Briefly summarized, American electoral life pits cities (Democrats) against the rural world (Republicans) in a fight arbitrated by suburbs with alternating political moods. It is an old opposition, which overlaps with other social and cultural divisions sharpened by partisan dynamics.
Withdrawn into his MAGA electorate, Donald Trump has done nothing but seek to amplify this opposition by choosing as his running mate the ultraconservative JD Vance, who grew up in a modest family in a small town in Ohio. His populist strategy is the same as the one that narrowly brought him to the presidency in 2016: to exploit as much as possible the feeling of exclusion of white working-class rural communities. Except that, without being entirely false, this image of a deep America strangled by resentment is a caricature, as is the caricature of the proposition that American rurality will always be reduced to a world clinging to the preservation of “traditional” or even reactionary values.
The strategy that elected Trump, this false anti-system, eight years ago made him lose the 2020 presidential election. Unwavering in his determination, while at the same time caught off guard by Joe Biden’s retirement, the miracle worker Trump is now exposing himself to defeat in the presidential election on November 5 against Kamala Harris, whose entrance on the scene electrifies the Democrats in a way that has not been seen since Barack Obama.
Mme Harris made an otherwise interesting and clever choice by retaining as her running mate the services of Tim Walz, governor of the state of Minnesota, where observers expected the ambitious Josh Shapiro, governor of the key state of Pennsylvania. A Democratic stronghold, Minnesota, bordering Manitoba, is the progressive hotbed of this large region of the American Midwest whose electorate is on the ridge line between Democrats and Republicans.
Having spent 12 years representing a rural county in the state, Mr. Walz, a 60-year-old boomer with an air of an affable grandfather, embodies not the urban-rural divorce, but rather their conjunction. Pro-abortion and pro-gun control, he is the ideological opposite of Vance, while also treading on the Republican toes of rural America. A major quality: he won his election with the support of independent voters and moderate Republicans. He is therefore the unifying white man that the Democratic Party expects to help Mr.me Harris, the dangerous leftist from California, scraped together just enough rural and working-class votes to win the swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“Harris-Walz, the most left-wing ticket in American history,” Trumpist Florida Governor Ron DeSantis warned on the X network. This is not so wrong. It is notable that Mr. Walz’s profile does not distinctly pull the Democratic ticket toward the center in a way that would attract moderate voters. It is also not lost on anyone that Mr. Walz is from a state with a significant Muslim population, and where Mr. Biden was punished during the state’s primary for his harshly pro-Israeli position on Gaza.
More fundamentally, the tandem is part of the rise of the left wing of the Democratic Party, which began with the candidacy of the “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders in 2016, then asserted itself under President Biden, considered to some extent the most left-wing – and the most pro-union – since Lyndon B. Johnson, in the 1960s.
Judging by a study by the American National Election Studies noted by the New York Timesit turns out that the duo is clearly in tune with the majority of Democrats. A study that indicates in particular that white Democrats have been leaning more resolutely to the left since the mid-2010s under the impact of two major concomitant phenomena: the emergence of Trump and that of the Black Lives Matter movement, marked in May 2020 by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin. This is something that the Republicans will not fail to use against Mr. Walz, who literally accuse him, by distorting the truth, of having been on the side of the rioters by delaying the intervention of the National Guard.
Three months before the presidential election, the counters are reset to zero. Harris has managed in a hurry to erase the lead that Trump had over Biden in the polls, so that they are neck and neck and states that were no longer neck are being put back into play.
In a week and a half, the Democratic convention will be held in Chicago, with strong reminiscences of the 1968 convention and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Lyndon Johnson having withdrawn, Hubert Humphrey, also from Minnesota, had obtained the nomination only to lose the presidential election to Richard Nixon. What does Trump hope? That Kamala Harris will blunder, that his campaign will stumble, that the Democratic common front will crack. We don’t want to see him get back in the saddle.