The term “weird” has become a topline attack on the campaign trail over the last week — particularly between Vice President Harris and former President Trump — and a new survey found that just under 50 percent of Americans say they also fit into that category.
The YouGov poll, published Friday, found that 48 percent of respondents labeled themselves as “very weird” or “somewhat weird.” On the flip side, about 43 percent said they were “not very weird” or “not weird at all.”
Liberal voters were more likely than conservatives to self-identify as “weird,” per the survey.
The results of the poll show that roughly 69 percent of those who identified as “liberal” or “very liberal” also said they were “very” or “somewhat” weird. Just 39 percent of those who claimed to be “conservative” or “very conservative” also said they were at least “somewhat” weird.
Roughly 13 percent of those who labeled themselves liberal said they were “not weird at all,” compared to the 33 percent of conservatives who said the same, the survey found.
The “weird” insult was sparked by the Harris campaign, which has put that label on everything from Trump’s rally where he praised the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lector to Sen. JD Vance’s (R-Ohio) past comments on “childless cat ladies.”
“You may have noticed Donald Trump has been resorting to some wild lies about my record,” Harris said last month at a fundraiser in Massachusetts. “And some of what he and his running mate are saying, it’s just plain weird. I mean, that’s the box you put that in, right?”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), who has been floated to be at the top of Harris’s running mate shortlist, also leaned into the label, reposting a clip of Trump speaking, captioning it: “Say it with me: Weird.”
Vance responded to the label, saying his feelings were not hurt by the insult, instead calling it an “honor.”
“Look, the price of admission — meaning, the price of getting to serve the people of this country — is the Democrats are going to attack us with everything that they have. I think it’s an honor,” he said Friday in an interview on Fox News.
The former president, who selected Vance as his running mate at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month, has thrown the insult back at Harris, calling her a “weird person,” and attempting to distance himself from the moniker.
“Nobody’s ever called me weird.” Trump said Friday on “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show,”
“They’re the weird ones,” the GOP nominee for president said of Democrats. “I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.”
The recent survey “did not attempt to define weirdness or to test in some way whether people are actually weird; it only asked about self-identification as weird.”
It was commissioned following the wave of attacks, and the insult may have resonated with the bases of both parties. While a majority of liberals think conservatives are “weird,” conservative think the same of liberals.
Moderates, on the other hand, do not distinguish heavily between the weirdness of conservative vs liberal voters. But moderates are more likely to say conservatives are weird over liberals, 51 percent to 45 percent respectively.
The YouGov survey was conducted online on Aug. 1 among 3,601 U.S. adults, and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.