The candidates have been chosen, and the race for the White House has officially started. With an eye on to next week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago that will mark the campaign’s starting gun, it’s a good time to stop, rise above all the ongoing reports about who said what and who met with whom, and make note of a few trends that have characterized the Trump-Vance campaign versus the Harris-Walz campaign.
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1. The Rise of the Left
This is the first time in a long while—maybe the first time since World War II—that all four candidates across the two major parties’ presidential tickets are economic leftists.
I’ve written before about Vice President Kamala Harris’s leftist stances, the most important of which are her support for universal health care (Medicare for All) and investing in public works. Her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, marks the left end of the party in everything related to the social agenda thanks to his support for expanding the social safety net in schools—from subsidizing school lunch to requiring schools to provide menstrual hygiene products (see section 3).
But both former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, have broken from the old Republican tradition of neoliberal economic theory: Trump can try branding Harris or Walz as economic leftists as much as he wants, but as president he acted—not spoke, acted—to support dying industries like coal, to restrict free trade via tariffs, and to strengthen workers unions by tightening conditions in the USMCA trade agreement (the replacement to the battered NAFTA, which was drafted by President Bill Clinton)—all that alongside expansionary fiscal policy and increasing the deficit.
Yes, Trump did pass tax reforms that were also good for the wealthy, but between him and party hero President Ronald Reagan (“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’”) lies a vast chasm. Vance is even to the left of Trump, declaring his opposition to raising the retirement age or cutting Social Security, refusing to support the cancellation of Obamacare, and supporting further strengthening the labor unions and expanding the welfare state.
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2. The Hawks Have Flown the Coop
A turn leftward has also taken place in the policy field: for the first time since the War on Terror, neither candidate from either party voted for the war in Iraq. If in the past, presidential candidates were proud of their history of heroic military combat, like John McCain, or of their involvement in taking out Osama Bin Laden, like Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, today, both candidates with a military past served in the rear rather than the front lines. Vance did serve in Iraq but he was a military journalist, and Walz mostly served in the National Guard in domestic missions. Neither of them has ever seen a battlefield.
The international arena is in flames, given the war in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine, and rising tensions in the South China Sea, but in the domestic arena, Americans are signaling to politicians that they want to be less involved in international affairs, not more. Since 2008, every presidential election has been won by the dovish candidate, the one perceived as less likely to get the US involved in conflicts. Even if you can’t use the rule to predict an election’s outcome, it certainly could be used to influence campaign strategy.
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3. The Party of Normalcy
Harris had many reasons to choose Walz as her running mate, which I’ll go into more detail about later on. One reason was his ability to describe policies that provoke controversy as stances that are just common sense. Making sure schoolchildren aren’t hungry isn’t radical, as a way of relating to his flagship policy as Minnesota governor, or making sure that girls who don’t have tampons can get them for free on campus and not have to miss school isn’t radical.
The Democrats’ most effective campaign strategy will be branding themselves as the party of normally, certainly when contrasted with the “weird” Republicans, as Walz himself called them. It should be relatively easy for Democrats to do so around economic issues (as mentioned, there’s a reason why the Republicans have also adopted a more interventionist economic policy), but the real challenge will be framing their positions on social issues—especially those relating to nationalism, faith, and family—as common sense stances.
Gender-affirming care is a good example. As governor, Walz signed a bill banning the state from interfering in gender-affirming care for minors, leaving decisions around such care in the hands of the parents. Walz presents his as someone trying to keep the government out of personal, family-related decisions—supposedly a Republican stance—but those who attack him from the right claim that he is leaving confused children and their parents defenseless against foreign influences and agendas, and demand state intervention to protect citizens from their own mistakes.
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4. The Three I’s
And yet despite Harris’s momentum, Trump is still the leading candidate—he has more paths to 270 electoral college votes, his base is loyal, scandals bounce off him, and mostly, poll after poll show that the two most significant issues to voters, cost of living and immigration, are issues that the public thinks Trump will handle better than Harris.
If you add in the culture war issues to cost of living and immigration, you get the three pillars of the Republican agenda this campaign, which you can call the three I’s: inflation, immigration, and identity. What they have in common, besides the starting letter, is the feeling of being threatened that they arouse in the average citizen: the economic threat to their ability to put food on the table, the threat to their personal safety caused by an influx of immigrants, who supposedly bring crime and drugs, and the threat to the American identity. These are the three exact topics that brought Trump to the White House in 2016, and you can count on him to do everything in his power to repeat that success.
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5. The Democrats’ Antisemitism Problem
The Democrats have an antisemitism problem. Not because the decision to pick Walz instead of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was made purely to appease the progressive base (there were other considerations, from concerns about Shapiro’s popularity to a preference for the folksy Walz), and not because hatred of Israel and hatred of Jews aren’t found in some of the party’s fringes (they are, even if they’re sometimes inflated by the media.)
The Democrats’ antisemitism problem is an epistemological problem—they don’t understand why they’re being blamed for antisemitism. Politicians, journalists, and analysts identified with the party make use of claims based on identity (“The Democratic candidate is married to a Jew,” “There are six Jewish cabinet members,” “The Senate majority leader is Jewish”) as a response to substantive accusations.
There is a real sense among American Jews, and I hear this from a number of communities across the US that I talk to, including those from progressive strongholds, that Democrats aren’t sufficiently standing with Jews against antisemitism. It’s less a matter of support for Israel and whether it’s sufficient, but rather the party’s jumbled response which claims to protect the rights of individuals and minorities to protest on campus, harass Jewish communities, and exclude Jews from minority coalitions. So too with the brutal “Genocide Josh” campaign carried out against Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro, despite the fact that his stances on the war were not meaningfully different from those of fellow running mate contenders Mark Kelly, Pete Buttigieg, Tim Walz, or Andy Beshear.
Choosing Walz over Shapiro added another match to the fire. I’m not sure this is what will break American Jews’ decades-long pattern of voting for Democrats, usually at a 2:1 margin, sometimes even more. In most Jewish communities, certainly the non-Orthodox ones, there’s a consensus that Trump is “bad for America” and that the Republicans harbor antisemitism no less than the Democrats. But while the “white” race-based antisemitism that has found a place in far-right circles is quickly dealt with by law enforcement agencies, the “red” class-based antisemitism found among certain progressive circles sometimes gets a soft-handed response.
If Harris, Walz, and the Democrats want to maintain their voter base—and no less important, their donor base—among American Jews, they need to change the manner in which they talk about their antisemitism problem, and not just hide behind the second gentleman (perhaps soon-to-be first.)
This article was translated from Hebrew by Leah Schwartz.
