeks of uncertainty when it wasn’t clear whether he would stay in the race. “Weird” is a catchall insult that allows liberals to slap back at years of similar aspersions from the right—connected to everything from trans rights to racial justice and abortion rights—and to normalize their personal politics through the imagined average voter, who, through this verbal sleight of hand, is now on their side. When it’s deployed by Walz, even someone like me—an Asian American who works in the media and lives in liberal Berkeley, California—can feel some purchase in a mainstream that values broadly popular policies such as abortion rights, free school lunches for all kids, or, really, whatever you want to slot in there. Its vagueness is its strength—any cause can be average—which is why it has lately been beat into the ground by every liberal politician within spitting distance of a microphone.

Will this reframing be enough to spark a come-from-behind victory in what amounts to a hundred-day election? Maybe. Trump and his running mate, Vance, both have a special talent for alienating large portions of the population—and, in Vance’s case, doing so in a uniquely charmless and nasty way. Thus far, the contours of the “weird” debate have mostly centered around things on which liberals largely agree, such as abortion law and the rights of all sorts of families, with or without children, to be respected rather than sneered at by the likes of Vance. But there will soon come a time when Harris might have to define herself—and, by extension, the party she hopes to lead—along much more contentious lines. This past weekend, a rocket attack that the U.S. and Israel have attributed to Hezbollah hit a soccer field in the Golan Heights, killing twelve children and injuring sixteen more. Israel’s foreign minister then told a reporter from Axios that the attack had “crossed all red lines” and that Israel was “approaching the moment of an all-out war against Hezbollah and Lebanon.” On Tuesday, Israel retaliated with a rocket attack in Beirut. A day later, a top Hamas official was killed, in Tehran, and both Iran and Hamas said that Israel was responsible. The possibility of a regional war in the Middle East now looms, and could shift the Presidential debate toward foreign policy. At a rally this week, Trump said that we were getting close to “World War Three,” and that he could prevent it. He didn’t offer many specifics, of course, but the comment evoked a moment from his debate with Biden, when he bragged that his four years in office had seen “no wars.” His strategy may be to press Harris on foreign policy and to hope that swing voters begin to doubt whether Harris is a serious enough person for the job. Trump himself may not be a serious person, but he’ll have bluster on his side.

Harris will also have to confront the question of the border in a country where half the population, including a significant portion of Democrats, supports the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. The Republican attacks will center around her time as the so-called “border czar” and a moment of bad optics, from June, 2021, when Harris seemed to be pleading with Guatemalan migrants not come to the United States—plus the wider perception, however erroneous and silly, that the Democratic Party favors a policy of open borders. At a rally in Atlanta on Tuesday, Harris told the crowd that she would go back to the bipartisan immigration bill that she said Trump effectively tanked, earlier this year, by pressuring loyalists not to give Biden a potential legislative victory. That bill, as her campaign points out in a recent ad, would have increased the number of Border Patrol agents, if not for Trump’s interference. This is a marked change from the way that the Biden Administration handled criticism about the border, either by ignoring the attacks or pointing out that border crossing had been steadily decreasing. Harris does not seem content to rely on statistics or merely to say that Republicans are lying about the magnitude of the crisis; she has tried to go on offense, and to declare that she is the candidate with the tough border policy, while Trump is simply trying to manufacture a crisis for his own personal gain.

This line of attack is in keeping with the projected image of Harris as a tough prosecutor here to fight for all us normal people against the lies and manipulations of the weirdos and creeps. That persona seems to be working so far: in the two weeks since Biden announced he was stepping down from the race, Harris and a well-coördinated army of messengers have done an impressive job defining the contrast between Harris and the Republicans. How long that will last is hard to gauge, and those who feel confident about Harris’s chances should remember that, just two weeks ago, Trump seemed to be sailing to an easy Electoral College victory. The Harris campaign has been buoyed, no doubt, by the immense relief that many Democratic voters feel after Biden’s withdrawal, and the emergence of a normal candidate who can deliver a speech and put together a busy campaigning schedule—plus the deep exhale from her fellow elected officials, who spent weeks trying to navigate the crisis around Biden’s candidacy. What really feels normal, in fact, might be the reprieve we have been given from the profound weirdness of watching two old men dodder around as they interviewed for the most important job in the world.

In any other time, all this normalcy might have felt necessary given the inherent degree of difficulty in electing a Black woman as President. But, for the first ten or so days of the Harris campaign, her identities—Black, Indian, woman, the child of immigrants—had not taken center stage. One of the ironic benefits of running a Black candidate who promises to run on a more centrist platform is that it gives white liberals more freedom in expressing their unbridled enthusiasm. This was most evident in two online organizing and fund-raising events: White Women: Answer the Call, which reportedly broke the record for the biggest Zoom meeting in history, and White Dudes for Harris, which raised more than four million dollars. There’s no contradiction in this; it makes sense that white liberals would be outwardly fervent about an inclusive ticket, in part because it frees them of the guilt of electing yet another white man. This has also been an implicit aspect of the “weird” critique: it feels good to say that it’s the two white guys who aren’t normal for once.

But any hope that this election might go forward without the expected fixations on Harris’s race and gender were disrupted on Wednesday by Trump’s bizarre appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago. Trump accused Harris, a graduate of Howard University, of only recently claiming a Black identity, absurdly and falsely insisting that she had always been simply Indian before. It is nearly impossible to tell when Trump is being strategically offensive or when he’s acting as the spirit moves him; I suspect that he was trying to signal to a fringe but not insignificant movement within Black politics that distinguishes between the American descendants of slaves and the Black children of immigrants who willingly came to this country. In any case, within a few hours, Trump surrogates had taken up the call, and Jesse Watters on Fox News said, of Harris, “She’s not African American, technically.”

I do not think that Harris or her surrogates, who must hear the echoes of Trump’s birther accusations against Barack Obama, can simply laugh this off, but they should recognize a trap when they see one. Trump, falling in the polls and saddled with a charmless running mate, is drawing his usual retrograde lines around what it means to be an American, whether white or Black. If Trump does, indeed, attack Harris on the war, on immigration, and on her identity, there may come a time when “weird” feels a bit small and juvenile, and will become a memento of a fun and energized period in the campaign. I imagine that day will come soon, if it hasn’t already. And, though I would like to think there is a way for Harris to ignore that, and to keep on with her campaign of good vibes, Trump has almost always been able to spoil his opponent’s campaigns with his lies and his insults. It is his great talent. ♦