Philippa Kaur

Hours after Kamala Harris announced her choice of running mate for November’s election, she and her vice-presidential pick, Minnesota governor Tim Walz were on stage at a rally of 12,000 people in Philadelphia. Turning his sights on Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, the schoolteacher and football coach turned politician gave a taste of the rhetorical style which is said to have won him his place on the ticket.

“Donald Trump sees the world a little differently than us,” he said. “First of all, he doesn’t know the first thing about service. He doesn’t have time for it because he’s too busy serving himself”. Putting the focus on Trump’s legal woes, he added: “Violent crime was up under Donald Trump … That’s not even counting the crimes he committed.”

Harris had announced Walz’s vice-presidential candidacy earlier in the day with an Instagram post in which she extolled his personal history and political achievements.

In a typical vitriolic attack, the Trump-Vance campaign immediately called Walz a “dangerously liberal extremist” and that he had spent much of his governorship “spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide” – in a negative reference to Harris’s background as a Californian.

Read more:
To win the White House Kamala Harris must first overcome the ‘California curse’

But, speaking to NBC news, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi countered this narrative, insisting that “to characterize [Walz] as left is so unreal. He’s right down the middle. He’s a heartland-of-America Democrat.”

Former US president, Barack Obama, released a statement saying that not only did Walz have “the values and the integrity to make us proud” but also “the experience to be vice president”.

As Obama insisted, Walz certainly has an extensive resume. A former high schoolteacher and football coach, who served in the National Guard for 24 years, he was elected to the US Congress in 2006 and won the governorship of Minnesota in 2018.

Read more:
Walz pick turns focus on what a VP brings to White House — 3 essential reads

He says he governed on the principle that “you win elections to burn political capital and improve lives”. This meant policies such as legalising recreational marijuana and expanding background checks for prospective gun owners.

Harris pointed to Walz’s record of ensuring access to abortion rights in Minnesota as one of the outstanding features of his governorship. With the subject likely to be a key part of Harris’s campaign, this will underline the Democrats commitment to protecting those rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022.

But it’s not just abortion rights where Walz would be a significant benefit to the Democrat’s campaign for the White House. Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Action Fund said the Harris-Walz partnership was “the winning ticket on climate”.

This is likely to increase his appeal to millennial and Gen Z voters. Walz has enacted some of the more progressive climate policies at state level, such as mandating zero-carbon electricity by 2040.

People I have spoken to in midwestern America have called Walz “a normal guy” that would relate to everyone from small business owners to veterans, from ethnic minorities to rural families, progressives to centrists to unions. The Harris-Walz ticket now has the sort of broad appeal that could prove crucial in gaining votes in those key “flyover” states, many of which traditionally lean to the Republican Party.

Changing the dynamic

The announcement of Walz as Harris’ running mate was accompanied with a considerable spike in reported fundraising by the Harris-Walz campaign. Harris is now reported to be outdoing the Trump campaign by a considerable margin.

It’s a completely different atmosphere to the stuttering Biden campaign of last month, when several high-profile donors were reported to have withdrawn their funding support.

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn chairman and a major Harris donor, called Walz “a lifelong public servant who represents the best of our country”. Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, another big Harris donor, posted on X that Walz would appeal to those tired with ideologues who and want to vote for somebody they can relate to.

Walz attracted national media attention when he called Trump and Vance “weird” in an interview on MSNBC. The comment went viral and has become a label many online users have applied to Republicans.

There is a new vibrancy to the Democrat campaign, one which already has captured the attention of voters. Isaac Chandler, 30, from Oklahoma, told the BBC that the Harris-Walz partnership was “more representative of the wider American public than the Vance-Trump ticket”.

This is in stark contrast to the Republican campaign which has seemingly stalled after such a promising start. Less than a month ago, opinion poll surveys put Trump as much as five points ahead of any Democrat contender for the White House.

The attempted assassination of Trump gained further public support for the former president. It forced Democrats to rethink their strategy of identifying Trump as a threat to American democracy.

The Republican convention which followed appeared to be a coronation ceremony for the former president. And the announcement of Trump’s selection of Vance as his vice-presidential candidate was praised by many as an astute way of wooing working class voters.

Since then, however, the campaign has gone into free fall. Vance’s attack on Harris’s parenting skills and general comments on childless couples’ place in American society, coupled with Trump’s disastrous performance at a Q&A session with the National Association of Black Journalists, has had a disastrous impact on Trump’s polling.

If the Democratic campaign’s momentum can be maintained over the next couple of months, the recent swing in the polls in favour of Harris could prove to be even more significant and have an impact on the result in this November’s election. More

Kamala Harris has been the presumptive Democratic nominee for US president for less than a fortnight, but some key themes are becoming clear from her campaign. One of those is abortion, about which she has spoken frequently since Joe Biden declared her his preferred successor.

Just over two years ago, the US Supreme Court overruled the 49-year-old precedent of Roe v Wade and withdrew constitutional protection for the choice to terminate a pregnancy. In the June 2022 majority judgment in the case of Dobbs v Women’s Health Organization – the case that overturned Roe v Wade – Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Roe v Wade had been “egregiously wrong from the start”. He concluded that: “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”

Under the guise of undoing this wrong, the Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion law to state jurisdiction. Americans have been watching the consequences unfold ever since, as various states have passed laws restricting or banning women from being able to terminate pregnancies.

Harris led the Biden administration’s response to this decision, visiting an abortion clinic and speaking out about reproductive freedom. Even before she took on the presidential candidacy, campaign rallies and adverts from the Democratic campaign were focused on the decision restrict women’s reproductive freedom.

The results of the 2022 midterm elections suggest this could be a useful strategy. The Democrats did significantly better than expected – and abortion was considered a major factor. Certainly successful ballot initiatives in California, Michigan and Ohio (which added constitutional protections) and defeats for abortion restriction measures in Kansas, Kentucky and Montana suggested an increased turnout of Democrat voters.

This November, a possible 11 states could have abortion-related initiatives on the ballot, including Arizona, a key swing state in this election. In such a tight race, parties are looking for any possible advantage.

Possibly mindful of this – and of the fact that most Americans continue to support some access to abortion – the Republican party recently softened its official stance, removing language calling for a federal abortion ban which appeared in both 2016 and 2020. Some Republican state legislators have urged caution about strict abortion bans that may alienate potential voters.

Widespread impact

Speaking regularly about reproductive rights also helps keep in voters’ minds the widespread consequences of the Dobbs decision on abortion and how it affects pregnant women and medical professionals across much of the country.

Only half of states protect abortion, at least until the point of foetal viability. These states – particularly those which border two or more states with abortion bans such as Illinois and Ohio – have become centres for those seeking abortion care and who are able to travel.

Fourteen states have outright bans on abortion access. Some have exceptions for cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the pregnant women, but many do not. Another 11 states have gestational limits that are earlier than the previous 24-week limit. Some are so early that most pregnant women don’t even yet know they are pregnant.

More than half of states have other restrictions: waiting time requirements, mandated counselling, required ultrasounds, multiple visits to the doctor, spousal or parental consent laws and others.

The most recent estimates suggest 48% of women now live in states with some form of abortion restrictions. That figure rises to 57% for black women and higher for Native American women. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research organisation, estimates that almost one in five pregnant women now have to travel out of state for abortion access.

Indirect attacks on access

By speaking out on abortion, the Harris campaign is also seeking to galvanise pro-choice voters by reminding them that the threats come in many forms.

In June, an attempt to undermine access to the abortion pill, mifepristone, was rejected by the Supreme Court. The case was, in effect, a back door attempt to further restrict abortion access.

There was a fierce and immediate backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v Wade.
EPA-EFE/Etienne Laurent

And, although interstate travel is constitutionally protected in the US, some localities in Texas have been trying to prevent use of their roads by those seeking to leave the state to access abortion care.

Two University of Texas at Austin professors sought the legal right to academically fail students who take time off for abortion care, while Idaho academics were warned they could no longer advise students about anything relating to abortion.

And, as the New Republic reported, anti-abortion laws are increasingly being used by domestic abusers to threaten and harass partners.

Healthcare consequences

As anti-abortion advocates continue to press for greater restrictions across the US, data from the Guttmacher Institute show that they continue to fail to achieve their aim of reducing abortion rates. In 2023, abortion rates were higher across the country than in previous years.

But, as many doctors are pointing out, the restrictions are regularly putting the lives of pregnant women at risk. Mimi Zieman, an obstetrician from Georgia wrote: “If I were finishing my training today and choosing somewhere to practice, I would not come to this state or anywhere with these restrictions on practice.”

Many agree with her. Recent studies suggest as many as 70% of gynaecology students in the US are less likely to consider residency in a state with abortion restrictions.

This risks leaving pregnant women without both abortion access and good, reliable, accessible reproductive healthcare. In a country that already has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations, this suggests further declines.

Testimony from practitioners overwhelmingly indicates that threats to medical licences and risk of prison terms are deterring doctors from undertaking vital healthcare provision.

And pregnant women are suffering as a result. Stories now abound of women like Kate Cox, who was forced to travel outside of Texas for an abortion when the state refused to determine that her case was sufficiently life threatening to qualify under their exemption. Or that of Nicole Miller, airlifted to a nearby state because the abortion she required to medically stabilise her was unavailable in her home state of Idaho.

Harris and the Democrats want voters to remember these stories as they go to the polls in November. And they want voters to remember that it was Trump, and his Supreme Court appointees, who made it possible. More

A former teacher and football coach who a majority of Americans had never heard of before is now running for vice president of the United States alongside Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

While the two names at the top of the Democratic and Republican tickets – Harris and Donald Trump – will largely define the next three months in the US presidential race, both campaigns will still focus considerable attention on defining Tim Walz, Harris’ largely unknown running mate.

So, who is Walz? And what will his addition to the Democratic ticket mean for Harris and the Democrats’ chances of winning the election?

Teaching in rural public schools

Walz undeniably has strong roots in rural and working-class America, despite being a member of a Democratic Party that has become increasingly urban and highly educated in recent years.

Born in a small Nebraska town to a school teacher father and a school administrator mother, Walz enrolled in the National Guard at 17. He later graduated from a small public university with a degree in social science education.

Walz met his wife, Gwen, while teaching in rural Nebraska. She soon persuaded him to move to her home state of Minnesota, where they got jobs teaching at the same school.

Walz devoted the next decade of his career to the school in Mankato, Minnesota, where he was a social studies teacher, American football coach and faculty adviser for the student gay-straight alliance.

One particular incident then spurred Walz’s decision to embark on a career in politics. In 2004, he took a group of students to a rally for then-presidential candidate George W. Bush. They were initially denied entry because one of the students had a campaign sticker for Bush’s rival, John Kerry.

Walz was reportedly irate – and signed up to volunteer for Kerry’s campaign the next day. He then ran for Congress himself in a rural southern Minnesota district bordering Iowa, which he won in 2006.

As a former command sergeant major, he was the highest-ranking enlisted military member in the history of Congress. And as a representative, he become known as a workhorse, eventually leading the Veterans Affairs Committee.

After winning six terms in a row in a once reliably Republican district, Walz ran for and won the Minnesota governorship in 2018. He was re-elected in 2022.

Then-gubernatorial candidate Tim Walz, along with his wife, Gwen (left), celebrates with supporters after winning the Democratic governor’s primary in Minnesota in 2018.
Anthony Souffle/Star Tribune/AP

Walz’s political positions

In his first congressional campaign, Walz presented himself as a moderate Democrat, touting endorsements from the National Rifle Association.

As a veteran and one of very few Democrats to represent a mostly rural district, Walz bucked the party line on some issues, including opposing a decrease in military spending. A key reason was his concern about China.

Walz taught English for a year in China and spent his honeymoon there. He and his wife even started a company leading student tours of China.

Given this history, Walz has a deep familiarity with the country. When he got to Congress, he joined the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a legislative group monitoring human rights and the rule of law in the country. He co-sponsored a number of resolutions condemning China’s human rights abuses and poor environmental standards.

Walz has also championed democracy activists in Hong Kong and regularly meets with exiled Tibetan leaders, including the Dalai Lama.

He and his wife were even married on June 4 1994 – the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in 1989 – because, his wife said, he “wanted to have a date he’d always remember”.

Walz’s time as governor of Minnesota – a state that is more Democratic-leaning than neighbouring Wisconsin or Michigan – has undoubtedly seen him turn more progressive.

Aided by the fact Democrats hold a small majority in the Minnesota legislature, Walz’s tenure has led to a number of progressive legislative wins, including:

Governor Tim Walz listens as President Joe Biden speaks in Minnesota in November 2023.
Andrew Harnik/AP

Defining Walz

From teaching on a Native American reservation to a school in China not long after the Tiananmen Square massacre, Walz’s life story has had many diverse turns. So much so, his staffers once called him Forrest Gump, after the Tom Hanks character with a colourful life.

Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are now angling to define his latest chapter.

The Harris campaign is hoping Walz’s straight-talking, Midwestern dad persona, combined with his background as a National Guardsman familiar with everything from turkey hunting to repairing pickup trucks, will make him relatable to a wide swathe of voters in middle America. He’s a conventional politician.

This is particularly important given his running mate, Harris, is anything but “conventional” – if she wins in November, she would be the first woman, first Black woman and first South Asian president in US history. She’s also from California – a state that hasn’t produced a president since Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

The campaign will also seek to juxtapose Walz’s perceived normalcy against the Trump-Vance ticket, which it is depicting as “weird”.

Walz first used this word to describe the Republican ticket, and it instantly went viral. He’s since become referred to as a “cool dad” online and has become the source of a stream of memes in recent days.

For the Trump campaign, they are hoping to define Walz by his more progressive tenure as Minnesota governor, ultimately alienating more moderate voters.

In the hours after Walz was announced as Harris’ running mate, Republicans began highlighting the unrest in Minnesota that followed the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020 and criticising Walz for being too slow to call in the National Guard to quell the violence.

While Walz would ultimately call in a sizeable number of National Guardsmen, the Republicans have nonetheless zeroed in on this attack line – even highlighting how Harris sought to raise funds for protesters who had been arrested in Minnesota.

Crime is a challenging issue for Democrats. When pollsters asked Americans last year which political party does better on crime, Democrats trailed Republicans by ten percentage points.

Where to from here?

Ultimately, Harris made clear what she views as Walz’s addition to the Democratic ticket, highlighting his background as a school teacher and National Guardsman. She also told him on Tuesday, “you understand our country”.

Over the next few months, we’ll see how accurate that statement is – if Walz’s understanding of the country actually helps Harris to win the race in November. More

Who is Kamala Harris?

Though Harris has had a very public life in politics for decades, speculation about who exactly she is and what she stands for has circulated across social media platforms and news stories for several years.

Many of these conversations focus on the historic nature of Harris’ presidential candidacy, since she is a mixed-race, Jamaican and Indian woman who does not have biological children and who was born to two immigrant parents in Oakland, California.

As I’ve previously written about Harris’ mixed-race identity, some have questioned how authentic her Black or Asian identities are. Interest in Harris’ familial background and race was reignited on July 31, 2024, when Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump falsely suggested that Harris has misled voters about her racial and ethnic identity.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump asked during an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago.

By saying this, Trump tapped into the long history of racism in America, where some white people have defined racial categories and policed the boundaries of race.

More than 33 million Americans identify as multiracial and likely see themselves reflected in Harris’ layered background. But many Republicans are also trying to use Harris’ identity against her.

For ardent Trump supporters, Harris may seem to represent all that they oppose, including woke politics and Democrats being “controlled by people who do not have children,” as Trump’s running mate JD Vance has said.

For Democrats, Harris represents the U.S.’s multiracial, feminist future.

Which means, what people believe about Harris largely depends on the party they already plan to vote for more than who the Democratic presidential nominee really is.

A Kamala Harris supporter holds a sign following President Joe Biden’s July 22, 2024, announcement that he will not seek reelection.
Loren Elliott/Getty Images

Harris and her many firsts

Many political observers and voters alike agree that Harris has breathed new life into the Democratic Party, precisely because she is a Black-South Asian woman. Many Asian American, Black, Latino and female voters see elements of themselves in Harris: the celebration of her ethnic cultures, her achievements as a person of color, and her unprecedented and pathbreaking model being a woman of color who is the nominee of a major party seeking the highest office in the country.

A variety of fundraising meetings in July and August centered on the identities of those who support Harris.

Black women for Harris, Black men for Harris, white women for Harris, white dudes for Harris, South Asians for Harris, LGBTQ+ people for Harris, among others, have all gathered in Zoom meetings that had tens of thousands of attendees – one even had a record-breaking 200,000 attendees. These online gatherings have jointly raised more than $15 million for Harris.

The number and diversity of people rallying for Harris shows her widespread appeal. Harris’ white male supporters – a key voting demographic for Democrats – also show how Harris’ candidacy is inclusive to many different kinds of people.

Inclusivity may be a keyword of Harris’ campaign, especially in opposition to her rival’s campaign. Vance’s comments about childless cat ladies has spawned endless memes tapping into the rancor of people who recognize the insensitivity and ignorance of such a remark.

Harris’ supporters have responded to the GOP’s critiques of her and turned them into positive political memes celebrating her identity, attesting to Harris’ popularity with a younger, media-savvy electorate.

Using Harris’ identity against her

Republicans, meanwhile, are questioning Harris’ qualifications precisely based on her ethnic and racial identity, calling her a “DEI” candidate. This is a reference to the term “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The exact definitions of DEI can vary, but in workplaces or school settings it can look like treating everyone equally and fostering a culture where all people, regardless of their background or identities, feel welcomed. DEI policies intend to respond to the historic oppression that marginalized people have faced.

As the scholar Susan Harmeling wrote recently, “The term ‘DEI hire’ actually implies that only heterosexual, white men are qualified for such high leadership positions.”

Some in the GOP have renamed the DEI acronym “Didn’t Earn It.” U.S. Reps. Tim Burchett and Harriet Hageman both have disparaged Harris as a DEI hire, with Hageman going a step further by saying that Harris is “intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel.”

The gender factor

Harris is the second woman major-party presidential nominee, following Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016. So far, Harris doesn’t seem to be facing persistent questions about whether women are fit to lead, as Clinton once did.

But Harris has faced both sexist and racist comments, particularly online. One 2021 study found that 78% of disparaging sexist and racist comments on Twitter, now called X, during November and December 2020 were directed at Harris.

Some Republicans have continued making sexist attacks on Harris in this election campaign. In a July 3, 2024, social media post, Jackson Lahmeyer, the head of the group Pastors for Trump, called Harris a “ho,” or whore, riffing off a right-wing meme of “Joe and the Ho.”

Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau took to social media on July 22 to call Harris a representative of the “spirit of Jezebel.” Other conservative pundits have claimed that Harris slept her way to the top, citing an early relationship she had with Willie Brown, a prominent Democratic politician from San Francisco and later speaker of the California State Assembly, as the reason for her success.

This false story of Harris’ romantic past aligns with old stereotypes of Black women being promiscuous, rooted in the rape of Black women by white slave owners during antebellum slavery.

And the tactic of questioning Harris’ authentic racial background could apply not just to Harris but to nearly all multiracial people.

Yet there are millions of Americans who identify as multiracial and see in Harris their own story. More

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s place on the short list of potential Democratic vice presidential nominees has vaulted him to a national profile. That’s not surprising to someone like me who follows Pennsylvania politics closely.

Shapiro is no stranger to both the modern realities of Trumpism in the Republican Party and the nitty-gritty work of legislating across the aisle. An important part of his rise is his “get shit done” mentality, the phrase he readily uses to describe his approach to politics.

Who is Josh Shapiro? And what might his experience with building consensus in the swing state of Pennsylvania mean in the current veepstakes?

Early political ambitions

Shapiro is the consummate politician. He worked as a staffer for several members of Congress before outhustling his competition to earn his own seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

While in the House, Shapiro built a reputation as a pragmatic reformer and bipartisan operator. He was known for his ambition but also for his engagement with policy.

His most famous consensus-building act was being at the center of bipartisan negotiations in 2007 that resulted in Republican state Rep. Denny O’Brien becoming speaker of the house, even though the Democrats had won a single-seat majority in the chamber.

O’Brien repaid the favor in 2022 when he, along with eight other prominent Republican figures, backed Shapiro for governor over his Republican rival.

As a state representative, Shapiro sponsored an unsuccessful amendment to the state constitution that would have changed Pennsylvania’s partisan judicial elections to a merit appointment system, which echoes the current push from the Biden administration for U.S. Supreme Court reforms.

And he led a bipartisan effort in 2009 to reinstate hate crimes protections for sexual orientation, gender identity and disability after the state’s Commonwealth Court struck down those protections.

Notably, this push failed and has become a perennial debate in Pennsylvania, most recently after the murder of transgender teen Pauly Likens Jr.

County commissioner to attorney general

Shapiro left the Pennsylvania House in 2012 after winning a seat on the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners. The three-member board is essentially the legislature for the county, and Shapiro’s election shifted it from Republican to Democratic control.

His record of “getting shit done” continued as a county commissioner, and he drew praise from the lone Republican commissioner, Bruce Castor, for being “the best county commissioner I ever knew” and “very good at arriving at consensus.”

Leveraging his success and a statewide profile, Shapiro then successfully won two terms, in 2016 and 2020, as Pennsylvania’s attorney general – a position widely considered a steppingstone to the governor’s mansion.

As attorney general, Shapiro was involved in the high-profile investigation of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church as well as the prosecution of Penn State’s former football coach Jerry Sandusky for the same, and former Penn State President Graham Spanier for covering it up.

He later became the face of the legal fight against the Trump campaign’s claims of election fraud in Pennsylvania in 2020.

An anti-MAGA candidate

Shapiro ran for Pennsylvania governor in 2022. The Democratic Party cleared the field for him, and he continued to assume the anti-MAGA mantle in his race against Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano.

Mastriano was a key figure in Republican denial of the election results in the 2020 race and proved to be a very weak candidate. In fact, Republican donors largely gave up on Mastriano’s campaign.

In the current veepstakes, some commentators have pointed to Shapiro’s landslide victory in 2022 as a liability. They argue that he has not been tested or vetted enough for a national campaign by running in a tough race.

But during his first two years as governor, Shapiro has held true to his consensus-building persona.

He coordinated the effort to repair a vital bridge on Interstate 95 near Philadelphia in just 12 days, after its collapse from a truck fire rendered the vital highway impassable.

He also appointed Republican Al Schmidt to oversee Pennsylvania’s election system as secretary of state. Shapiro’s argument that “running an election should be a nonpartisan exercise” was another rejection of the election denialism that emerged in the state in 2020.

About-face on school vouchers

Shapiro’s work toward consensus building has at times caused problems for him within his own party.

For example, in 2023, Shapiro appeared to be cruising to an on-time bipartisan state budget. This is something his Democratic predecessor Tom Wolf struggled with.

However, an offer to the Republicans controlling the Pennsylvania Senate – a $100 million school voucher program – angered his allies in the House, narrowly controlled by Democrats.

Shapiro pulled his support, using his line-item veto power to strike the voucher program from the budget after Senate Republicans had passed it.

This move understandably angered Republicans and diminished the chances for other compromises needed on both a spending bill for higher education and the enabling legislation needed to spend the money from the budget.

As a result, state spending, including critical education and human services funding, was delayed for 5½ months until the final budget negotiations were concluded and enabling legislation was passed.

Moderate and bipartisan bona fides

Shapiro has also proven pragmatic on other issues that are central to Pennsylvania politics, but which may not be well accepted by more liberal Democrats in other states.

For example, he backed away from his predecessor’s attempt to have Pennsylvania join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a carbon cap-and-trade system in the Northeast. Shapiro has long been skeptical of the initiative and its potential effect on union jobs in one of the top natural gas-producing states in the country.

Shapiro’s support for private school vouchers wasn’t popular with his party in Pennsylvania and also won’t be with national Democrats.

Shapiro has also been at the forefront of several controversies roiling the Democratic Party more broadly. He condemned as “shameful and unacceptable” University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill’s disastrous testimony before a U.S. House committee investigating campus protests over the Israeli war in Gaza. On the left, the Republican-led committee’s work was largely seen as an attack on higher education.

More broadly, Shapiro, who is Jewish, has been a staunch supporter of Israel at a time when the war in Gaza is roiling the Democratic Party.

If on the ticket, however, Shapiro will not be running in a partisan primary but a general election. That means that all of these stances could help bolster his moderate and bipartisan bona fides nationally.

Harris-Shapiro political chemistry?

In the end, political scientists will say the hype around choosing a swing-state politician – even a popular one like Shapiro – is unlikely to make any difference in the outcome of the election.

But when it comes to Harris selecting her running mate, Shapiro checks two important boxes. Most importantly, he appears to meet the requirement of do no harm to the ticket. As has been seen in recent days with concern among some Republicans over Trump’s choice of U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as a running mate, a presidential candidate does not want a partner who will potentially drag down the ticket.

Properly vetting and selecting the right candidate who is qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency is another important optic in choosing a running mate. Shapiro would seem a safe choice from this perspective, although campaigns often bring out flaws candidates miss.

The pair also came up in politics together. They share a history as state attorneys general, with Shapiro coming into office in 2017 as Harris moved from California attorney general to the U.S. Senate. But they first met in 2006 at a bipartisan seminar for future political leaders, sponsored by the nonpartisan Aspen Institute.

Moreover, Shapiro endorsed Harris in her presidential run in 2019.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia. More

Last week, presumptive US Democratic nominee Kamala Harris delivered one of the most important messages of her presidential campaign so far:

I’ve heard that recently I’ve been on the ‘For You’ page, so I thought I would get on here myself.

She wasn’t speaking to a typical crowd of supporters at a campaign rally, or to journalists at a White House press conference – but to an audience of 20 million TikTok users.

Following President Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance in early June, Harris has ignited an explosion of memes and viral content online.

And with fewer than 100 days until Americans cast their vote, it’s clear her campaign is trying to speak the digital language of Gen Z and harness youth-dominated social media platforms to gain traction with young voters.

Coconut trees and a ‘brat summer’

Harris is no stranger to viral moments. In her past three years as Biden’s vice president, she has been relentlessly mocked and meme-fied online for her so-called “word salads” and overuse of trademark phrases.

In recent weeks, however, her digital footprint has taken on a life of its own. Harris’s passionate online fandom is dubbed the “K-Hive” in a nod to the name of Beyoncé’s dedicated fanbase, the “BeyHive”.

The K-Hive is embracing Harris’s personality and political style in a wave of viral videos inspired by Gen Z trends and cultural touch points.

Let’s take Harris’s coconut tree comment as an example. Last year at a White House event in May, the vice president jokingly said, quoting her mother, “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”

“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

This now-viral quote has resurfaced and spawned endless online content. Many online users (and particularly young people) are referencing the quote in their posts, describing themselves as “coconut pilled” and lining their social media bios with coconut emojis.

The clip of Harris speaking has been stitched and reposted thousands of times by TikTok users, remixed to the music of iconic Gen Z artists such as Chappell Roan and even used as a soundtrack to a viral dance associated with Charli XCX’s song, Apple.

Harris’ campaign appears to be leaning into the joke, with the bio of the official Kamala HQ TikTok and X accounts now being just two words: “Providing context.”

Even the header image of Kamala’s X account (pictured at the top of this article) is a reference to British pop singer Charli XCX’s recently released album Brat. According to the singer – who sent the internet into a frenzy when she tweeted “kamala IS brat” last week — the archetypal brat is

just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile.

You’d be forgiven for thinking these might be undesirable traits for a presidential candidate. But by leaning into the “brat summer” brand and tapping into trending audios, Harris’s campaign is leveraging youth culture to position herself as a relevant and contemporary candidate for Gen Z.

Young social media users have largely embraced Harris’s chaotic and excitable energy. In a way, the very personality quirks that Republicans have tried to construe as baggage to take Harris down have emerged as one her greatest assets in connecting with younger voters.

Injecting new life into the Democrats’ campaign

In recent months, poll after poll found young Americans were switching off from a redux of the Trump–Biden matchup.

While Biden was still in the race, polling showed an overwhelming 82% of voters below age 30 thought he was too old to be an effective president – more than any other age group.

Harris could not strike a stronger contrast with Biden in her public persona. With her relative youth and engagement with meme culture, she has injected fresh life into the presidential race and the Democrats’ campaign platform.

Since entering the race, Harris has reinvigorated young Americans – a key Democratic voter base Biden was struggling to hold onto.

In the 48 hours after Biden stepped aside and formally endorsed Harris, almost 40,000 people registered to vote. This is the largest spike reported this election cycle. Most of these newly registered voters (83%) were aged 18–34.

Harris has also raked in celebrity endorsements from massive pop culture names, including rapper Megan Thee Stallion, who performed at her first presidential campaign rally in Atlanta – coining the slogan “Hotties for Harris”. Other star endorsements have come from rapper Quavo, pop singer Olivia Rodrigo and actor Kerry Washington, to name a few.

From online popularity to the polls

Harris’ campaign is harnessing social media to drill down on campaign messages in a way that might appeal to young audiences online.

In tweets and interviews, Democrats are branding Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance as “weird” for their views on issues such as abortion access and women’s rights. They are adopting the bite-sized, quick-witted humour that defines Gen Z to mount policy attacks.

Beyond making the case against Trump, Harris is also positioning herself as a younger candidate with a vision for the future. For instance, her first presidential campaign ad strikes an optimistic tone set to the soundtrack of Beyoncé’s song Freedom, as Harris embraces the rallying cry of “we choose freedom”.

It’s this future-focused messaging that Harris’s camp hopes will appeal to younger voters — and an angle Biden struggled to articulate, given his age and deteriorating public speaking skills.

That said, the real test for Harris will be whether she can convert this groundswell of momentum into votes come election day in November. More

A “childless cat lady”. “Crazy”. “Dumb as a rock.” Those are just some of the insults that have been directed at Kamala Harris since she announced her intention to gain the Democratic nomination for president.

Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, would only be the second woman to gain a major party’s nomination for president of the United States. The first woman in this position, Hillary Clinton, was labelled a “nasty woman” by her opponent Donald Trump in 2016.

If Germany, Serbia, Peru, Barbados, Iceland and Samoa can elect women as leaders, and a third of UN member countries overall, why is it still an issue in the US? And if a woman can be vice president in the US, surely she could also be president? After many other countries have elected women leaders, is the US really not ready for a woman president?

Last week, YouGov data sparked conversations about the US’ “woman problem” again. While more than half of respondents (54%) said the US was ready to elect a woman as president, this number is down from 2015. During the first month of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic nomination, 63% said the country was ready to elect a woman to its highest office.

That Americans are feeling less confident about the issue now is hardly surprising and could be explained through cultivation theory. This suggests that when gendered stereotypes and sexist narratives persist in media coverage, voters are more likely to reflect these as well.

For many voters, Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 and the defeat of several female candidates in the 2020 and 2024 Democratic and Republican primaries may indicate that the country is simply not ready to elect a woman president. Surveys such as the recent YouGov data further reinforce this perception as journalists report on the declining support for a potential female president. But the issue is significantly more layered than that.

Despite a decrease in sexism against women politicians around the world, the US presidency remains a role which many voters associate with stereotypically “male” characteristics such as power, strength and assertiveness. This makes it more likely that women candidates will face negative gendered coverage and attacks when aspiring to this office.

Many people still associate more stereotypically masculine traits with their views of the ideal president or hold stereotypical, gendered associations about policy issues. For instance, foreign policy and the economy are often seen as issues that men would be better suited to handle.

Indeed, polling data suggests Harris is seen as weaker than Trump on stereotypically masculine issues such as foreign policy, inflation and crime. However, she is seen as the stronger candidate on issues such as abortion rights, tackling climate change, improving education and healthcare.

Those issues are currently at the top of the news agenda and consequently at the forefront of voters’ minds. If she continues to emphasise her experience and policy plans on these issues, Harris could win over a substantial share of the electorate.

Harris seen as stronger debater than Trump

Recent surveys include further promising data for Harris and her campaign team. Among US adults, she is seen as a slightly better debater than Trump. The sentiment has been amplified on social media, where younger voters in particular are expressing excitement over the prospect of a Harris-Trump debate, saying they look forward to seeing Harris outperform Trump.

This has not gone unnoticed by Trump who backtracked on his commitment to a televised debate in September just last week. “It shows that he is afraid,” was Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s assessment in an MSNBC clip shared to X by the Harris HQ account: “It shows that he knows if the two of them are on a stage together, it’s not going to end well for him.”

The younger generation and social media are of high importance for Harris’s campaign, having created positive narratives around her through memes and “fancams” (fan videos) since she announced her campaign. Having noticed the momentum and its potential, Harris officially joined TikTok last week and enjoys her highest approval (favorability) ratings among voters under the age of 30.

Read more:
Kamala Harris’s ‘Brat summer’: how memes can change a political campaign

“Just call her Madam President”

For women candidates, however, a significant challenge lies in the stereotypical framing that their opponents use, and how to respond. As research has shown, coverage about women candidates is more likely to focus on their personal lives than it is for men.

This is also true for political attacks. In the few days that Harris has been in the race, attacks from her opponents have included criticising her personal life choices, attacking her family, and mocking her name by only using her first name and intentionally mispronouncing it.

So far, Harris’s team seems prepared to fight where necessary and to take the high road where appropriate. But Harris’s campaign has introduced a middle way as well – addressing comments without explicitly mentioning them, a strong political communication strategy for the digital age.

For instance, when Vance’s comments about Harris as a “childless cat lady” resurfaced, instead of going on the defence, her campaign hinted at the comments in a post about World IVF Day.

“The Harris campaign wishes a happy IVF Day to everyone except for @JDVance,” they captioned the post which included sharp criticism of Vance for “insulting couples struggling with infertility, demeaning women’s choices and their freedoms” before stating Harris’s stance on the issue.

As for mocking her name, Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff presented “good news” for Trump and others: “After the election, you can just call her Madam President.” More

In any presidential year, the Australian media – including social media – will suddenly generate a vast army of instant experts on American politics, all with a take you just have to read or hear. They’ll cover everything from laws governing electoral delegates in Arizona to the impact of demographic change on voting patterns in western Pennsylvania. In the 2024 US presidential year, when so much is at stake, that ramps right up.

Allan Behm’s The Odd Couple, a study of the Australia–America relationship that also serves as a meditation on both countries, could hardly be more timely. It belongs to a rather different tradition than that of instant analysis with newly acquired (and dubious) “expertise”.

The Odd Couple: The Australia–America Relationship – Allan Behm (Upswell)

Behm is a considered and reflective commentator. An experienced former diplomat, public servant and (Labor) political adviser who now works at the Australia Institute, he is qualified to offer both well-informed critique and constructive suggestions for the relationship.

He has a way with words and is widely read, displaying a formidable cultural range that can take in the Argonauts, Davy Crockett and the Lone Ranger, the foundational documents of the United States, novels and poems from the 19th century, big thick books of political history and international relations, and much in between.

The result is a valuable contribution to discussion of the Australia–America relationship. The quality of this debate here is poor. There are too many commentators with too much skin in the game, too many with warm recollections of their last trip to that conference in Aspen, or who are waiting in hope or expectation for their invitation to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue.

The dissidents are there, but they struggle to exercise influence in a public culture dominated by a news empire controlled by (American) Citizen Murdoch.

There are some who do a good job of questioning many of the pieties about the alliance. They include James Curran (a University of Sydney history professor and the Australian Financial Review’s foreign editor), Hugh White (former senior public servant and Australian National University academic) and Behm’s colleague at the Australian Institute, Emma Shortis. You will also find penetrating critics further to the left, in magazines such as Arena: Guy Rundle, Clinton Fernandez and David Lee. They tend to treat the US as an empire, Australia as a compliant sub-empire.

Critics remind Australians that the alliance’s risks and costs are only magnified by the reflexive “follow the leader” approach to US policy pursued by Australian policy-makers. But compared with the chorus of pro-alliance commentators, the critics exercise limited influence with a political class whose timidity is one of Behm’s themes. Australia’s “international policies have been characteristically defensive and deferential to the interests of others,” he judges.

‘Half a dissident’

Behm is only half a dissident: he does not reject the alliance. Each nation needs the other and their relationship is broadly complementary. Take out the US, and Behm can imagine only a bleak future for Australia: “Without America, Australia would be alone, adrift on its continent in a region that it does not understand and with which it has no affinity.”

It is a rather pessimistic summation of Australian capacity – perhaps too much so – but “fear of abandonment” is a familiar theme in Australian foreign policy.

Behm does not like visceral identity politics, but he does like a politics and diplomacy in which national actors have a strong and coherent sense of identity. He would like Australia to have a Bill of Rights, as the US does, but admires the shared commitment of the US and our country to the rule of law.

Many of the alliance’s benefits – strategic, economic and cultural – are set out in The Odd Couple, but Behm worries Australians have done too little either to evaluate the dangers and losses, or to extract the full benefit they could gain from the relationship.

Perhaps oddly for a book on this theme appearing at this moment, AUKUS, the security agreement between Australia, the UK, and the US, does not figure as a major topic. There is more on the economy: Behm draws attention to how the relationship helped Australia in the global financial crisis, but harmed it via the Howard-era free trade agreement.

That agreement, Behm suggests, has undermined multilateralism, given the US sway over our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and handed US companies new opportunities to constrain Australian policy-making. Behm believes the massive increase in two-way foreign direct investment between the two countries this century had very little to do with the free trade agreement.

A 2003 protest against the free trade agreement with the US.
Alan Porritt/AAP

Behm is also a critic of US adventurism in war and Australia’s supine behaviour in following the leader, notably in Vietnam and Iraq. These failures, among others, were the result of Australia’s inability to articulate a strong sense of its own national identity or interests. It has too often, and too readily, subordinated itself to the much larger and more powerful country.

He would like Australia to be more like Israel and Taiwan in the dogged pursuit of its interests with US policymakers, especially in working the Congress. Behm thinks we should invest more in diplomacy, recognising that power depends on culture, persuasion and a strong sense of national selfhood. It is not only about military firepower (including that of nuclear-powered submarines). He would like to see “a bit of jostling in the relationship”, less deference.

Behm’s argument that the relationship with the US is multifaceted is hardly new, but it is worth reiterating and updating. He has chapters dealing with the law, economics, culture, war and peace. All contain valuable insights, although the chapter on culture was the least focused – and (though this Gen-X reviewer surprises himself in saying so) a little hard on the Baby Boomers.

Deeper insecurities

Two themes are either absent or lightly touched on. Behm says little about intelligence sharing. And he touches only lightly on religion, which is surely central to any understanding of the American experience in general, and of the twists and turns of its politics in recent decades.

Behm is interested in the common histories of the US and Australia as settler societies founded on the dispossession of, and violence towards, Indigenous peoples. He detects a fundamental insecurity at the heart of each nation, based on this original sin.

The apparently “boundless self-belief” of the Americans with their claims to exceptionalism, and Australia’s “brasher kind of larrikinism” each express a “much deeper insecurity born of a shared inability to ‘belong to’ – as distinct from ‘to own’ – the continents on which they live”.

It is to Behm’s credit that he is not afraid of this kind of ambitious generalisation. That said, it carries the risk of inviting objection from the measurers and straighteners who review books. For example, I can’t help but suspect some complexity is being brushed over a little too lightly when I read: “The simple fact is that Australians no longer trust their governments. Nor do they trust one another.”

The most serious of our recent crises, the pandemic, surely revealed that, when the chips are down, Australians do largely trust their governments – and one another, too.

Behm gets the occasional historical detail wrong. The Myall Creek massacre was in 1838, not 1832, and Australia had no federal election in 1932. We are told at one point: “At the end of World War II, coal and iron ore declined as key exports.” In fact, neither had ever been key exports. But these are minor matters.

Behm has an intelligent understanding of the past, which he applies to a wise, witty and subtle analysis. The Odd Couple is a welcome contribution to a domain of public debate in Australia where too many people think it’s best simply to keep a lid on their opinions. More