Opinion | The Real Reason Trump and Vance Hate Being Called ‘Weird’

The Democratic Party of George McGovern was, in this narrative, the party of “acid, amnesty and abortion,” the party of chaos, disruption and overreach. Out of touch with the vast American middle, it had cast its lot with cultural elites and antiwar militants. This Democratic Party, said the Nixon campaign, could not relate to the tens of millions ... See more

Through all of this, Republicans still insist that they’re the party of normalcy. This is why they can’t quite deal with the charge that they’re weird. There’s a reason for this. For years, in the American political imagination, Republicans were the normal party and Democrats were the party of weirdness.

Now, stepping back a bit, they shouldn’t be. The signature obsessions of Republican politics since 2020 — election denialism, book banning, abortion bans and the crusades against trans and other gender-nonconforming people — are either unpopular with most Americans or electoral dead weight. Democrats in local, state and federal elections have score... See more

outside the mainstream,