Philippa Kaur

Since Donald Trump chose Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, it’s been widely noted that Vance once described Trump as “reprehensible” and “cultural heroin.” However, the day after Vance won his own Senate race in 2022, he reportedly made it known that he would support Trump for president in 2024.

Given this dramatic change, what does Vance’s selection mean for the Republican Party and conservatism, the political philosophy that the GOP once claimed to embrace?

I am a political scientist whose research and political analysis focuses on the relationship between Trump, the Republican Party and conservatism. Everyday citizens define conservatism in different ways, but at its root it is a philosophy that supports smaller and less-centralized government because consolidated power could be used to silence political competition and deny citizens their liberties.

Since 2015, Trump has tightened his grip on the Republican Party, moving it further away from its professed conservative ideology. The choice of Vance as Trump’s running mate – and the competition that preceded it – are the latest steps in this process.

Political columnist George Will describes how Trumpism has steered the Republican Party away from traditional conservative views.

Vance came from a small pool of contenders that included other noteworthy politicians who likewise once vehemently opposed Trump. By examining their trajectories, we can see how the Republican Party has abandoned conservative values to serve a single man.

Elise Stefanik

Elise Stefanik ran for Congress in 2014 from a district in upstate New York as a mainstream Republican who admired Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Ryan was a traditional conservative who had run for vice president alongside former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2012. Romney endorsed Stefanik for Congress, saying that she was “a person of integrity. Every campaign is different, but values don’t change.”

But Stefanik’s values did change. When forced to share the ballot with Trump in 2016, she couldn’t even “spit his name out,” according to Republican consultant Tim Miller. But early in Trump’s presidency, she became a vocal ally, eventually replacing Rep. Liz Cheney as chair of the House Republican Conference in 2021.

House Republicans ousted Cheney from that position after she criticized Trump’s refusal to support the 2020 election results and his actions during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Cheney justified her opposition to Trump by highlighting her respect for the rule of law and support for limited government – even when those positions meant opposing her own party leader. These are foundational conservative principles, centered in aversion to consolidated government power.

This switch was a significant moment in the party’s ideological transformation. Stefanik’s rising star subsequently landed her in the mix for vice president, which she called “An honor. A humbling honor.”

Marco Rubio

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio challenged Trump for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. During that race, Rubio issued a news release calling Trump a “serious threat to the future of our party and our country,” and blamed him for ushering in a climate of violence.

Statements like these made sense coming from a serious conservative whose worldview was defined by his family’s Cuban heritage and who opposed communism, tyranny and excessive government power.

Eventually, though, Rubio became a Trump ally. He voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial in 2021, which centered on charges that Trump had incited an insurrection. In line with Trump’s wishes, Rubio opposed establishing an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 events.

In early 2024, Rubio was asked in an ABC interview if he really wanted to be vice president even though Trump had defended calls by Jan. 6 insurrectionists to hang former Vice President Mike Pence for certifying the 2020 election results.

“When Donald Trump was president of the United States, this country was safer, it was more prosperous,” Rubio responded. “I think this country and the world was a better place.”

This refusal to acknowledge and challenge Trump’s apparent support of lawlessness by his followers was an abdication of fundamental conservative values.

Sen. Marco Rubio called Donald Trump ‘a con artist’ and a threat to conservatism in 2016, but sought to be his running mate in 2024.

Tim Scott

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott has touted his conservative values and principles throughout his political life. It was logical for him to endorse Rubio as Trump gained momentum in the 2016 Republican primaries.

In 2017, Scott insisted that Trump’s failure to condemn white nationalists after violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, compromised his moral authority. Not long after, however, Scott met with Trump about his comments and was convinced that Trump had “obviously reflected” on what he said.

When Trump refused to flatly condemn white supremacists a few years later in a 2020 presidential debate, Scott suggested that Trump “misspoke” and should correct the comments, but added, “If he doesn’t correct it, I guess he didn’t misspeak.” After dropping out of the Republican primaries in 2024, Scott endorsed Trump as someone who could “unite the country.”

Why Vance?

These converted Trump allies still hold modern conservative stances on issues such as abortion and health care. But in seeking to become Trump’s running mate, they tacitly endorsed an executive’s attempt to overturn a democratic election and subvert the liberties of U.S. citizens. Such a shift violates the spirit of conservatism.

These politicians have also moved away from conservative principles in areas including U.S. foreign policy and immigration. But the fundamental shift that is most profound is in their attitudes toward abuse of government power.

What should we make of Trump choosing Vance, who once privately compared Trump to Hitler but now says that he would not have readily certified the 2020 election if he had been in Pence’s shoes?

Many considerations affect the choice of a running mate. But Vance doesn’t represent a swing state. He probably won’t appeal to MAGA-skeptical independent voters who have yet to make up their minds about who to vote for.

Instead, people close to Trump call the 39-year-old Vance the new heir to Trump’s MAGA movement. Vance is more than a protegé, though; he embodies Trump’s influence on the Republican Party’s evolving relationship with government power and insists his political conversion is genuine.

If there was any speculation that Republicans would revert to some form of traditional conservatism after Trump leaves politics, the prospect of a JD Vance presidency makes clear that the answer is no. More

Donald Trump apparently prefers to watch television over reading anything at all. As president, some reports claimed, he spent up to seven hours a day watching television news shows, but had little interest in reading the flow of top secret briefings (including tapped phone conversations of various world leaders) that previous presidents had relied on to make decisions.

Since Trump formally entered American politics, however, reading about him has become a widely recognised hobby, accompanied with significant amounts of fear and loathing for most people living outside of the United States. In many ways, reading about Trump and the upcoming US presidential election is a civic duty in such consequential and worrying times.

I have put together this guide to help people follow the presidential election – and better understand the social, cultural and political forces that have led to Donald Trump being viewed by millions of Americans as the answer to their political concerns.

Columnists

The single best journalist covering the US presidential elections this year has been Thomas Edsall. I have been reading his work since I discovered his book The New Politics of Inequality (1984). Edsall has a regular guest column with the New York Times, in which he summarises relevant research from academics on the presidential election and editorialises about these findings based on email exchanges with those academics.

Recent columns on partisanship and the gender gap in voting preferences among the young and the old have been particularly insightful. Reflecting on surveys that consistently show the majority of American men supporting Donald Trump over any likely Democratic candidate, I was reminded of Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power (2016), in which women exact revenge on men for centuries of oppression and stupidity.

The New York Times opinion poll analyst Nate Cohen is also consistently worth reading, as are the columns of Aaron Blake on opinion polling for the Washington Post. For breaking news as well as insider takes, the news service Axios is worth signing up to.

Robert Reich’s regular substack posts are well written and informative. Some get picked up by newspapers, like this piece on Elon Musk’s financial support of Trump’s campaign. Reich was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Department of Labor and a fellow Rhodes scholar at Oxford with Clinton back in the 1960s. At 78 years old, he is still as sharp as a tack and writes with a real passion for a fairer America.

Other worthwhile substacks include the Old Goats and Forever Wars, which provide a wealth of information in a short and chatty format delivered right to your inbox. On Middle Eastern politics and its impact on the election, I subscribe to the paid version of Peter Beinart’s substack, which is excellent value for money.

For those wanting prison humour and a spiky take on events, I recommend Guy Rundle’s Crikey columns on US politics. He described the first presidential “debate” between Trump and Joe Biden, which set in train events that led to Biden stepping down as a candidate, as at first an “audition. Then it became a physical fitness examination. By the conclusion, it verged on being a coronial inquiry.”

Current vice president and presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaking at the White House, March 18, 2024.
Evan Vucci/AAP

Magazines and journals

The excellent journal The American Prospect consistently focuses on the most important policy issues and rewards regular reading, as does The Atlantic, which Trump called a “third-rate magazine that’s failing” in the first presidential debate. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic, has come in for special criticism from Trump at recent rallies for publishing statements from military advisers who claimed that President Trump called Americans who died during World War I in France “losers” and “suckers”.

My favourite piece from the Atlantic in recent years is an article by Kurt Andersen on disinformation and conspiracy theories called How America Lost Its Mind, which was subsequently developed into his book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire (2017).

Andersen makes the fascinating argument that America is particularly open to lies and conspiracies in politics and public life because of its history of evangelical religion. The development of the counterculture in the 1960s, with its emphasis on uncovering conspiracies in the American government and interest in alternative medicine and spirituality, has also played a role. Andersen sees the current crisis of legitimate authority and the power of disinformation in America as the result of a heady mix of these two seemingly contradictory forces.

Andrew Marantz in the New Yorker has done an excellent job of exploring the role of the internet in spreading disinformation and political hatred. His book Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation (2019) is also a must read on this topic, as it offers particular insight into alt-right internet communities, with their culture of trolling and ability to spread disinformation very widely.

There is almost a “punk” spirit to this destructive element of Trump’s success, as James Parker has argued. Marantz shows how a small and motley collection of internet trolls, who are racist, sexist and dishonest, have had an outsized influence on American politics – all the while claiming their acts are either one big joke or motivated by revenge.

The best books

Many non-Americans are inclined to ask what is wrong with the Republican party. Why has it become so delusional and destructive? Is it Trump’s fault, or was this happening before Trump?

Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (2022), Geoffrey Kabaservice’s Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party (2011), and John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up In The Early 1990s (2024) all persuasively show that the roots of the Republican turn to the hard right date from well before Trump.

On the madness of the Republican party during the Trump years, Tim Alberta has written two of the best deeply sourced books: American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (2020) and The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

Alberta offers particular insight into why Republican politicians continued to support Trump after everything they know about him and everything he has done. The short answer is that they are fearful of Trump and his supporters. They are fearful that he will make them irrelevant and thus starve them of attention. They are fearful he and his supporters can end their careers by directing support away from them in Republican Party primaries, or just threatening to (this ended the career of Republican senator Jeff Flake, a Trump critic). They are even fearful for their lives and those of their families if Trump sets the mob on them.

Another book that is very good on the Republican Party today is Robert Draper’s Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost its Mind (2022), which gives a fascinating account of the lunacy of the Arizona Republican party following the death of long-serving senator John McCain in 2018.

Three books are essential reading for those who have the stomach for revisiting Trump’s presidency, the 2020 election and the events of January 6, 2021. These are Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021 (2023), Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (2022), and Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s Peril: Trump, Biden and a Nation on the Brink (2021).

In my view, these three books are necessary to understand the extent of Trump’s lack of respect for democratic norms and the lengths he will go to in order to maintain power. Also well worth reading for its satirising of Trump’s trolling political persona, and for reminding us of Trump’s unapologetic misogyny, is Laurie Penny’s brilliant Bitch Doctrine (2017).

On the question of the loyalty of Trump’s staffers and the wider Republican Party, two books are interesting: Mark Leibovich’s breezy Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission (2022) and Jonathan Karl’s Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show (2021). The latter makes the bold claim that a number of Trump’s staffers saved America from an attempted coup against democracy after his 2020 election defeat.

The witty and snarky Leibovich is always a lot of fun to read, particularly his earlier book about the Obama era, This Town (2014). Thank You for Your Servitude skewers Republican politicians in the Congress for being sycophantic in their support of Trump. The greatest single error of judgement Republican politicians made from 2017-2021, in my opinion, was not finding Trump guilty during the second impeachment trial and barring him from ever running for office again. Instead, enough of them were cowed by threats and sufficiently concerned about the possible end of their political careers to vote to save him.

For anyone wanting the analysis of academics rather than journalists, I would highly recommend Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s two excellent books How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future (2018) and Tyranny of the Minority: How to Reverse an Authoritarian Turn and Forge a Democracy for All (2023). These books wisely take a comparative approach to the decline of American democracy during recent times.

The Tyranny of the Minority lays out the argument that anti-majoritarian institutions in the US have far too much power, contending that the MAGA movement, which they estimate to make up 30% of American voters, has disproportionate power given its size.

For those fretting about the 2024 election, books by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck with Michael Tesler and Chris Tausanovich – Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (2018) and The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy (2023) – are comprehensive accounts of which demographic groups voted for Trump and why.

Identity Crisis focuses on what the authors call the “diploma divide”. Their hunch was that whites without college degrees had abandoned the Democratic party in support of Trump. Subsequent data showed this to be the case. Trump had a 39% advantage among whites without a college degree in 2016. A key reason Biden was chosen as the Democrats’ candidate in 2020 was to combat this Democratic party weakness. The support of male voters of all races without a college degree may take Trump to victory in November this year.

The go-to book on Trump’s likely opponent Kamala Harris is currently her autobiography The Truths We Hold: An American Journey (2019).

The subtitles “American Journey” or “American Story” or “American Life” are a common way to suggest a life story is the personification of the nation’s story. They have been used in biographies written by or about Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, Jerry Garcia, Andrew Mellon, George Kennan, Condoleezza Rice, Burt Lancaster, Martha Washington, Ben Hogan, George Washington, Jesse Owens, Oral Roberts, Bill Clinton, Colin Powell and Benjamin Franklin.

No one person can stand in for a nation’s story or journey, but Harris undoubtedly represents a multicultural America – and an America where immigrants come to seek greater opportunities. Both of her parents gained PhDs in the US and went on to work at leading North American universities.

One of the most interesting chapters of Harris’ book describes the teenage years she spent living with her mother in Quebec. Personal experiences in that period set her on the path to becoming a prosecutor committed to protecting women and children from violence. Harris is well placed to emphasise to Americans just how vile, and criminal, Trump’s record of comments and behaviour towards women has been.

Podcasts

Strictly speaking, listening to podcasts is not reading, but given their rise and rise, a few are worth mentioning.

The Ezra Klein Show and Chris Hayes’ Why is this happening? have great guests. Two recent shows have been particularly insightful about the history and structures of American politics and how these have made the rise of Trump possible – and so frightening. One was Klein interviewing John Ganz about his book When the Clock Broke; the other was Hayes interviewing Ari Berman about his book Minority Rule.

The New Yorker’s Political Scene, which features the excellent Jane Mayer, also helps keep me up to date. To delve deeper, certain episodes of the New Books in Political Science podcast are worth looking out for, such as Stephanie Ternullo talking about her fascinating book How the Heartland Went Red (2024).

For many American politics junkies, the New York Times podcast The Daily is a deserved favourite. A few recent episodes have been the most insightful podcasts I have listened to on the election this year. A recent Daily podcast, for example, explained why Biden was generally behind the widely disliked Trump in most opinion polls. The short answer is that Biden was the status quo candidate in a year where 70% of voters say they want significant change.

Lots of voters do not want the change that Trump is promising, but plenty do, including a group that might decide the election: men of all races who are low information voters. Members of this demographic generally identify as being “conservative”, but do not have particular policy changes in mind when they say they support “change”.

The next administration?

Another worrying Daily podcast examined what the next Trump administration might look like. According to this podcast, and many other accounts of the first Trump administration, the biggest regret Trump had was the lack of loyalty of his staff. Books by Bob Woodward and others have emphasised this. As a result, a second Trump administration is likely to be staffed with younger, more loyal people.

Most commentators are concerned about how Trump will attempt to pervert the Justice Department by mass sackings and unprecedented political interference. But the most disturbing plan associated with a possible second Trump administration is the idea of setting up detention camps for supposedly illegal immigrants. Trump has stated that, if re-elected, many thousands, and possibly millions, of people would be rounded up and put in detention camps before being deported.

Many commentators are also concerned that Trump might put into action the truly frightening and fascistic ideas advocated by the Heritage Foundation’s road map, known as Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Emma Shortis has done an excellent job of summarising the 900 page plus blueprint in the Conversation.

But with so many insightful analyses to inform us and help us navigate this worrying time (to misquote a line from REM), it’s the end of the world as we know it – and I’m reading online! More

Donald Trump’s narrow escape from an assassin’s bullet led me – a historian who has written about political polarization and the Civil Rights Movement – to think back to another norm-smashing populist who encountered death on the campaign trail: former Alabama governor and U.S. presidential candidate George Wallace.

By 1972, Wallace’s image was fixed in most Americans’ minds as the face of the white South’s violent response to the Civil Rights Movement. Wallace had skillfully deployed divisive, racially tinged attacks against liberals, government and protesters to become a serious contender for the presidency.

So, Wallace turned heads when he publicly apologized and pleaded for forgiveness for his segregationist past after a 1972 assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Maryland left him paralyzed.

On the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” March 4, 1965, Alabama Gov. George Wallace rejects charges of police brutality in Selma, Ala., and spotlights police use of force in Northern cities.

Facing death and seeking redemption

It’s impossible to look into Wallace’s heart and understand what moved him. Yet three factors probably loomed large.

First, the brush with death. It upended Wallace’s life and forced him to end his 1972 bid for the presidency. It also left a pugnacious man who had been a boxer in his youth and was proud of his physical prowess bound to a wheelchair. He underwent frequent surgeries and lived in constant pain.

It’s common for those who have faced death to reflect on their mortality and their life. Wallace was no exception.

Religion also may have played a role. While he was an earthy, profane man who didn’t resist temptations of the flesh, Wallace couldn’t escape the religious views that he had imbibed as a child and that permeated Southern culture. Faced with his own mortality, he thought about the fate of his soul and sought redemption by accepting Jesus, repenting and seeking forgiveness.

Less than a month after Wallace was shot, civil rights icon Shirley Chisholm visited him in his Maryland hospital room.

“I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone,” she told the governor.

Wallace’s daughter Peggy recalled that Chisholm’s words brought her father to tears and he “started to change.”

In 1973, a year after he was paralyzed in a shooting, Gov. George Wallace meets with Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move to the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955 launched citywide boycotts, and her attorney, state Rep. Fred Gray.
AP Photo

In 1974, Wallace professed his conversion in a speech at Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg, Virginia, megachurch. He told the congregation he had “been through the valley of the shadow of death,” and proclaimed, “I am whole through the grace of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Wallace reached out to those he had wronged, including John Lewis, the civil rights leader whose skull had been broken by Wallace’s state troopers in Selma in 1965. Lewis was moved by their 1979 encounter.

“During that meeting, I could tell that he was a changed man; he was engaged in a campaign to seek forgiveness from the same African-Americans he had oppressed,” Lewis wrote for The New York Times in 1998. “He acknowledged his bigotry and assumed responsibility for the harm he had caused. He wanted to be forgiven.”

Playing to voters

Politics had been Wallace’s life since he first won election to the Alabama Legislature in 1946. He could barely breathe without it, even after being nearly killed on the campaign trail.

“I don’t believe he needs a family,” his second wife, Cornelia, commented in the midst of an acrimonious divorce in 1978. “He just needs an audience.”

Wallace’s segregationist persona was a product, apparently, of politics. As a college student and budding politician, he was progressive by Southern standards: He avoided race-baiting and called for greater support for public services that benefited working-class Alabamians.

Years later, Ruth Johnson, whose husband, Frank, became a champion of civil rights as a federal judge, remembered Wallace as a college friend. “We were young and idealistic,” Ruth recalled. “And we loved George for his enthusiasms.”

In the late 1940s and 1950s, Wallace eschewed extremism. He refused to join the Dixiecrat rebellion against the Democratic Party’s civil rights platform at the 1948 Democratic convention. And he had a reputation for dealing fairly with Black attorneys and plaintiffs during his years as a state judge.

That changed after he lost the Democratic nomination for governor in 1958 to a rival who courted the Ku Klux Klan and openly appealed to white racism. With the South in flames as the Civil Rights Movement accelerated, Wallace won election in 1962 as a full-throated segregationist.

“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” he proclaimed in his 1963 inaugural address. Wallace physically confronted a U.S. deputy attorney general and federal marshals as they attempted to enforce a court order admitting a Black woman to the University of Alabama.

In 1963, Gov. George Wallace, second from left, attempts to block integration at the University of Alabama while confronting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.
Buyenlarge/Getty Images

Going national

Ambitious and sensing that racism wasn’t limited to the South, Wallace entered three Democratic presidential primaries in 1964 during his first term as governor. Then, after leaving office in 1967, he launched an unsuccessful third-party bid for the presidency in 1968.

He was reelected governor in 1970 and then pursued the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 until his near-assassination. Despite his injuries, he remained in office, winning election to a third term and serving until 1979.

In 1983, even as Wallace’s physical and mental condition deteriorated, he won a fourth term as governor. Being in the limelight was “a matter of life and death” for him, a long-term adviser observed.

The South had changed as a result of the movement Wallace fought so viciously, and Black people had become a major force in the Democratic Party. Ever the politician, Wallace changed too, appointing Black politicians to positions at all levels of his administration.

Gov. George Wallace, in a wheelchair, welcomes President Ronald Reagan to Alabama on Sept. 18, 1986.
AP Photo/Charles Tasnadi

Wallace wasn’t a saint. Two marriages ended in divorce, in part because of his emotional abuse of his wives.

Spike Lee’s documentary “4 Little Girls,” which recounts white supremacists’ 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four Black children, features chilling interviews with Wallace. They reveal a man who treated Black people who worked for him in the 1980s in an embarrassingly patronizing manner.

Still, Wallace reflected, repented and asked forgiveness. That’s worth remembering at a time when many of us hope our leaders will become introspective and perhaps even change. More

With President Biden’s announcement that he will not run for re-election in November, all eyes have turned to his replacement. Many top Democrats, including Biden, have endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris, leading to increased scrutiny over who she might pick as a running mate.

The Democrat party will be looking for a vice-president (VP) candidate who can pull in young people and moderates, appeal to suburbanites and win over voters in key battleground states. With a woman running for president, the party will also need a VP candidate who can appeal to men, since in 2020 men favoured Trump by a narrow margin.

Democrats will want to balance the ticket in terms of Harris’ bold stances on reproductive rights and gun control, which the right is already casting as “extreme”. Most importantly, if Harris runs for president, she’ll need a running mate that can help calm the general unrest that has simmered across the nation over the past four years.

Here are five of the top contenders and what they reveal about the new Democratic strategy:

1. Josh Shapiro

Josh Shapiro is governor of swing state Pennsylvania.
OOgImages / Alamy

Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro is rumoured to be the top pick to join Harris on the Democrat ticket. He’s young, a good communicator and would help Harris capture voters in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state. In his speech after the recent shooting at a Trump rally in his home state, he showed that he can bridge the divide with Republicans. However, he’s also been vocally pro-Israel since the Hamas attack on October 7 2023, which could turn off young voters aged 18-24, a crucial demographic in this election.

2. Mark Kelly

Senator Mark Kelly, former astronaut and naval captain, is not closely tied to the current administration.
MediaPunch Inc /Alamy

Mark Kelly, former astronaut, naval captain and Arizona senator is another contender. He is a fresh face not closely tied to the current administration, which will rally voters who feel disillusioned with the Democratic party under Biden’s leadership. Kelly’s tough stance on immigration – which is becoming a cornerstone issue in the election – will appeal to moderates and Black voters, both demographics the Democrats want to capture. Kelly also strongly supports gun restrictions, after his wife, former Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in an assassination attempt in 2011. This position is likely to draw critique from moderates if he runs alongside Harris.

3. Roy Cooper

Roy Cooper is the governor of swing state North Carolina.
Erik S. Lesser/Pool /EPA

North Carolina is another important battleground state and putting Democratic governor Roy Cooper on the ticket would be advantageous on several fronts. Cooper, a moderate, has a successful track record of winning and a relatively high approval rating as a liberal in a southern swing state. He also provides a stable, steady presence, which is necessary in America’s highly polarised and fractured political climate. As an older white man, he may attract the same male voters who supported Biden in 2020, and who Harris needs to win over.

4. Andy Beshear

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear would be a foil to Trump’s VP JD Vance.
Associated Press/Alamy

Andy Beshear, the 46-year-old governor of Kentucky, a conservative state, would be an excellent foil for Trump’s running mate JD Vance. Both are from Kentucky and appeal to working class voters, a group that Harris will need to woo, as an upper middle-class Californian who will be portrayed as part of the country’s liberal elite. Beshear is an outspoken Christian, which will endear him to America’s large Christian population. However, Beshear is relatively unknown, and Kentucky isn’t a battleground state, making him a less likely candidate for vice president.

5. Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom has made a name for himself by prioritising abortion rights, the environment and transgender rights.
Xinhua /Alamy

Gavin Newsom, the young hotshot governor of California, has made a name for himself by enshrining abortion rights, prioritising environmental protection policies and protecting transgender rights. Newsom ranked closely behind Harris on a recent YouGov poll on potential presidential replacements, demonstrating his popularity. Although considered a moderate by California standards, Newsom’s policies are far too liberal to capture moderate voters and two Californians on the ticket would exclude crucial middle America voters. More

When JD Vance stood to accept the vice-presidential nomination for the Republican Party, what struck me was his physical resemblance to Donald Trump’s sons. This is not surprising: Donald Jr had been his most active supporter. The best way to understand Trump’s choice is as a continuation of dynastic politics, a common theme in recent US politics — think Kennedy, Bush, Clinton.

This is not the standard explanation for Trump’s choice, which emphasises Vance’s links to conservative money in Silicon Valley and right-wing media figure Tucker Carlson. But for Trump, politics is an extension of the family business and Vance has cleverly positioned himself as a de facto son.

JD Vance (right) with Donald Trump Jr at the Republication National Convention.
J Scott Applewhite/AAP

Vance rode to popular attention – and then a Senate seat from Ohio – on the basis of his 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy. This is not unprecedented in US politics: Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father (1995) helped launch his political career, just as John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (1956) was a deliberate ploy for public attention.

Neither book was as immediately successful as Vance’s, which became a bestseller and the basis for a movie of the same name. His mother was a drug addict who married and changed boyfriends several times, giving him various stepfathers, so his grandmother was his most stable mother figure.

But his grandparents’ marriage was violent, and at one point his grandmother tried to kill her husband by setting him on fire. They separated, but effectively reunited (despite living separately) as he was growing up, giving him stability – they had considerably mellowed by the time Vance was a boy. After scraping through high school, he joined the Marines and went to Ohio State University.

Older readers may recall the 1960s television series The Beverley Hillbillies, which suggests the ongoing fascination with understanding a section of American life in which poverty and violence appear to persist over generations.

A memoirist like Obama

In some ways, Vance’s book resembles Obama’s memoir. Both recount stories of men clearly not part of the WASP establishment, who were determined to achieve greatness. Like Obama, Vance attended an Ivy League law school – Yale, rather than Obama’s Harvard – where, like the Clintons, he met his future wife.

In the Marines, Vance writes, he learned “willfulness”, perhaps as opposed to the “helplessness” he learned at home.

Obama became a community organiser, whereas Vance became a venture capitalist with backing from one of Silicon Valley’s conservative moguls, Peter Thiel. One of Vance’s attractions for Trump was his ability to raise money from very rich donors, who might not like Trump’s rhetoric but certainly appreciate his views on taxation, which are skewed heavily towards favouring the rich.

Obama is the better stylist, but Vance is a competent and vivid writer, even if the complexities of his childhood, torn between a mother who becomes a drug addict, numerous de facto stepfathers and his grandparents, makes for harrowing reading. As a picture of a complex dysfunctional family, it is a remarkable if somewhat maudlin achievement.

Occasionally, Vance acknowledges the similarities between rural poor whites and African–Americans, and the book has none of the nasty racist language deployed by Trump. Although Vance has become an arch social conservative, there is none of the ugly homophobic language of some of his colleagues.

As a teenager, he wondered about his sexuality, to which his grandmother replied:

You’re not gay. And even if you did want to suck dicks that would be okay. God would still love you.

Here Vance reveals a softer sense of sexuality and gender than is found in many of Trump’s evangelical supporters. “I learned little else about what masculinity required of me,” he writes. “Other than drinking beer and screaming at a woman when she screamed at you.”

Vance grew up in Middletown in eastern Ohio, but stresses his Scots–Irish ancestry and small-town, coal-country Kentucky roots. He begins the book claiming his great-grandmother’s Jackson, Kentucky house, where he spent childhood summers, as his true “home”, though his grandparents were among many who left for Middletown (consequently nicknamed, he claims, “Middletucky”). The working-class industrial town was part Appalachian and part Rust Belt.

JD Vance campaigning at Middletown High School, from where he graduated in 2003.
Julia Nikhinson/AAP

He stresses the long history of disadvantage in the Appalachians, a region that stretches across seven states, from Alabama to Pennsylvania. (There are considerable variations in what is considered part of the Appalachian region.)

Traditionally Democratic, the region has swung increasingly to the Republicans, symbolised by the shift in West Virginia, which supported Bill Clinton twice – and then voted around 60% for Trump in the past two elections.

This is a region of small towns and rural communities, heavily white and dependent on timber and coal mining. While Pittsburgh is sometimes included in definitions of the region, it has no major cities.

Intergenerational disadvantage and self-reliance

Hillbilly Elegy is in some ways a schizophrenic book, which both acknowledges the burdens of intergenerational disadvantage and preaches the virtues of self-reliance.

When it appeared, it attracted both conservatives and liberals, although Vance was heavily criticised for ignoring the structural causes of disadvantage. Most savage, perhaps, is the critique by Gabriel Winant, who actually knew Vance when he was a law student at Yale.

As Winant points out:

Vance wishes to foment what he sees as a class war  —  not between labor and capital, but between the white citizenry and the “elites” of the universities and the media, who pour poison into the ears of the country and corrode its virtue and integrity by stripping away your jobs, corrupting your kids, and sending drug-laden foreigners into your community.

This Trumpian rhetoric is not the language of Hillbilly Elegy. There are echoes in his book of Ronald Reagan’s attacks on “welfare queens”, but without the racism. As Vance writes: “I have known many welfare queens; some were my neighbors, and all were white.”)

The book elicited a remarkable amount of commentary, including an anthology, Appalachian Reckoning, which took issue with Vance’s characterisations of the region, claiming “Vance’s sweeping stereotypes are shark bait for conservative policymakers”.

Both conservatives and liberals could, however, agree that Vance had captured the mood that saw many traditional Democrats swing to Trump. The party of unions and non-white Americans was increasingly painted as the captive of Wall Street and Hollywood elites. This helps explain why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 and why Joe Biden, who comes from working-class roots, was able to recapture some of those lost votes in 2020.

Vance traces his own similar disillusionment, dating back to his first employment as a teenager:

Every two weeks, I’d get a small paycheck and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.

This, he writes, was his “first indication that the policies of Mamaw’s ‘party of the working man’ – the Democrats – weren’t all they were cracked up to be”. And, he believes, it’s “a big part” of why “Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation”.

The house in Middletown, Ohio, where JD Vance grew up.
Carolyn Kaster/AAP

If one wants an explanation of how so many poor Americans could vote for a candidate who boasted of his wealth and promised increasing tax cuts for the rich, there is perhaps a more sophisticated analysis in Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, also released in 2016, on the cusp of Trump’s election. Her book explores the appeal of Trump in the bayou country of Louisiana, an area that shares some similarities to Vance’s Appalachia.

But the Vance who wrote Hillbilly Elegy has undergone a major political transformation since the 2016 election, when he attacked Trump as “cultural heroin” and mused whether he might be “America’s Hitler”. One assumes much of this is sheer calculation, but I suspect there is more to his new conservatism than sheer ambition.

Religion and skepticism

As a younger man, Vance was suspicious of religion, after a brief stint as “a devout convert” to the evangelist Christianity of his largely absent father. He writes: “the deeper I immersed myself in evangelical theology, the more I felt compelled to mistrust many sectors of society”.

Four years ago, Vance converted to Catholicism, writing that he saw in Catholicism a recognition “that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties”.

It’s hard to find fault with that sentiment, but his Catholicism also helps explain his rigid line against abortion, a key issue in US politics since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. His is not the Catholicism of Biden, who accepted the right of women to choose, but seems to be more in line with conservative critics of Pope Francis.

In that article, he also writes that he “left for Iraq in 2005, a young idealist committed to spreading democracy and liberalism to the backward nations of the world”. And that he “returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it”.

Vance is often attacked for being an isolationist, abandoning the global leadership role most US presidents have championed. But here he is close to those on the left who, like him, reflect on the carnage of recent interventions in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Vance is aware most of the recruits to the US armed forces are not liberal college graduates, but poor and often non-white Americans, whose deaths and injuries seem largely pointless.

The vice president has little actual power, other than to preside over the Senate, where Kamala Harris has used her casting vote to further a number of Biden’s initiatives. In a sense, it is a role rather akin to that of the Prince of Wales, where much of the job is anticipation of the future. Presidents often use the position to pick the person they hope will succeed them, although Obama overlooked Biden in 2016 to support Hillary Clinton.

If elected, Vance’s real challenge will be to keep in favour with Trump for the next four years, with the clear expectation he is the heir apparent. The media discussion of his policy issues seems to me overblown: Vance will go along with what Trump wants and, as experience has taught us, Trump’s views are a movable feast, politely called transactional.

Vance is more cerebral than Trump and certainly better-read, but his politics have changed since he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. He will certainly be aware that if they win, Trump will be in his eighties by the end of his second term and constitutionally unable to recontest. Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka may well be preparing to serve in a future Vance administration. More

Joe Biden has announced he will no longer contest the 2024 US presidential election. He has thrown his support instead behind his vice president, Kamala Harris.

In most countries, including Australia, such a decision would trigger a meeting of party number-crunchers behind closed doors, where the party would select a new candidate and announce the decision to the rest of the country.

Not in America.

How nominees are selected

American political parties arguably have the most transparent system to select candidates running for office in the world. This very transparency, which many cherish as an additional democratic feature of the American political system, makes the next steps a bit more complicated today than some may be acknowledging.

In brief, any party member who wants to run for president of the United States must run for “primary” elections. Each party holds their own primaries — or caucuses — and whoever wins those becomes the party’s candidate at the general election.

The process, however, is indirect: when voters vote for a candidate during a primary election, their vote actually triggers the selection of a party delegate who is pledged to vote for that candidate during the party convention. The party’s nominee is then formally selected at the convention.

The Democratic party has around 4,700 delegates. Of these, around 3,800 delegates were pledged to nominate Biden for president and are now essentially free agents. Biden’s endorsement of Harris might convince some of them to support her bid, but they are under no obligation to do so.

This situation is unprecedented in modern US elections. The current presidential nominating system based on widespread primary elections took shape in the 1970s. Since then, it has worked virtually flawlessly, with candidates from both parties collecting pledged delegates during the primary season and receiving the nomination during each party’s convention.

The last time that any of the two major American parties held an “open convention” – that is, a convention where there is no individual with enough pledged delegates to be considered the presumptive party nominee and instead the delegates choose the candidate with a free vote – was the Democratic National Convention of 1968. Nothing like this has happened since.

So what happens now?

Harris is definitely running to secure the party’s nomination. Several prominent Democrats have also endorsed her candidacy. But she is not the official Democratic candidate yet, and has some way to go in order to secure the nomination.

According to the party rules, at this stage any member of the Democratic party can gather signatures from at least 300 delegates from a minimum of six states to run for the top spot on the Democratic ticket. This means, theoretically, that there could be up to 15 people seeking the Democratic nomination, including Harris, although it is highly unlikely that such a large number of contenders will enter the field now.

So far, no other potential candidate has expressed a clear intention to run. Should there be more than one candidate, the party rules state that each candidate has the right to give a 20-minute speech in front of the convention, before the delegates vote on the nominee. If a small number of contenders emerged, such a process could be managed effectively. If a large number of contenders were to emerge, however, then the process could quickly become messy, resulting in multiple ballots before a candidate is selected.

From August 19-22, Democrats will gather in Chicago for their national convention. Interestingly, Chicago was also the city where the Democrats gathered during the last properly contentious convention in 1968.

That year, President Lyndon Johnson announced on March 31 that he was not going to run for re-election. A few days later, on April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Then on June 6, right after winning the California primary election during his presidential bid, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.

When the Democratic delegates gathered in Chicago, they nominated the vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who had not run in any of the primary elections and caucuses that took place that season. Anti-Vietnam war protests also triggered a number of riots and protests around Chicago, so the process was extremely volatile.

We don’t know yet if 2024 is going to be an open convention or not. But we know that many have been arguing that, if Biden stepped down, there should not be a “coronation” of Harris, but rather a democratic process that selects the next candidate.

Harris has also stated that she wants to “earn and win” the nomination. Donations also appear to have been flowing in record numbers towards the Democratic cause since Biden’s announcement.

There is now a very delicate balancing act unfolding between keeping the democratic nature of the nominating process intact and ensuring that the Democratic party is quickly united if it has any chance of beating Donald Trump in November. More

The United States election will be held on November 5. On Sunday US time, President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential election contest and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris.

It’s not certain, but very likely Harris will now be the Democratic candidate to face former Republican president Donald Trump in November. During the Democratic presidential primaries held early this year, Biden won about 95% of all delegates to the August 19–22 Democratic convention. These delegates are likely to support Harris given Biden’s endorsement.

Since the debate with Trump on June 27 that was widely thought to have been a disaster for Biden, he has faced pressure to withdraw. In an Ipsos poll for US ABC News that was released before Biden’s withdrawal on Sunday, Democratic voters wanted Biden to withdraw by 60–39.

Following the assassination attempt against Trump on July 13 and the Republican convention from July 15–18, Trump’s lead over Biden in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate of national polls had increased to 3.2 points from 1.9 points on July 13, the largest margin since the aggregate began in March. Vote shares were 43.5% Trump, 40.2% Biden and 8.7% for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

I’ve written previously that the presidency is not decided by the national popular vote. Instead each state has a certain amount of Electoral Votes (EVs), mostly based on population, with each state awarding their EVs winner takes all. It takes 270 EVs to win. The EV system is likely to skew to Trump, so Biden was further behind than in the national polls.

Biden will continue as president until his term ends in January 2025. His net approval in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate is -17.7, with 56.2% disapproving and 38.5% approving. His net approval is worse than other previous presidents at this point in their term, except George Bush Sr and Jimmy Carter.

Trump’s net favourability in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate is -12.0, with 53.7% unfavourable and 41.7% favourable. His ratings are relatively unchanged since April. Unfortunately, FiveThirtyEight has no favourability ratings for Harris.

Will Harris win?

It’s too soon to analyse Harris vs Trump polls. Harris had not been a presidential candidate before today and name recognition of Biden explains his often better numbers than Harris. A recent national YouGov poll for CBS News gave Trump a five-point lead over Biden and a three-point lead over Harris.

There are two things that should advantage Harris. One is that economic data has improved, with inflation dropping and real earnings up. The other is that, while Biden would have been almost 82 by the election, Harris will only be 60 by then. Trump is 78, so the age split that was unfavourable to Biden will be favourable to Harris.

It’s too early to tell what a contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris might look like in the polls.
Allison Dinner/EPA

Nevertheless, nominating a candidate who has not been battle-tested in the primaries is very risky. When Harris ran for president in 2020, she withdrew from the contest in December 2019, before any primaries.

However, with Biden’s age of great concern to voters, and with him already behind Trump, switching to a new candidate could prove a sensible move for the Democrats. Changes in prime minister have worked for Australian parties in the past, with Malcolm Turnbull winning the 2016 federal election after replacing Tony Abbott, and Scott Morrison winning in 2019 after replacing Turnbull.

While Biden has been losing, US Senate polls in the presidential swing states of Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona suggest the Democratic candidates are winning, and doing much better than Biden. So perhaps Democrats just have a Biden problem.

US earnings up

In June, headline inflation dropped 0.1% after being unchanged in May and 12-month inflation dropped to 3.0%, the lowest it has been since June 2023. Core inflation was up 0.1% in June after increasing 0.2% in May and has increased 3.3% in the last 12 months, the smallest increase since April 2021.

The low inflation in May and June has boosted real (inflation-adjusted) earnings in those months, with real hourly earnings up 0.9% for May and June and real weekly earnings up 0.7%. In the 12 months to June, real hourly earnings are up 0.8% and real weekly earnings up 0.6%.

In June, a net 206,000 jobs were added, but the unemployment rate increased 0.1% to 4.1%. This is the highest unemployment rate since November 2021. More

There’s a reason Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign is working hard to evoke nostalgia: People who are nostalgic – meaning, people who long for America’s “good old days” – were more likely to vote for Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, according to research I conducted along with collaborators Kirby Goidel and Paul Kellstedt.

The first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention kicked off with a nostalgic message from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin imploring voters to back Trump and “make America the land of opportunity again.”

And in general, the 2024 RNC themes largely wax nostalgic with “Make America Wealthy Once Again” on Monday, “Make America Safe Once Again” on Tuesday, “Make America Strong Once Again” on Wednesday, and “Make America Great Once Again” on Thursday.

The American public leans nostalgic. Through the 2022 Cooperative Election Study survey, which is a collective effort across many researchers and research groups, we surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults and found that approximately 54% of the respondents to our questions agree that “the world used to be a better place.” Other questions we asked included “How often do you long for the good old days in this country?” and “Do you think the American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the worse or better since the 1950s?”

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin addresses the Republican National Convention on July 15, 2024.

From their answers, we constructed a scale of how much nostalgia a person feels for America’s past, and we used this scale to examine the influence of nostalgia on people’s vote choice in the 2022 midterm elections.

Our results show that the influence of nostalgia is most pronounced among independent voters.

In 2022, partisans, meaning people who aren’t independents, were loyal supporters of their respective parties, regardless of how much nostalgia they have. But independents, or people without party attachments, who feel relatively little nostalgia have a 57% probability of voting Democratic and 40% probability of voting Republican. Meanwhile, independents with relatively high levels of nostalgia have a 25% probability of voting Democratic and 74% probability of voting Republican.

Looking ahead to the 2024 general election, our findings indicate that nostalgic appeals could attract those more independent-minded swing voters to the Republican Party.

Trump’s nostalgic appeal

As a record number of Americans disapprove of incumbent President Joe Biden, a New York Times/Siena College poll finds that nostalgia for the late 2010s is setting in.

Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and his handling of the pandemic seem like blips compared to the three years of sustained economic growth during his presidency from 2016 to 2019. Just 9% of voters say the insurrection or COVID-19 is the one thing they remember most from the Trump presidency – 24% recall the economy. It’s no surprise Trump’s presidential campaign is steeped in nostalgia, again.

Trump is using the same slogan that he used officially in his 2016 campaign and unofficially in his 2020 reelection bid – “make America great again.” In 2016 and 2020, the slogan referred to a vague and distant American past when things were better, simpler.

Now, the former president’s appeal has an element of specificity to it. “Make America great again” – captured in the acronym “MAGA” – is a pledge to return things both to “the good old days” and to the way they were during Trump’s presidency. Trump’s campaign is explicit about this connection. For example, the campaign website cites Trump’s first-term accomplishments when it lists “rebuild the greatest economy in history,” “stop crime and restore safety,” and “renew American strength and leadership” as some of Trump’s top priorities for another term.

Ronald Reagan makes his final pitch to voters in the 1980 presidential election.

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Presidential candidates often use nostalgia in their campaigns. “Make America great again” was not novel in 2016: It was co-opted from Ronald Reagan’s “let’s make America great again” pitch in 1980.

Reagan was masterful in his use of nostalgic appeals. In 1980, he was running against an extremely unpopular incumbent president in Jimmy Carter. After four years of the Carter presidency, the American economy was significantly worse off than in 1976. The inflation rate was 13.5%, and the economy was in a recession.

While debating Carter, Reagan famously asked the audience, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The answer to Reagan’s question was clearly, “No.”

Comparing current conditions to the recent past is a crucial component of democratic accountability. The act of voting is inherently retrospective, a judgment of past performance. Voters need to be able to hold incumbent presidents accountable.

However, Trump’s nostalgia is more than simple retrospection. Trump’s appeal isn’t just about a better economic past or a more stable society. It serves as an evocation of a time in America when women and minorities had less power.

Nostalgia as a dog whistle

In a recently published paper in the journal Research & Politics, political scientists Kirby Goidel, Bradley Madsen and I find that feelings of nostalgia are strongly related to sexism and racism.

Analyses show that those people with more nostalgia are 23% more likely than those with less nostalgia to agree with the following racist statement: “Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”

Similarly, nostalgic respondents are significantly more likely to believe that women “are too easily offended” and that they “seek to gain power by getting control over men.”

The connection of nostalgia to racial resentment and hostile sexism is why Trump’s nostalgic appeal is so potent and polarizing: Nostalgia is not merely about the past four years or even the Reagan-era 1980s; it harks back to an era before the Civil Rights Movement, and before the feminist movement gained momentum. More