Pollak: Harris and Walz Are Running a Divisive Campaign, Not a ‘Joyful’ One

Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota are running a divisive campaign that relies on “in group” labeling of the “other” as a strategy to rally Democratic voters — though it will not appeal to independents.

You may have heard the word “joy” used to describe the campaign. It’s a word first used by Walz in his introductory speech as Harris’s nominee. A more accurate description would have been “relief” — relief that President Joe Biden was finally out of the way.

The real emotion at the core of the campaign is contempt.

Harris’s stump speech — which she repeats, verbatim, at every campaign stop — includes a tag line in which she says: “I know Donald Trump’s type.”

What is that “type”? She conjures up many different categories of criminals, but the essence of her claim is that we ought to be able to stereotype Trump based on groups to which he supposedly belongs.

It is an odd argument for a candidate who has made the most of her membership in various minority and oppressed groups — black, Indian — female — but it is also the strategy of an elitist who has gone to private schools for much of her life and who has coasted to political success based on her connections to powerful political insiders and donors.

Walz apparently invented the term “weird” as a label for former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). It is not clear what, exactly, is weird about them — aside from Vance’s white, Christian, working-class identity, a sign that residents of America’s heartland are now seen by bicoastal elites as a departure from the American norm.

“Weird” is a junior-high putdown that requires no further explanation; “weird” people are simply to be shunned.

As Peggy Noonan — no Trump fan — observed in the Wall Street Journal: “[Walz] always gets personal. He looks as if he likes Trump voters. But listening to him this week I thought: He doesn’t, not at all.”

Thus the Democratic ticket is running on a strategy that encourages supporters to stereotype and marginalize those who are on the other side.

It is a losing strategy, historically speaking, one deployed by Hillary Clinton in 2016 in her infamous attack on the “alt-right.”

Generally, successful campaigns try to broaden their appeal, not to encourage their supporters to close ranks.

But Harris and Walz are gambling that rallying Democrats alone will be enough to win.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.