The word “weird” has become a major campaign attack word over the past week, particularly between Vice President Harris and former President Trump, and a new poll finds that nearly 50% of Americans say they fall into that category.
A YouGov poll found that Released on Fridayfound that 48 percent of respondents perceived themselves as “very different” or “somewhat different.” Conversely, about 43 percent said they hadn’t changed much or hadn’t changed at all.
The survey found that liberal voters were more likely to identify themselves as “weird” than conservative voters.
The poll found that about 69% of people who identify as “liberal” or “very liberal” also say they are “very” or “somewhat” strange, while only 39% of those who identify as “conservative” or “very conservative” say they are at least “somewhat” strange.
About 13% of people who identify as liberals said they weren’t weird at all, while 33% of conservatives said the same, according to the survey.
The “bizarre” insult was hatched by the Harris campaign, which has applied the label to everything from a Trump rally praising fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter to past comments made by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) about “childless cat ladies.”
“Some of you may have noticed that Donald Trump has told some outrageous lies about my record,” Harris said at a fundraiser in Massachusetts last month. “Some of the things he and his running mate are saying are just plain bizarre. I mean, that’s what you put in that box, right?”
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (Democrat), who has been mentioned as a leading contender for Harris’ running mate, also echoed the label, reposting a video of Trump’s speech with the caption, “Say it with me: bizarre.”
Vance told the label he wasn’t hurt by the insult, but rather that it was an “honour.”
“Look, the price of admission, the price of serving the people, is that the Democrats are going to attack us with all their might, and I consider that an honor,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News on Friday.
The former president, who picked Vance as his running mate at last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, has responded by insulting Harris, calling her a “weird person,” and has sought to distance himself from the nickname.
“Nobody has ever called me a weirdo,” Trump said on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” on Friday.
“They’re weird people,” the Republican presidential candidate said of Democrats. “I’m a lot of things, but I’m not weird.”
The recent survey “did not attempt to define weirdness or in any way test whether people are actually weird, it just asked about self-perception of being weird.”
The remarks were solicited following a series of attacks, and the insulting comments may have resonated with bases on both sides of the aisle: Most liberals think conservatives are “weird,” but conservatives also think the same of liberals.
Meanwhile, moderates make less of a distinction between the weirdness of conservative and liberal voters, but they are more likely to say conservatives are weird, 51 percent vs. 45 percent, respectively.
The YouGov poll was conducted online among 3,601 U.S. adults on August 1 and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
