California congressman says focus of Harris campaign should be on unity and reaching out to skeptical voters
Congressman and Kamala Harris campaign surrogate Ro Khanna said he doesn’t support the trend among his fellow Democrats of calling Republicans “weird” on the election trail.
“I’m not, in candor, a fan of calling each other ‘weird’ or names, I don’t think that advanced American democracy,” the California US House representative said during a live event with the Guardian at the Texas Tribune festival on Saturday. “I think we have to – in this country, and as a party – not just win, but deserve victory. And to deserve victory means to offer a vision that is going to bring this country together with a common purpose.”
That common purpose, he said, was economic growth, expanding voting rights, women’s dignity, and a “civic religion”.
The term “weird” has been part of a campaign strategy by Harris’s vice-presidential pick Tim Walz and several others as a way of painting opponent Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance as destructive and out of line with US voters.
“These are weird people on the other side,” Walz said in an interview in July. “They wanna take books away, they wanna be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to and don’t, you know, get sugar-coating this: these are weird ideas.
