What Walz v Vance tells us about the US presidential election
As the US hurtles towards another election, what do Donald Trump's and Kamala Harris’s running mates mean for their prospects? Can JD Vance and Tim Walz truly sway key voters?
To a certain kind of 2016 American liberal, desperate to understand how Donald Trump – Donald Trump! – had won the presidency, JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy provided something of a crutch. In his less than sparkling prose, Vance detailed a life growing up in the poorest regions of Appalachia, a book which at least in theory elucidated the suffering of the white working class in ‘flyover country’ that had voted overwhelmingly for the New York property developer. Few of those liberals would have been quite so enamoured by the book and its author – whom the New York Times at the time said was “advancing the conversation” with a “compassionate” memoir – if they’d known the journey Vance was about to embark on.
From describing him privately as having the potential to be “America’s Hitler,” Vance is now at Trump’s side as his vice presidential pick. And the former president’s decision to pick Vance as his running mate could well be the single most consequential moment of the entire election campaign.
A gendered poll
If Trump’s potential path to the White House wasn’t clear already, it certainly was on picking Vance. An election that was already being described by pollsters as the most gendered poll in American history when Joe Biden was at the top of the Democrat ticket has only become more split along those lines with the ascension of Kamala Harris to the nomination. The unearthing of various Vance comments from years past (not least his criticism of ‘childless cat ladies’) and his hard-line stance on abortion – illegal, everywhere – have unsurprisingly done little to increase Republicans’ favourability among women. Extraordinarily, women favour the Democrats by more than 20 points this year according to a recent Suffolk University / USA Today poll. Men, meanwhile, favour Trump by 13 points per the same polling.
Enter, then, Tim Walz, selected as Kamala Harris’s running mate after an intensive weekend of interviews with her top team. The Minnesota governor has entered the wider American consciousness late on: a former military man, high school football coach, and hunter, his folksy charm has won friends since his elevation. His one-word description of Trump, Vance and friends – “they’re weird” – went viral, and his rescue tabby Honey has become social media catnip, not least after Trump’s extravagant claims about the eating habits of Haitian immigrants.
Working class votes
But the question is not whether Walz would appeal to TikTok and Instagram users or make it more likely the once-hardline prosecutor Kamala Harris can win endorsements like Taylor Swift’s. It’s whether he can buttress the Democrats’ traditional appeal among the working class, so disrupted by the Trump project.
This is the first election, for instance, that the Teamsters – America’s all-powerful, all-trades union – will not endorse the Democrat candidate since 1996. And Trump and Vance are finding plenty of support among disaffected white youngsters in the parts of the country that matter most; the swing states of Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, whose electoral college votes regularly decide the eventual outcome at a national level.
Walz has become a regular visitor to all three. A recent campaign rally in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, drew 3,000 voters; when Walz stars in Harris-approved ads, he is invariably surrounded by hard-working, often white, men. “He identifies with everyone. If there was ever a Joe Schmoe or a John Smith, Tim Walz is that guy,” a local Dem told a Politico reporter at the event. Critics say Walz has questions to answer on runaway spending as governor and embellishes his military record.
Remembering the Veep
There remains a question among pollsters as to whether vice presidential picks matter. Even the most politically minded will struggle to remember, for instance, Hillary Clinton’s VP choice in 2016 – Tim Kaine – or Mitt Romney’s in 2012. Fundamentally, as Walz regularly says, Americans will be presented with a choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
But in a divisive election that has already had its share of drama – from Joe Biden’s departure from the fray to the attempted assassination of Trump – both party’s candidates are looking for any advantage they can.
For Republicans, Vance represents a perfect double-down on a strategy to appeal to disaffected working class men; for Democrats, Walz they hope will serve as an effective counterweight to accusations the party has been captured by extreme, coastal lefties more interested in pronouns and Palestine than Palestine, Ohio, and working-class jobs. Early polling suggests the latter’s strategy has been more effective than the former’s. But there is still a long way to go yet.
Andy Silvester is a journalist and former editor of City AM.
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