There is a strange symmetry in the vice presidential picks of the two presidential candidates. There are some superficial differences: Republican J.D. Vance is 40, Democrat Tim Walz is 60. Vance has a beard; Waltz is bald.
The similarities go far beyond military service: Both men were selected as presidential candidates at exciting times: former President Donald Trump after a landslide victory in a debate against President Joe Biden and surviving an assassination attempt, and Vice President Kamala Harris after taking a better-than-expected lead in the polls.
Both may reflect that poll leads can disappear and that their leads weren't all that impressive anyway: Trump never reached 50% over Biden, and Harris' numbers are nowhere near the 4.5 percentage point popular vote lead that enabled Biden to win an Electoral College majority by just 42,918 votes in three states.
As is often the case in politics, optimism prevailed. Each candidate picked a candidate with a track record that highlighted their departure from party traditions and who seemed less likely than others to appeal to voters disappointed by either option. Ms. Harris was nominated online before the convention.
Vance has transformed from a scoffer at Trumpism in 2016 into a true believer in a demotic Republican party that reflects the cultural and economic discontent of many in the working class. “Demotic” has the same Greek root as “democracy.” He explicitly defends tariffs, ridicules aid to Ukraine and extolls family values not just in the abstract but with provocative references to “childless cat ladies.”
Walz, a native of Blue Earth County, Minnesota, may occasionally vote centrist in Congress, but he has come to represent a metropolitan Democrat whose majorities in metropolitan areas of more than 1 million people come each election cycle not from racial minorities but from white college graduates.
In May 2020, he was sympathetic to rioters and hesitated before sending in the National Guard, called for a “functional ceasefire” in Gaza, and signed a bill to provide sanitary napkins in boys' bathrooms in grades 4 through 12.
The vice presidential race is a loaded environment for both sides: Before the nomination, Mr. Waltz led Democrats in calling Mr. Vance a “nutjob,” and Republicans are sure to respond fiercely.
And the top candidates offer more targets: Trump inexplicably attacked the Republican governor of target state Georgia, suggesting he didn't know Harris was black, while Harris, if she were to allow reporters to ask questions, may have to explain why she instructed campaign staff to tweet abandoning her 2019 support for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, banning fracking and eliminating private health insurance.
The selection of Vance and Walz can be explained as an attempt to set the party's course for the long-term future: Democrats will outlast the 78-year-old Trump, and metropolitan Democrats will expand Harris's coastal California base to areas within a plane ride.
But in the short term, the election of Vance and Walz increases the likelihood that both parties will achieve the separation of powers — majorities in both houses of Congress and the White House — that they have sought in every presidential election this century, as Democrats did in 2008 and 2020 and Republicans did in 2004 and 2016.
The 2022 election results show that the electoral track record of either vice presidential candidate adds nothing to the attractiveness of their parties.
Vance won his Senate seat in Ohio with 53% of the vote, the exact same percentage Trump got in 2020. He won 43% of the vote in the Cleveland-Akron metropolitan area and 45% in Columbus, both identical percentages to Trump, and won 54% of the vote in the Cincinnati metropolitan area, which includes his childhood hometown of Middletown, a full percentage point higher.
In the rest of the state – which includes the smaller metropolitan areas of Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown, which accounted for 43% of the state's vote – Vance received 62% of the vote, exactly the same as Trump.
Walz's supporters have made a big deal of his victories in metropolitan districts with populations of less than 1 million between 2006 and 2016, in part due to his success in Olmsted County, the prestigious higher education district that is home to the Mayo Clinic. Statewide, his approval rating for the governor's race has fallen from 54% in 2018 to 52% in 2022. The drop was steepest in the 38% of the state outside the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area, from 46% to 40%.
His performance in 2022 was uncannily similar to Biden's in 2020. They both won 52% of the vote statewide and 71% of the vote in the two counties that contain the two central metro cities, but lost just a little on the other side of the metro MSP counties ring with 48%. In the rest of the state, Walz's 40% trailed Biden's 41%.
These numbers suggest that we continue to live in an era of balanced en bloc voting between the two major parties, a balance that has come to be strengthened and defined by the election of Vance and Walz.
The primary results this week bear that out: In Michigan's nonpartisan Senate race, with 90% of the votes counted, 51% of the votes were cast for the Democrats and 49% for the Republicans. This is one of six Democratic-held Senate seats where Democrats have leads in the polls but usually don't reach 50%.
Traditionally, if an incumbent's approval rating falls below 50%, it is considered difficult to win, but that may not be the case in a blockbuster voting environment where personal qualities are valued more than party affiliation. If so, Democrats are hoping that VP Walz will cast a runoff election to maintain the 50-50 split in the electoral vote. Hopes for a triple crown, which seemed extinct a few weeks ago, seem to be alive and well.
But so are Republicans: Republicans outnumbered Democrats in Michigan and Washington's Democratic-held 3rd Congressional District (where no party members are registered) this week, giving the party a little more hope of holding on to its slim House majorities.
Republicans' hopes of achieving separation of powers seem greater than Democrats', but that's by no means certain. Basic polling questions show that most voters have a more positive view of President Trump than of what Republicans call a Biden-Harris administration, that inflation and immigration remain issues for Democrats, and that foreign policy does not look favorable for the incumbent party or its candidates.
Countervailing factors include the determination of most of the media to help Harris beat Trump, most recently manifested in complacency about Harris' unwillingness to answer questions or speak extemporaneously. And of course, Trump's undisciplined caveats and deviations helped him defeat many Republican candidates in 2018, 20, 21 and 22, but a year in which Harris' approval rating is higher than in 2016 and 2020 might help him beat a candidate himself. It's not over yet.
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