Democrats are hard selling Kamala Harris’ message that Trump and Vance are ‘weird’

Prominent Democrats championed Vice President Kamala Harris’s bid for the presidency on Sunday, one week after the official launch of her campaign, as she seeks to capitalize on a wave of support coalescing around her candidacy.

The Democratic Party’s sudden unification was on full display across the broadcast and cable news networks on Sunday as the party’s biggest stars lined up to deliver talking points on three issues: the strength of Harris’s resume, the perceived weirdness of Trump and his vice presidential candidate JD Vance, and Joe Biden’s lame-duck agenda item, Supreme Court reform. Today marked the first round of Sunday news talk shows (minus Meet the Press, pre-empted by the Olympics) since Biden’s decision to drop out of the race was announced last Sunday afternoon.

Speaking on various shows Sunday were three of the party’s younger, nationally-prominent members, Maryland Governor Wes More, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also made an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation. Gov Tim Walz, who like Buttigieg has been considered on the list of potential running mates for Harris this fall, appeared on CNN.

Moore, Pritzker, and Schumer all led with defenses of Harris and her long record as a prosecutor, senator and finally vice president, the former being a characteristic which many of Harris’s allies have said will create a sharp contrast with convicted felon Donald Trump on the debate stage and at the ballot box.

“Remember, this is a person who was a prosecutor,” noted Pritzker on ABC’s This Week. “She's somebody who understands that making the case is how you win, that going out there, every day prosecuting the case, especially against a 34-time convicted felon and, frankly, a congenital liar [is how you win].”

Moore fought back against the Trump campaign’s attempts to paint Harris as a radical and supporter of efforts to defund or cut funding to law enforcement: "It's remarkably disingenuous to call someone who was a prosecutor for her entire career someone who is ‘soft on crime’ or someone who believed in ‘defund the police’.”

The VP contenders, meanwhile, sharpened their images as the party’s attack dogs — a traditional campaign role of the vice presidential nominee, and one Harris herself played into as she had taken to the trail in support of the Biden-Harris ticket up until this point.

Buttigieg returned to familiar stomping grounds: Fox News, where he jousted with anchor Shannon Bream on Fox News Sunday.

“Donald Trump made a promise when he was a candidate — one of the few promises he actually kept, by the way — you know, he didn’t keep his promise of six per cent economic growth, he didn’t keep his promise to drain the swamp,” said the Transportation secretary, veering off as he spoke about Trump’s promise to pack the Supreme Court with conservatives who would overturn Roe vs Wade. He went on to go back and forth with Bream over whether Trump was responsible for throwing the US into a manufacturing recession before the Covid pandemic hit.

Walz, meanwhile, honed in on a message he and Democrats writ large delivered successfully in the past week; labelling Republicans “weird”, after he painted JD Vance with the insult over the Ohio senator’s remarks about unmarried women and Americans without children. Vance has said Americans who fit either label should not be presidents or political leaders, and should have less of a say at the ballot box.

The governor of Minnesota expanded that “weird” description to attack Trump’s behavior on Sunday, quipping that in six years of political life, he’d never seen the former president laugh normally.

“It’s true that Donald Trump is going to put women's lives at risk and wants to end constitutional liberties. But also just listen to the guy. He's talking about Hannibal Lecter and electrocuting sharks,” Walz said on CNN’s State of the Union. “That is weird behavior.”

Schumer, a key ally of Biden’s and Harris’s in the Senate who nevertheless was reported to be part of the effort to ask the president to back down from the 2024 race, also joined in on the pile-on against Vance in his own interview on CBS. But he also spoke about what is likely to be the last big policy fight of Joe Biden’s one-term presidency: court reform, which has become a major issue of concern for both Democrats and many centrists as an increasingly right-leaning Supreme Court has been revealed to effectively allow its members to live lavish lifestyles funded by right-wing donors with political interests (if not specific cases) before the Court itself.

The involvement of the spouse of one justice in the effort to overturn the 2020 election based on false pretenses of fraud has also riled many who now argue that the Court is little more than a conservative policy engine.

“The idea that wealthy individuals, many of them right-wing, can both pay for cases before the court and at the same time give justices gifts or trips is outrageous. And frankly, Chief Justice Roberts isn’t doing enough to curb it,” Schumer told Face the Nation guest host Robert Costa.

The unified Democratic firing line coming out on Sunday came in sharp contrast to the Republicans, who have yet to emerge with their own effective message to counter Harris’s “honeymoon” period. Some allies of the former president have joined in the argument that Harris should not be treated as the presumptive nominee and complained that the Democrats should face legal challenges to force Biden to run — but those potential challenges are thought by legal experts to be far-fetched.

Lindsey Graham emerged on CBS as the lone defender of Vance this week as Republicans struggle to respond to a surging Harris campaign, launched just one week ago today. In that one-week span, Harris campaign officials say the vice president has raised more than $200m from donors while polling has seen Democrats bounce back in five major swing states.

Graham, in his defense of Vance’s assault on single women and other Americans who he smeared as not having “stakes” in the country seemingly that the Democratic Party’s support for LGBTQ+ Americans was Vance’s intended target.

"You should never say anything to hurt anybody's feelings, but when you look at all these interviews by JD, he was talking about how the Democratic Party has abandoned the traditional family."