They are both Midwesterners, both served in Congress from the military, both drink Diet Mountain Dew, a caffeinated soda, and both have just been tapped as potential vice presidents. But those are the only things that two men who are ideologically polar opposites have in common.
Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz is a former geography teacher with a long career in Minnesota high school, where he was also the football coach. The affable 60-year-old was in the National Guard for 24 years. In 2006, he won a seat in the House of Representatives after defeating the Republican incumbent, becoming one of the few Democrats elected in a rural district. He served in Congress for 12 years before running for governor of the state in 2018 and was re-elected four years later.
JD Vance, his Republican opponent, is twenty years younger. He grew up in a very modest family in Ohio, raised by his grandparents. After high school, in 2002, he joined the Marines and was sent to Iraq, but returned very disillusioned with American politics: “A total joke.” He studied political science and philosophy, then entered Yale Law School. He was hired by a venture capital firm run by Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley libertarian who turned Trumpist. At the same time, he published an autobiographical story in 2016, Hillbilly Elegywhich tells of his impoverished childhood against the backdrop of post-industrial America. The book became a bestseller and made him famous.
Vance, anti-abortion, without exceptions
At that time, JD Vance was very anti-Trump, whom he compared to Hitler. But in 2019, influenced by reading Saint Augustine and the French philosopher René Girard, he converted to Catholicism. And some time later made a second conversion, this time to Trumpism. A genuine change of view, say his defenders. His detractors, however, see it as political opportunism. In 2022, he ran for a senatorial seat in Ohio and owed his victory only to the financing of Peter Thiel and the support of Donald Trump.
“JD is licking my ass because he wants my support so much,” Donald Trump will say ironically. Since then, Vance, a great admirer of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has transformed into a mini Trump and fiercely defends him. He presents himself as a member of the “New Right”, a movement in favor of a more populist, more nationalist and more conservative party. He is in favor of a ban on abortion at the federal level, without exceptions, even in cases of rape or incest, calls teachers “enemies” and is resolutely isolationist. On the international level, he is notably opposed to aid to Ukraine. Opinions at the antipodes of those of Tim Walz.
Walz, funny and biting
The unashamed social democrat defends everything that Vance abhors: the welfare state, the fight against global warming, the defense of reproductive rights… Since he has never spoken out on Gaza or Ukraine, his positions are unknown. But he knows China. At the beginning of his career, he spent several months there as an English teacher and is reputed to be able to hold a conversation in Mandarin. The governor of Minnesota can boast of having implemented a whole series of very progressive laws. During his second term, he passed a law to protect the right to abortion, legalized recreational marijuana, introduced free meals for poor children, imposed sick leave and parental leave, gave free access to university for the poorest, toughened gun laws, and limited the price of insulin.
In short, Tim Walz has political experience that JD Vance doesn’t. Elected to the Senate for less than two years, the Republican has a pretty thin track record: he has proposed a bill to ban the federal mask mandate, reduce affirmative action in colleges and allow the prosecution of doctors who provide treatment to transgender teens.
That lack of experience has been apparent since his nomination. Democrats have dug up controversial statements he’s made in the past. In one devastating one, he lashes out at “childless cat ladies who are miserable and regret their life choices, and therefore want the country to be miserable too.” In another, decidedly obsessed with birth rates, he claims that not having kids makes “people more sociopaths.” Faced with the outcry, JD Vance has struggled to counterattack.
In his defense, the current political configuration is not what he had prepared for. When he was chosen, JD Vance planned to fight for the vice presidency with Kamala Harris, an African-American from California who was perceived as left-wing and lacking in oratory skills. But Joe Biden withdrew from the race, and the senator finds himself facing a popular, funny and biting Midwestern governor. Even before he was chosen, Tim Walz began attacking him, calling him “weird” because he is pushing reforms “that no one wants.” Trump’s campaign spokeswoman fired back, accusing the Democrat of being “a dangerous leftist extremist.” “Harris-Walz’s California dream is every American’s nightmare,” she said.
The running mates’ mission in the coming months will be to crisscross the country to convince voters. Both were chosen for their ability to speak to blue-collar and rural populations. They will therefore compete in the Midwest and the “Rust Belt” states, the industrial region in the northeast of the United States, to seduce those disenchanted with politics.
A future televised debate
And of course, the two men will face off in a televised debate, the date of which has not yet been set. A highly anticipated spectacle. During his first campaign rally, yesterday in Philadelphia, with Kamala Harris, Tim Walz gave a spirited speech, peppered with jokes, and thanked the candidate “for bringing back joy”. A very different atmosphere from the Republican rallies where Trump and Vance play on fears and multiply apocalyptic predictions.
That didn’t stop the Democratic governor from slamming his opponent. “Like all ordinary people, I grew up in the middle of America. JD, he went to Yale, had a career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires and then wrote a best-selling book that denigrated his community,” he said, before adding: “That’s not middle-class America.” He repeated his now-popular dig: “These people are unhealthy and, yeah, just really weird.” But he added that he was looking forward to debating him. “That is, if he’ll get off his couch and show up.”
JD Vance announced that he would be traveling on the exact same days and in the exact same states as the two Democratic candidates on the tour. He began on Tuesday, August 5, by organizing a rally in Philadelphia a few hours before Harris and Walz’s. It gathered a few hundred people. The Democrats, for their part, filled a stadium.