Philippa Kaur

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

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