Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris is welcomed by running mate Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz before she delivers remarks at a campaign rally in Eau Claire, Wis., on Aug. 7.Kerem Yücel/The Associated Press
For months, crowds of Democratic Party supporters have been chanting “Lock him up!”
Then the party faithful began calling Donald Trump and his acolytes “weird.”
Then, this week, Tim Walz, in his first speech as the newly installed Democratic vice-presidential candidate, made a jab at his Republican opponent, J.D. Vance.
“I’ve got to tell you, I can’t wait to debate the guy. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up,” Mr. Walz said. To anyone paying attention to the digital conversation around the election, it was an obvious reference to a fictitious anecdote that had circulated about Mr. Vance, a sofa and an odd sexual proclivity. The story has, for weeks, been thoroughly debunked.
Yet Mr. Walz was eager to turn that fiction into a punchline. “You see what I did there?” he said, as the crowd cheered and laughed.
For much of the past decade, fact-checkers and political opponents have criticized Mr. Trump for his use of inflammatory speech and his deliberate propagation of mistruths.
Now, Democrats, under their new presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, are employing some of the same tactics, a sign of the sweeping change to the conduct of U.S. politics wrought by Mr. Trump’s success.
“The Harris and Walz party is just kind of taking a page out of the Trump playbook – trying to do some wild and crazy social-media stuff,” said Fred Davis, a celebrated Republican advertising specialist.
Democrats have argued that facts are on their side. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has spent years calling opponents names, belittling them, making thinly veiled appeals to violence against those who stand in his way and falsely accusing them of advocating for horrific policies.
But in decades of political work, “I haven’t seen anything even close to this before,” said Mr. Davis, who was a media strategist for the presidential campaigns of both George W. Bush and John McCain. He recalled Mr. McCain prohibiting the use of certain words that could be seen as racially charged in political advertising against his opponent, Barack Obama.
For Mr. McCain, winning came second to being honourable, Mr. Davis recalled.
Such rhetorical restraint has become a relic of a bygone era.
This year has brought a U.S. election like no other. The surprise withdrawal of Joe Biden from the campaign means three of the four main contestants only became candidates for president and vice-president in the past few weeks. Both sides have raced to define their opponents before they have a chance to do so themselves.
Democrats say their party has little choice.
“It’s great to go high. But you can’t go high consistently if someone” – Mr. Trump – “is going to just go low and lie and make things up and appeal to the poorest instincts of people,” said Ed Rendell, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee and former governor of Pennsylvania.
He defended the Democratic attacks as being different in tone and in truth from those of Republicans. The chants of “lock her up” at Trump rallies in 2016, for example, were directed toward a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who had not been found guilty of any crimes, as Mr. Trump has.
And, Mr. Rendell said, “a lot of what we do is based on humour. It’s not biting and vicious.”
The couch story began circulating when a social-media user falsely claimed the anecdote had appeared in Mr. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. The online ridicule continued even after it became widely known that there was no such passage in the book.
“They found a first printing which had that story in it,” Mr. Rendell said, referencing a subsequent rumour about the supposed story – this one, too, baseless.
Republicans, meanwhile, were quick to respond in kind, promoting another narrative that is both bogus and salacious. After a fake news article circulated that claimed Mr. Walz had been hospitalized from “reportedly overingesting horse semen,” the narrative was propagated on social media by right-wing broadcaster Jack Posobiec and Tyler Bowyer, a senior executive at the influential pro-Trump political advocacy organization Turning Point Action, and even by Donald Trump Jr., the son of the former president.
The horse story is thoroughly false – dismissed as “a joke” even by InfoWars, the far-right conspiracy site.
But it has circulated as Republicans probe for vulnerabilities in their new Democratic opponents. Mr. Trump has questioned Ms. Harris’s identity as a Black person (her parents were Black and South Asian), and others have criticized her laugh and her liberal policy record. Republicans, meanwhile, have accused Mr. Walz of inflating his military credentials.
“It’s the right wing trying to throw everything at this team to see what will stick,” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic political strategist. A U.S. presidential contest, he said, tends to be less about policies than personality. “It’s about trust. And who you like. Literally, it’s a popularity contest.”
The Harris campaign has made its own thrusts at Mr. Trump, using social media to describe his “agitating, grating voice,” mock the size of his rally crowds and call him “low energy.”
Mr. Davis is bracing for worse to come in the hard-fought weeks that will follow the Democratic National Convention later this month.
“It’s just going to be stark-raving mad,” he said.
U.S. voters are preparing to elect a president who will be arguably the most powerful person on Earth. “And they’re treating it kind of like a small-town mayor’s race or something,” Mr. Davis said.
He sees little prospect of a return to more dignified discourse.
“The genie has been let out of the bottle.”