The persistence of the idea that the default American belongs to a political party that has won the popular vote once since 1988 was weird
By 
However effective the “Republicans are weird” message works as a campaign device, it’s useful because it captures how committed the contemporary Republican Party is to culture war obsessions the are unpopular with most Americans:
“Weird” doesn’t sound like much. But of all the attacks Democrats have levied against Republicans since Trump came down that escalator, this one appears to hit the hardest. Republican politicians seem taken aback by the idea that they’re outside the mainstream, by the charge that their interests and priorities are alienating to the average American.
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 scored win after win in opposition to these and similar preoccupations. In fact, if not for its commitment to this divisive, far-right cultural agenda, the Republican Party might have gotten the “red wave” of its dreams in the 2022 midterm elections.
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.
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Through all of this, Democrats rarely tried to contest the notion that Republicans represented, in some sense, the mainstream of American society. The political press also took the idea that the Republican Party spoke to the so-called heartland of the United States for granted. Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election — on the strength of narrow margins in a handful of postindustrial swing states — only enhanced the sense that Republicans were still the party of a silent majority, even if they hadn’t actually won a majority.
But a funny thing happened after Trump won. He purged the old-line Republicans and brought to prominence a new crop of far-right politicians, activists and media personalities who stood well outside the mainstream. As Trump strengthened his hold on the Republican Party, so too did these figures come to dominate conservative politics nationwide. Out with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan; in with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.
Besides Trump, there is one other living former Republican president. There are three living former Republican vice presidents. There are any number of former high-ranking Republican officials, from cabinet members to party leaders. Few, if any, were present at the Republican National Convention last month. Instead, when the Republicans gathered to nominate Trump a third time for the presidency of the United States, they marked the occasion with conservative celebrities, Silicon Valley reactionaries and a wide assortment of far-right extremists, culminating in the introduction of Senator Vance as Trump’s running mate and heir apparent.
The Republican Party under Trump has fallen so far out of the political and cultural mainstream that the central aim of its most ambitious representatives and apparatchiks is to use the power of the state to bend that mainstream to their will.
And needless to say, the fact that Republicans now have mostly unpopular ideas on both economic and cultural issues as their core agenda is a major part of the reason why they’ve turned hard against democracy.
Anyway, it’s nice that we don’t have to pretend that every niche cultural interest of Southern white guys (remember when national Democratic politicians had to pretend to care about NASCAR?) is something we have to do a lot less of now.
I do like using the theme as a way of attracting disillusioned Republicans to a broader anti-Trump coalition, as the Harris campaign did tonight:
Mesa, AZ Republican Mayor John Giles: I do not recognize my party. I have something to say to those of us who are in the middle: You don’t owe a damn thing to that party. You don’t owe anything to a party that is out of touch and hell-bent on taking us backward. And by all means,… pic.twitter.com/8vpQmdxsPx— Acyn (@Acyn) August 9, 2024