The Republican Party of today is not a serious party: They are a party of schoolyard bullies.

When dealing with a schoolyard bully, there are two options: One is to punch him in the mouth. This might result in getting suspended from school, or having the bully come back the next day with several of his friends to hurt you worse than you hurt him. The other option? Mock him relentlessly in front of everyone — and get all of your friends to join in on the mockery — until he cries to the teacher. Yes, the teacher may scold you after class. But when a bully is subjected to public humiliation, that almost certainly means he won’t be able to bully anyone else. And the teacher may even be quietly relieved.

Since she became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has taken a decidedly different tone when talking about her Republican opponents. And this strategy is paying dividends. If she prevails in November, this approach could be a blueprint for how candidates challenging MAGA Republicans across the country could beat back the far right in their own cities, states, and congressional districts.

Republicans desperately don’t want to be called “creepy” or “weird”

The MAGA movement and the Republican Party it has consumed have been bullying America for the better part of a decade. This goes far beyond simply pushing for tax cuts for wealthy people and curbing regulations on big business: It’s delved into an obsession with regulating the kind of sex people are having, forcing children to have their genitals inspected before they can play sports, and requiring pregnant individuals to be monitored on a national database among other extreme measures.

Former President Donald Trump picking Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate appeared to confirm that his campaign would be doubling down on those policies. Vance has suggested that “childless cat ladies” are forcing a progressive agenda on Americans, called to “punish” adults who don’t have children with higher taxes, believes parents should get more votes than non-parents, and once called for a “federal response” to pregnant individuals who travel out of state to get abortions. The chief architect of the far-right Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian Project 2025 initiative even said that he was “rooting” for Trump to make Vance his running mate.

This is all objectively terrifying. But Democrats are now starting to plainly embrace other labels for the GOP’s leaders and policies: They’re “creepy” and “weird.”

Minnesota Democratic Governor Tim Walz – thought to be on Harris’ running mate shortlist — was the first to do this on national cable news, saying the GOP had “weird ideas,” like inserting the government into women’s exam rooms and deciding what books children should and shouldn’t read. The vice president soon followed suit, sending out a press release in late July calling Vance a “creep.”

This line of attack is entirely unexplored terrain for the party that used to abide by former First Lady Michelle Obama’s moniker, “when they go low, we go high.” But the “creepy” and “weird” attack strategy is provoking a typical reaction from the party of bullies: They’re crying to the teacher, as former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy recently did on X (formerly Twitter).

“This whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from the Democrats is dumb and juvenile. This is a presidential election, not a high school prom queen contest… Win on policy if you can, but cut the crap please,” tweeted the candidate whose platform included railing against “the cult of radical gender ideology.”

Ramaswamy’s tweet gave Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) an opening to show her millions of followers how to apply even more pressure when Republicans squirmed: Explain exactly why the GOP platform is so weird and creepy.

“Being obsessed with repressing women is goofy,” she wrote. “Trying to watch what LGBTQ+ people are doing all the time is abnormal. Punishing people who don’t have biological offspring is creepy.”

“It’s an incel platform, dude. It’s SUPER weird,” she added. “And people need to know.”

Republicans’ defense against this attack ends up confirming it

Republicans have so far not been able to distance themselves from the “weird” and “creepy” labels, and are instead only demonstrating why that branding is apt. Media Matters for America discovered a clip of far-right Daily Wire host Andrew Klavan responding to Democrats’ latest attacks on their weird approach to regulating women by insisting that women, in fact, need to be regulated by men for their own good.

“[T]he central purpose of every society is to figure out the distribution of women because women are valuable,” he said. “But the big lie that the government wants to tell you… is that women can take care of themselves. And women hate the idea that they can’t take care of themselves, but women can’t take care of themselves… Women have to find different ways of being safe, and one of those ways is finding a man to protect them.”

It isn’t just Klavan who is embracing weird, backward ideas about women. In Project 2025’s 920-page blueprint for the next Republican administration, authors call for a total ban on pornography on page five of the document (the far right uses the term “pornography” to include anything remotely related to LGBTQ+ issues). Project 2025 calls for the federal government to primarily recognize “Biblically based” marriages (pg. 481) and discourages working “on the Sabbath” (pg. 589). One of Project 2025’s partner organizations — the Center for Renewing America — has called for ending no-fault divorce, which will keep women trapped in miserable marriages. Vance himself has suggested that the “sexual revolution” convinced women that they should “shift spouses like they change their underwear,” and that even “violent” marriages should continue for the sake of a couple’s children. 

The GOP’s vice presidential nominee has effectively proven himself to be the perfect embodiment of the “weird” and “creepy” attack. His continued presence on the Republican ticket serves as a vehicle to confirm Democrats’ newfound way of defining their opponents. 

Vance’s perception as weird resulted in one X/Twitter user fabricating a myth that his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, includes a passage about Vance committing a sex act with a couch. The rumor went viral before the Associated Press ended up writing a fact-check entitled “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” In February, Vance wrote a tweet that read, “maybe the internet was a mistake,” which showed a video clip entitled “woman gets violated by a dolphin and enjoys it.” The words “woman” and “dolphin” showed up in bold, which some X users noted meant that Vance searched for content featuring those two words. Fact-checking website Snopes confirmed that Vance did indeed search for posts that contained the words “dolphin” and “woman.”

In an essay for Defector, editor Barry Petchesky elaborated on why the “weird” label seems to be so fitting for the Republican Party in 2024, and why their flavor of “weird” is so off-putting to objective observers.

“It resonates with normal people, who just want to live their lives and keep the government out of their underwear and have Thanksgiving dinner without their weird uncle starting some weird fight about some weird Fox News talking head who is still obsessed about finishing fifth in a college swim meet many years ago,” he wrote. 

“[T]heir weirdness is the type of weirdness that makes them unpleasant to be around,” he continued. “And that weirdness, to a normal person, is the same sort of weirdness that would make them highly unpleasant as an omnipresence for the next four years. Do not underestimate the value of that to voters.”

It’s not wrong to call these people and their ideas frightening. But opting instead to mock them and simply observe that they are “weird” and “creepy” effectively removes the mask of seriousness and respectability in which Republicans couch their policies. Bullies don’t mind being perceived as scary or intimidating, as it gives them power. But outright mockery no longer allows them to be taken seriously. When a serious person threatens to ban abortion, they’re a threat. But when someone wearing a rainbow wig and a big red nose and funny shoes says that children’s genitals should be inspected before they can play school sports, they can be ridiculed and dismissed like the clowns they are.

In July of 2015 — roughly a month after a white supremacist murdered nine people and injured one at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina — a debate was raging about whether it was still appropriate to publicly display the Confederate flag (the Charleston shooter took photos of himself posing with Confederate flags). A group of Ku Klux Klan members carrying Confederate flags demonstrated in public, and were met with loud counter-protests and condemnation from the community. But one particular counter-protest of a man mockingly playing a sousaphone while following the KKK went viral, garnering more than seven million views.

The last week of July 2024 may be remembered as the week that turned the election around. The doom and gloom that plagued Democrats in the month following President Joe Biden’s historically poor debate performance was erased almost overnight. This sudden shift in vibes was partially due to the emergence of a young, energetic, vigorous candidate who fired up her base to donate more than $200 million and enlisted 170,000 campaign volunteers in the span of a week. But the other vibe shift was absolutely the product of Democrats going on the offensive and being able to brand their opponents with a surprisingly accurate label that they have been unable to shed.

Republicans are used to having arguments be conducted on their terms, with their framing. The GOP was able to successfully shift the Overton Window of acceptable political discourse to the hard right in convincing Biden and top Democrats in Congress to embrace what they called “the most conservative border security bill in four decades” only to tank it because it didn’t go far enough. Democrats arguing with Republicans on “late-term abortions” allowed for some in the GOP to propose 15-week abortion bans as a compromise, even though most pregnant individuals don’t even know they’re pregnant until after a missed period or two — making 15 weeks effectively a near-total ban. 

But Democrats’ “weird” discourse is also weird in that it’s the first time in recent memory that Democrats have forced Republicans to play defense instead of constantly being on the attack. One image circulating on social media lately is the “awkward party reaction” meme, which shows a group of young women holding ubiquitous red cups and wearing a disgusted expression while looking at the camera (the implication being that the person they’re staring at said something that made everyone deeply uncomfortable). This is actually an adequate depiction of how normal people perceive Republicans when hearing about their policies.

The GOP and the far-right echo chamber it inhabits has gotten so weird that simply being called that has caused them to panic. Their disturbing ideas and grotesque standard-bearers have made everyone in the house party uncomfortable for too long. And this November, they’ll be shown the door.

Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.