In the middle of the night, after President Joe Biden’s withdrawal announcement, former President Donald Trump posted this mocking remark on Truth Social: “It’s not over! Tomorrow Crooked Joe Biden’s going to wake up and forget that he dropped out of the race today!”
It was a joke. Was it also wishful thinking?
Even if Vice President Kamala Harris has fared better than Biden in some recent polls, by most standards of conventional political wisdom, she’s an even better target for Republicans than Biden. The party’s standard-bearer hasn’t reacted with much satisfaction, however.
If he had really wanted to bring the country together, Trump could have used Biden’s departure to be gracious. Instead he complained about the money spent focused on Biden and came off as more than a little wistful he’d stayed in the race. This bespeaks a certain nervousness about anything that might change the chemistry in this race.
Right now, the richest man in the world (Elon Musk) is giving $45 million a month to a presidential candidate whose running mate proclaimed last week that his party was “done” catering to Wall Street and will henceforth be for the working class. That combination can’t hold together for long, but while it does, it’s formidable.
With Biden’s announcement Sunday, Trump now finds himself in a generational contrast with his Democratic opponent as well as his vice-presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance.
Vance’s convention acceptance speech was much different from Trump’s the following night. It was focused and concise — for this sort of thing — and laid out a premise for the sort of nativist party that might emerge after Trump.
“You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty,” Vance said. “But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
Harris won’t be debating Vance now, but in another sense, that’s the debate she really has to win to have any chance of winning this election. She’s sure to win the votes of those who want the opposite of Donald Trump. To become president, she must also win over the Midwestern working-class voters Vance is appealing to, who have wavered between one party and another in recent elections.
An astute observer once noted that unlike the Tory-Labor division in the United Kingdom, the United States really has two business parties representing different segments of the economy. There’s still truth in that, evidenced by Trump’s guarantee that he’ll be the first “crypto president” and the dismay of some more mainstream corporate CEOs who attended a private meeting with him recently.
But this year, both the Democrats and Republicans are presenting themselves as the party of the working class, and there are signs that this may last far past the election. The Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira makes a convincing case that Vance’s selection and the new GOP platform suggest that “the Trump style, the Trump policies and the Trump appeal to non-college-educated voters of every race and ethnicity will rule the Republican Party for decades to come.”
“If it’s only Donald Trump and trying to demonize him more, I don’t think that’s a winning strategy,” Sen. Joe Manchin said Monday on MSNBC. Manchin, who is serving out his last Senate term as an independent, shot down reports he was considering becoming a Democrat again to challenge Harris but said he wanted to be a voice for “the middle of the country.”
She may not like all his politics, but Harris has to realize that the middle of the country is where she has to go to win this election.
That is true, but it’s also worth noting that the only financial geographic that Trump won in 2020 was those making over $100,000 a year. Also worth noting that the Brooking Institute says Trump won white working class EVANGELICAL voters, but Biden won white working class non-Evangelical voters, so it’s really not true that the Republicans are beloved by the working class as a whole. The Dems definitely need to do a better job showing how Republicans only fight for eworking-class voters in words, as they generally veto any worker’s right type polices, Affordable Care Act, etc… Just demonizing Trump won’t get them anywhere. Even I don’t care about his 34 felonies in a trial that’s clearly political, and I’m a Trump hater and Democrat. Everyone has already made up their mind about who he is.
The race is still fierce. We anxiously await the results.
I appreciate the depth of research and clarity in your writing.