Democrat Tim Walz calls for progress while Republican JD Vance stokes anger against urban marginalization
The candidates for vice president of the United States, Tim Walz and JD Vance, represent an effort by the respective Democratic and Republican campaigns to reconnect with the 20 percent of the American population: the inhabitants of the so-called “rural America,” a social stratum that has been inclined for almost half a century towards conservative positions, increasingly radical as the feeling of marginalization of its voters from urban centers grew.
The Republican candidate, JD Vance, has made this disaffection the banner of his public life. The 40-year-old senator from Ohio, described in 2016 a disconnected America in his personal and best-selling book “Country Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis.” Vance had only been in the Senate for a year when he accepted the request of Republican candidate and former US President Donald Trump to be his running mate.
On the Democratic side is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who has framed his campaign as an applause for the “traditional common sense” of small-town America — Walz, 60, and a teacher by vocation, is a native of the tiny town of West Point, Nebraska — as a bridge to innovation and more progressive values represented in Kamala Harris’ candidacy for the US Presidency.
Vance and Walz held a first and only debate earlier this month, the result of which did not significantly influence their paths in the polls, parallel to that of their possible superiors: Walz would win at the national level, but Vance is more popular in key states that are essential for the final victory in the American electoral college, according to the average of polls collected by the American portal RealClearPolitics.
Vance’s campaign has not been without its hiccups. Unlike Mike Pence, who was a candidate four years ago, the Ohio senator has been the exclusive choice of Trump’s team and does not enjoy much sympathy from the more moderate and traditionalist wing of the Republican Party.
Among other things, Vance has been criticized for his electoral inexperience, his past linked to the same corporate elites he denounces, his inflexibility on issues of sex and gender — from his outright opposition to abortion to his caricature of Democratic female voters as “crazy cat people without children” — and his past criticism of the tycoon, to whom he now seems to dedicate absolute loyalty.
Vance, despite all this, has had no choice but to sail with the wind in his favor to preserve his party’s advantage among rural voters in the United States, who began to become during the 1990s the great pillars of American conservatism.
In 2016, Trump won 59 percent of rural voters. Four years later, that figure rose to 65 percent, according to Pew. And in the 2022 election, Republicans won 69 percent of the rural vote — optimistic percentages for Republicans and which continue with the results of a poll released this week by Forbes/HarrisX and published by Newsweek, which gives Vance 41 percent of voting intention in states considered in dispute compared to 35 percent for Walz.
The Minnesota governor, like Harris, remains unable to turn the polls in the disputed states despite the initial boost of his appearance on the scene — part of the extraordinary turn in the Democratic campaign following Joe Biden’s decision not to seek reelection — when he attacked the pride of extremist supporters of Trump and Vance by describing them as “weirdos,” a comment that Harris incorporated into her campaign during the first and most aggressive weeks.
RURAL PROGRESSIVISM
Walz represents a kind of “rural progressivism” that has not completely disassociated itself from conservative concepts: the governor has issued decrees favorable to vulnerable communities such as LGBTIQ or children at risk of social exclusion, but he has also coincided on numerous occasions with the Republicans, with whom he has voted in favor of financing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or for the tightening of immigration restrictions.
This makes him an affable but diffuse figure: more popular than Vance in the polls, but unable to convince the necessary voters. In fact, the governor has been getting increasingly poor results in local elections (from the 46 percent he won in the state Legislative elections to the 38.2 percent he obtained in the last elections to the position he holds, in 2022).
For Nicholas Jacobs, an adjunct professor of government policy at Colby College, both candidates represent two ways of understanding rural American life and face a fundamental problem: the inability of this population to see themselves reflected in the national political class.
“If you ask rural people if they see themselves represented in these descriptions, either one, I would say no,” Jacobs said in comments reported by the New York Times. “And what I find interesting here is that these highly stylized images of what the countryside means can change affiliations at a given moment, but they do not contribute to clearing up dissatisfaction with the functioning of the political system.”
