As clever as a middle school bully, Democrat vice presidential Candidate Tim Walz has been going around calling the Republican ticket, former President Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance, “weird.”

It’s not terribly clever. Walz’s lack of imagination only proves he has not been able to identify any sellable flaws in the Republican ticket that he can work into a nasty nickname.  

At least when Trump workshops a nickname, it has some basis in reality. After Vice President Kamala Harris suggested a plan to place government price controls on grocery stores, Trump called Harris “Comrade Kamala” to underscore that the plan smacks of Communist ideals.

If you are going to call someone weird, you better be able to back it up. And thanks to a survey this week provided by the Napolitan News Service, we can definitively say Walz fits the description of weird in most voters’ eyes.

The survey, conducted online Sept. 3-4 by Scott Rasmussen of RMG Research Inc., asked 1,000 registered voters whether they would consider various items weird or normal?

How about putting tampons in boys’ bathrooms as the Minnesota governor did in state schools last year? Most folks surveyed, 73 percent, said that is weird; 19 percent said it is normal. The rest were undecided.  

What about setting up a hotline to report on neighbors’ COVID restriction violations? Again, the majority (68 percent) thought it was weird compared to those (20 percent) who thought this policy implemented by Walz was normal.

A similar reporting system was put in place in Pennsylvania, where then-Gov. Tom Wolf approved a hotline for citizens to rat out businesses that were ignoring his severe COVID restrictions.

Most survey respondents, 57 percent, said imposing mask mandates for outdoor events was weird; 30 percent think it is normal.

Providing government payments to illegal immigrants is weird too, according to 67 percent of those surveyed; 19 percent said this is normal, and the rest said they were not sure. Walz approved free college and free health insurance for people who illegally crossed the border and settled in his state.

The survey also reveals 64 percent of respondents think it is normal to deport most illegal immigrants while 26 believe that is weird. And 80 percent of respondents, the largest majority in the survey, say it is normal to require employers to verify their employees are legal residents of the United States while 12 percent said that policy is weird.

Just 19 percent of those who responded said homeschooling your children is weird; 71percent said it was normal. But maybe Walz thinks it’s weird because homeschool parents were upset in 2023, when Walz, a former teacher, unveiled education policy changes that included new requirements for homeschool families, embedded ethnic studies into the state’s academic standards, and imposed a mandate for homeschool parents to submit standardized test scores to local school districts and provide proof that they are following protocols set by the school superintendent.

Allowing boys to play girls sports is weird according to 63 percent of those who took the survey while 24 percent said it was normal. While teaching, Walz helped launch school’s first Gay-Straight Alliance and some have called Minnesota a transgender sanctuary under Walz.

Curtailing free speech is weird too. According to 65 percent of respondents, allowing the government to censor social media posts is weird, while 21 percent believe it is normal.

“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy,” Walz said in an MSNBC interview. But he didn’t say who gets to decide what is “hate speech” or “misinformation.”

In a nation where opposing views are so far apart and 21 percent of people in this survey think curtailing free speech is perfectly normal, the majority of voters must engage fully in the election process, and pay close attention to those who wish to decide what you can say, especially if they have a history of cracking down on personal liberties.

The prospect of being reprimanded for saying something that an elected leader deems “misinformation” may be viewed as weird by the majority of Americans, but elections matter. If someone with a minority opinion about citizens’ constitutional rights gets in office, then the majority of people may find themselves living under policies few consider normal.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.