The Walz-Vance Inversion
5 min read
Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have now selected vice-presidential nominees who hail from the Midwest, have humble backgrounds, and bear the expectation of appealing to white working-class voters. But the choices also serve as wagers on two very different theories of electoral politics. The case for Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is that the progressive base will like his policy agenda and swing voters will like his style. For Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, it’s the inverse: The MAGA base will like his style and swing voters will like his policy agenda.
Over the past few weeks, as the Harris campaign publicly considered a range of middle-aged white men, Walz emerged as the preferred choice of not only the online left and Bernie Sanders, but also Democratic Party leaders including Nancy Pelosi, according to The Hill. The selection even drew lavish praise from Joe Manchin, who issued a statement calling Walz “the real deal.” To the Sanders wing of the party, Walz’s appeal stems largely from his policy track record: After Minnesota Democrats won a rare trifecta in 2022, Walz jammed through a host of progressive laws, including universal free school lunch and paid family and medical leave. Meanwhile, pragmatists like Pelosi and centrists like Manchin see a salt-of-the-earth white guy from rural America who can win over Trump voters.
This makes Walz something of a bizarro Vance, electorally speaking. Vance, too, appeals in theory to both his party’s base and up-for-grab voters in the center, but in his case, the roles of policy and style are flipped: His style plays to the base and his economic policies play to the middle.
Vance, who first became famous as a Trump critic, has bet his political fortunes on MAGA maximalism, binding himself as tightly as possible to Trump, to the point of claiming with a straight face that the 2020 election was stolen. But Vance isn’t a pure mini-Trump, because unlike the former president, he appears to have genuinely populist policy objectives. “We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street,” he declared in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. “We’ll commit to the working man.” As a senator, while making headlines with harsh rhetoric on Fox News, he also quietly teamed up with Democrats to introduce legislation that can fairly be described as progressive, including bills that would restrict bank-CEO pay, end tax breaks for corporate mergers, and tighten rail-safety regulations. He may have taken arch-conservative positions on abortion and other social issues, but he is part of an emerging Republican faction that believes it can poach Democratic voters who are economically liberal and culturally conservative. In a 2019 interview, he told me, “What I would really like to do is lose one white educated Silicon Valley employee for every two middle-class Black Americans that we pick up.”
Let’s stipulate that trying to predict the electoral consequences of a VP pick is silly. As one student of the presidency recently said, “Historically, the vice president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact—I mean, virtually no impact.” (This was, of course, Trump himself, responding to a question about Vance, perhaps with a twinge of buyer’s remorse.) Still, if you’re going to try to boost your odds at the margins, then Walz seems like a safer play than Vance. Most voters don’t pay very close attention to the fine details of candidates’ policy positions. This goes doubly for undecided voters, who almost by definition either don’t know or don’t care about the candidates’ differences on policy matters. (If they did, they wouldn’t be wavering between Trump and Harris to begin with.) A case can be made for connecting on ideological grounds with the politically engaged base, while appealing to swing voters with affect and vibe.
Does Walz in fact have that appeal? On paper, sure. Unlike the stereotypical Democratic pol—a cosmopolitan Ivy League–educated lawyer who watches Succession—Walz grew up in a rural small town, coached high-school football, and in 2016 hung on to a congressional seat in a district that Trump won by 15 points. “His midwestern plainspokenness and bluntness,” my colleague David A. Graham observes, “may be an asset to a party that has become negatively associated with technocratic coastal elites.”
But the possibility remains that Walz is, as the National Review editor Rich Lowry put it on X, an “MSNBC anchor’s idea of a folksy politician who can appeal to Middle America.” The Democratic Party doesn’t have the strongest track record here. Amy McGrath, a former fighter pilot, was once supposed to be the next big thing in Kentucky politics. She lost to Mitch McConnell by nearly 20 points in 2020. On the flip side, if you predicted that Sanders, a socialist Jew from the Northeast, would do better in the 2016 Democratic primary than Hillary Clinton among voters who leaned more conservative, then you’re a clairvoyant who should go into day trading. This is to say nothing of the affinity that white working-class voters show for Trump, a New York City real-estate tycoon who unironically patterns his residences after Versailles.
Perhaps the lesson from those examples is that voters respond less to a candidate’s life story than to their style and temperament. Vance really is a son of the working class, and he’s much less popular than Trump, including among Republicans. This may be because he comes across as what he in fact has become: a Yale Law–educated intellectual from the right-wing speaker circuit. He and Walz might both drink Diet Mountain Dew, but if Walz ends up being the better VP pick, it might be because only he seems like the kind of guy who drinks Diet Mountain Dew. To imagine otherwise—to expect undecided voters to carefully parse the vice-presidential nominees’ policy positions—would just be, well, weird.
