DAD'S ON KAMALA'S TICKET: IS TRUMP TOAST?

The sigh of relief on 21 July when Jo Biden stepped down as Democrat presidential candidate was deafening.  Within less than a fortnight the Democrats nominated Vice-President Kamala Harris to replace the outgoing President with ratification to take place at their 19 August National Convention.

After intense consultations, at a Philadelphia rally on 6 August Harris presented Minnesota Governor, Tim Walz, as her Vice-Presidential running mate.  Walz memorably described Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, as “creepy” and “weird”.  Walz’s humour and masterful engagement with his audience in an acceptance speech was striking.   To those watching from afar it suddenly felt like Trump was toast.

The Harris-Walz ticket is nicely balanced.  Kamala Harris, a former senator who now presides over the United States Senate and a former Attorney-General of California, tough on crime, modern and colourful, father Jamaican heritage, mother Indian heritage, husband Jewish.  Walz, white, Lutheran and folksy with a track record of worker-friendly policy in Minnesota and a personal history that might have been designed to counter Trump.
 
The son of an aspiring Nebraska Catholic family, Walz followed his father, a school superintendent, into teaching.  He was his school’s football coach - the nearest thing to a secular priest. In three years, he turned a dud team around to win a state-level schools’ championship.  The stuff of movies.  He also served 24 years as a US Army reservist and, before entering politics in 2005, taught in China, his interest in human rights gained during this rich experience continues.

The religious dimension of the Democrat ticket is perhaps less well balanced.  And given the significant white evangelical Christian support for Trump, this matters.  Since the attempted assassination, Trump has been ‘doing God’ more and has found a fruitful narrative as beneficiary of divine intervention. Kamala Harris is a member of the progressive Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, established in 1852.  It is led by the Reverend Amos C. Brown, a respected former black civil rights activist - taught by Martin Luther King - who supports same-sex marriage.  Tim Walz, raised a Catholic, joined the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ECLA), the most liberal branch of Lutheranism and the largest in Minnesota where it makes up 20% of the state’s Christian community, second only to Catholics. He acknowledges his debt to his Catholic family. “My mum and dad taught us: show generosity to your neighbours and work for the Common Good”.  Walz avoids ideological language and presents down-to-earth policy.  He is also passionately pro-choice seeing it as a basic human right.  His Minnesota State Protect Reproductive Options Act says, “every individual has a fundamental right to make autonomous decisions about the individual’s own reproductive health”.
 
Abortion is a salient issue for US voters.  Some 82% of Democrat voters disapprove of the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that unduly restrictive regulation of abortion by states was unconstitutional.   Polling of all Catholic voters by the respected Pew Foundation in 2022 indicates that only 42% think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, though for the smaller number of those who attend mass regularly (20%) the figure is 68%.  Despite there being some 70 million American Catholics, pro-choice is politically a vote-winning position.

The voting behaviour of other groups in US Christian communities remains important.   White male and conservative Evangelical Christian voters notably helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.  Against that precedent the religious implications of the Harris -Walz ticket might remain a vulnerability.   But there are far too many political issues for religious positions to determine the result of the Election.
 
Trump, now at sea strategically, has fallen back on branding Kamala Harris a ‘left-wing extremist’.  His denunciation of his opponent as a dangerous radical with a ‘crazy laugh’ is manna for Trump’s core constituency, but US Presidential elections are won or lost by swing and undecided marginal voters in seven battle-ground states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada.  A spectrum of local and national issues, several of them falling into the category of social justice, will decide their choice.  The most dangerous for Kamala Harris, whom Trump likes to call Biden’s former ‘border czar’, (though she never had that role), is immigration.

It is the American Constitution itself which gives these battle ground states their peculiar importance.  In the national vote, which is a stage in the overall electoral process, voters determine the members of the national Electoral College which in turn determines who will be the next President.  How many each state is allowed depends on how many representatives the state has in the Federal House of Representatives plus two Senators – a number which is related to each state’s population.  In all but two small states, the winner of the popular vote takes all the Electoral College delegates.   And it is possible to become President without winning the national vote; Donald Trump did this in 2016 with 77 electoral votes more than Hillary Clinton who beat him by 2.87 million popular votes.

In the majority of states, the result of the election is predictable, in UK terms ‘safe’.  California, the largest US state with 54 electoral votes, has been solidly Democrat since 1992 and Minnesota, with 10 electoral votes, Democrat led since Richard Nixon’s Republican landslide victory in 1972.  As in the UK, the strategic priority is to hold your safe seats and gain the marginals.  Fewer than 80,000 combined votes in three out of six of the key marginal states gave Trump the Presidency in 2016.

Kamala Harris has considerable ground to make up and she is making it up fast.  She is currently behind Trump in only one of the marginals, Nevada, and that by a whisker.  Much of the two campaigns is happening and will happen on social media.  She performs well with a lightness of touch, laughing at Trump, and benefits from endorsements and funding from stars such as Beyoncé.  “She does it all with a sense of joy” in Walz’s unexpected words.   The same could be said of Walz himself.  Homey, mildly amusing videos featuring his daughter Hope are attracting the generally pro-Democrat Gen-Z voters (18-27).  There is a touch of the Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey’s, endearing antics. Dad (or Grandad) is on the ticket.

A week is a long time in politics and there are under twelve of them before America chooses a President.  The US has never had a female President, let alone a black woman, and nobody knows how the idea will play with the Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics.  Never underestimate misogyny or racism.  Never forget the power of repeated lies and disinformation.  So even with Dad on the ticket, it is perhaps premature to assume Trump is toast.

See TheArticle 16/08/2024