Democratic vice presidential candidate Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz speaks with Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris at a campaign rally in Philadelphia, August 6, 2024.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
With their choice of running mate, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have opened a new front in the battle for the White House: the fight for popular support.
Courtship”The real America“This is not a new election strategy, but Trump billionaire Harris, the real estate and media mogul and former San Francisco prosecutor turned politician, are not in favor of either plan.
Approximately 130 million voters Low or moderate incomeBut waging class warfare is just good politics.
It features the presidential nominee’s running mate, Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, whose humble backgrounds are central to their political personas.
During his debut as the Democratic candidate this week, Walz wasted no time in trying to portray Vance as an out-of-touch elitist.
“Just like most people I know who grew up in the Midwest, JD went to Yale,” Walz joked at a campaign rally with Harris in Philadelphia on Tuesday night.
“Vance built a career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, then wrote a best-seller that disparaged that community,” Walz said, referring to Senator Vance’s hit memoir about growing up in a rural area.
“Come on!” the Governor said. “That’s not the Midwest.”
The attack portrayed Trump’s running mate as almost the polar opposite of Waltz, who Harris had just introduced as “the proud product of a middle-class family from rural Nebraska.”
Republican vice presidential nominee Senator J.D. Vance speaks at a campaign rally at NMC-Wallard Inc./Wallard International in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on August 7, 2024.
Adam Boettcher | Getty Images
Vance fired back Wednesday, calling Walz’s comments “pretty odd” and defending his rise through the U.S. social and economic ranks.
“I grew up poor” and “none of us went to law school,” Vance said while campaigning in Michigan.
“The fact that Tim Walz is trying to turn it into a bad thing, the fact that I actually worked my way through college and law school and made something of myself, to me that’s the American Dream,” he said.
The opening showdown sees each presidential candidate vying to position themselves as more authentic, more relatable, and more in tune with average Americans than their opponents.
It’s a classic political tactic, but one that has only come to the forefront since Walz and Vance joined the race.
“There’s a strange sense of relief,” William Howell, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, said in an interview.
“This has been a long-standing feature of our politics, and it’s been accentuated in a time of deep inequality,” Howell said.
“There are many things about this election that are unprecedented, but this is not one of them.”
Democratic vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz speaks as Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris listens during a campaign rally at Temple University’s Liacoras Center on August 6, 2024 in Philadelphia.
Brendan Smiarowski | AFP | Getty Images
The tradition remained alive and well even though President Joe Biden withdrew his reelection bid in July and confirmed Harris as his successor.
He describes himself asMiddle Class Joe” he said, The poorest of the senators He emphasized that he comes from a working-class background in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Harris, who was born and raised in heavily Democratic California and made her name in San Francisco government, cannot make such a claim.
That could pose a major problem for her efforts to win over key constituencies, such as rural and non-college-educated voters, who could have an impact in battleground states that could decide the outcome of the election.
As a news media NOTUS said it“Kamala Harris has a Scranton problem.”
Harris initially avoided discussing Walz’s political stance at Tuesday’s rally, instead praising his military service and decades of experience as a high school teacher and football coach. Walz was elected to Congress in 2006 and served in the House of Representatives until he became Minnesota’s governor in 2019.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on February 8, 2024.
Joe Raedl | Getty Images
Vance, meanwhile, rose to national fame in 2016 with the publication of his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” in which he spoke about, and sometimes criticized, the people and culture of the Appalachian region where he grew up.
He served in the U.S. Marine Corps and later graduated from Yale Law School. He won his first and only political election in 2022 for a vacant U.S. Senate seat in Ohio.
Now, Walz and Vance are running against each other and the top candidates, both using working-class bona fides.
In a Trump campaign fundraising email sent Wednesday morning, Vance criticized Harris for wearing an expensive Tiffany & Co. necklace while appearing in a campaign ad soliciting donations for the presidential campaign.
The email was written in Vance’s voice and had the subject line, “This photo of Kamala makes me angry.”
In it, Vance alleged that Harris had “made a fortune in the D.C. swamp so that she could wear a necklace worth more than two months’ wages.”
A Harris campaign spokesman declined to comment on the Trump campaign emails.
Vance’s attack on the vice president might have been disruptive had it come directly from Trump, who has long bragged about his wealth and fondness for luxury items such as gold.
In 2005, Trump bought his future wife, Melania Trump, an engagement ring. Retail price: $1.5 million That amount would be worth roughly $2.4 million today.
On Monday, Trump was seen wearing a Rolex watch and Tesla Cybertruck interview Podcaster Adyn Ross.
The next day, it was Waltz, not Harris, who pointed out the stark contrast between his own working-class life experience and Trump’s.
“Donald Trump is not fighting for you or your family,” Walz told a crowd gathered in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
“My dad didn’t sit at the kitchen table figuring out how to pay the bills like he did when I was growing up. He sat at the country club at Mar-a-Lago figuring out how to reduce his rich friends’ taxes.”
On Wednesday night, Walz again targeted Trump with the same attack.
“My mother and father taught us to be generous to our neighbors and to work for the common good,” Walz wrote in a campaign email sent under his own name.
“But what about Donald Trump? He sees the world differently. He’s so busy serving himself that he doesn’t know anything about serving.”
A Trump campaign spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.