The US Vice Presidential candidates, Tim Walz and JD Vance, represent an effort by the respective Democratic and Republican campaigns to reconnect with 20 percent of the US population: the inhabitants of so-called “rural America”, a social stratum inclined for almost half a century towards conservative positions, increasingly more radical as the feeling of marginalization of its voters with respect to 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 a disconnected America in 2016 in his best-selling personal book, ‘Hittle Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.’ Vance had only been in the Senate for a year when he accepted the request of Republican candidate and former President of the United States, Donald Trump, to be his running mate.
On the Democratic side is the governor of Minnesota, 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 lower case town of West Point, Nebraska — as a bridge to innovation and the more progressive values represented in Kamala Harris’ candidacy for the Presidency of the United States.
Vance and Walz held a first and only debate earlier this month whose result did not significantly mark their path in the polls, parallel to that of their possible superiors: Walz would win nationally, but Vance is more popular in key states and essential for the final victory in the North American electoral college, according to the average of surveys collected by the American portal RealClearPolitics.
Vance’s campaign has not been without its ups and downs. Unlike Mike Pence, a candidate four years ago, the senator from Ohio has been an exclusive decision of the Trump team and does not enjoy much sympathy from the more moderate and traditionalist wing of the Republican Party.
Among other things, Vance has been tarnished by his electoral inexperience, his past ties to the same corporate elites he denounces, his inflexibility on issues of sex and gender — from his adamant opposition to abortion to his caricature of Democratic voters as “crazy.” of childless cats” — and his past criticism of the tycoon, to whom he now seems to dedicate absolute loyalty.
Vance, despite all this, has only had 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 the great pillars of North American conservatism during the 1990s. .
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 elections, Republicans won 69 percent of the rural vote; optimistic percentages for Republicans and that continue with the results of a survey presented this week by Forbes/HarrisX and published by Newsweek, which gives Vance 41 percent of voting intention in states considered in dispute compared to Walz’s 35 percent .
The Minnesota governor, like Harris, remains unable to turn around the polls in battleground 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 pursue the election. reelection –, when she attacked the pride of extremist supporters of Trump and Vance by describing them as “weird,” a comment that Harris incorporated into her campaign during the first and most aggressive weeks.
RURAL PROGRESSISM
Walz represents a kind of “rural progressivism” that has not completely separated itself from conservative concepts: the governor has promulgated 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 tightening immigration restrictions.
This makes him an affable but diffuse figure: more liked 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 that he won in the state Legislative elections to the 38.2 percent that he obtained in the last elections to the position he holds, in 2022).
For the associate professor of Government Policy at Colby College, Nicholas Jacobs, both candidates are representatives of two ways of understanding rural North American life and that they face a fundamental problem: the inability of this population to see itself reflected in the national political class. .
“If you ask people in the countryside if they see themselves represented in these descriptions, either of them, I would say no,” says Jacobs in comments reported by the ‘New York Times’. “And what I see here as interesting is that these very stylized images of what the countryside means can change affiliations at a given moment, but they do not contribute to dispelling dissatisfaction with the functioning of the political system.”
