“JD Vance wasn’t picked as Donald Trump’s running mate because he can deliver Ohio. It’s already in the tank for the GOP. And he wasn’t tapped because he’s the most qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. The entirety of his government experience consists of less than two years in the Senate.
Vance’s ascension is owed to something else entirely. He is the embodiment — and one of the most articulate defenders — of a belief system that has gradually taken hold of the Republican Party, one that prizes cultural and ideological warfare and rewards the warriors who are most effective in taking the fight to non-believers.”
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“Vance has experience where it counts for the Trump era GOP, in the social media trenches and on cable TV hits. His Marine Corps service — Vance is the first post-9/11 veteran on a major-party ticket — insulates him on foreign policy, and offers a measure of credibility to isolationist views that once might have been dismissed as a product of a lack of seasoning.
He projects cool anger, and knows the enemy as well as anyone in the party because he’s lived and circulated among them, as a venture capitalist, a celebrated author and a Yale Law School graduate. He doesn’t deliver his home state so much as send a message to the restive regions that the GOP aspires to keep in its fold — the Rust Belt and Appalachia.
Trump spoke to these aspects of Vance’s background in announcing his pick Monday on social media, ticking off LinkedIn bullet points that individually served as dog whistles to the faithful.”
“Former President Donald Trump pulled out of the scheduled ABC debate and tried to push for a showdown on Fox News instead, drawing open derision from the Harris campaign and throwing into doubt whether any debates would take place in the general election.”
“A new voting method, AADV (Approve/Approve/Disapprove Voting), was proposed in 2020. Each voter has the option to approve of either one or two of the candidates, and also has the option to disapprove of one candidate. Each candidate’s approvals and disapprovals are separately summed. Disapprovals are then subtracted from approvals to obtain the net approvals for each candidate. The candidate with the most (positive) net approvals is declared the winner. If no candidate achieves positive net approvals, NOTA (None Of The Above) has won. If NOTA should win, all candidates are disqualified and a new election must be held with new candidates.”
“What Harris’s career has made clear is that she’s more likely to pursue incremental progress than big, ambitious ideas. That’s why if elected, it’s likely that her administration would simply be an extension of the current one rather than a disruption.
On the campaign trail this week, several priorities have come into focus, with the economy and affordability still at the top of the list. Harris continues to talk about prioritizing the middle class, just as Biden did: “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” Harris said at her first major campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday. “When our middle class is strong, America is strong.”
To support that swath of Americans, improving the care economy — those services that focus on children and the elderly — could be one of the major policy areas she may come to prioritize.
She would zero in on a straightforward policy agenda, said Carmel Martin, who served as the vice president’s domestic policy adviser from 2022 to 2023: a focus on “economic progress while bringing down inflation, expanding access to services that people need — health care being at the front of the line — and protecting reproductive rights.”
Harris has already shown signs of this focus, saying in a campaign address on Monday that she believes “in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty; where every person can buy a home, start a family, and build wealth; and where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care.” All of these stances are essentially what Biden has pitched before.
The fact that Harris has shown she’s not a hardened ideologue means that she can be swayed by political headwinds, giving social movements an opportunity to push various agendas.
Some of the country’s most transformational legislation, for example, didn’t come directly from presidents who were ideological hardliners, but rather from presidents who were willing to listen to social movements and public sentiment — as was the case during the Civil Rights Era.”