Philippa Kaur

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

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

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

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

1. Josh Shapiro

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

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

2. Mark Kelly

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

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

3. Roy Cooper

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

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

4. Andy Beshear

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

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

5. Gavin Newsom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A memoirist like Obama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intergenerational disadvantage and self-reliance

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

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

As Winant points out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religion and skepticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not in America.

How nominees are selected

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what happens now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Harris win?

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

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

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

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

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

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

US earnings up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump’s nostalgic appeal

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

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

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

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

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

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

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

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

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

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

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

Nostalgia as a dog whistle

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

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

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

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

As the United States presidential election race gathers pace, current president Joe Biden’s advanced age continues to draw significant scrutiny.

But either candidate would reach the record for the oldest sitting US president over the course of their four-year term. While Biden is currently 81 years old, former US president Donald Trump, at 78, is only three years younger.

A February poll found 59% of Americans believe both candidates are too old for another presidential term. A further 27% thought President Biden was too old, but not former President Trump.

Criticism of Biden increased following the first US presidential debate in late June. Concerns were raised about his performance, including his soft, muffled speech, and his tendency to make illogical points or trail off.

More recently, during a press conference at the NATO summit, Biden made several verbal errors, including referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as President Putin and to US Vice President Kamala Harris as Vice President Trump.

Many people, including medical experts, have speculated that President Biden is showing classic features of neurodegeneration, including cognitive decline. But to what degree is cognitive decline a normal part of ageing? And what can we really tell about Biden’s cognitive state from public appearances alone?

Cognitive changes are a part of ageing

While it’s true that cognitive function changes with normal ageing, not all aspects of cognition are affected to the same extent, and not all changes are negative.

Some domains of cognitive function show age-related decline, particularly those reliant on “fluid” abilities. Fluid abilities require individuals to pay attention to their environment and quickly process information to solve problems. These skills show steady decline from around age 20.

This can lead to changes in areas including:

memory
executive function (for example, the ability to plan, multitask and exhibit self-control)
language
attention
perceptual-motor control (the ability to coordinate between what we perceive with our senses and resulting actions).

Nevertheless, while older adults may take longer processing new information or switching between tasks, they often still do so correctly. Similarly, while older adults may find recalling past information (for example, struggling to remember someone’s name when you meet them unexpectedly) or memorising new information (such as the weekly grocery list) challenging, these changes don’t usually significantly impact day-to-day function.

There are also memory aids and strategies that can compensate for these changes and reduce their effects. These might include keeping a to-do list, using tricks to remember new information, or setting reminders. As such, age-related cognitive changes alone don’t necessarily impact a person’s ability to perform a particular job.

Some areas of cognitive function slow down as we age – but not all.
wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock

Certain aspects of cognitive function actually improve with age, in particular, “crystallised” abilities. These rely on the cumulative skills and knowledge gained throughout a person’s life, such as general knowledge or vocabulary. These improve up to one’s 60s and then plateau to around age 80.

Similarly, older adults tend to manage conflict better, using strategies that allow for compromise, emphasising the value of multiple perspectives and recognising knowledge limits.

Progression to dementia

A subset of older adults (around 12–18%) develop mild cognitive impairment, where cognitive decline becomes pronounced enough to be noticed by family and friends, and may begin to have some impact on daily function.

People with mild cognitive impairment might forget things more often, lose their train of thought, struggle with decision making or experience changes in their judgement.

While some people with mild cognitive impairment remain stable or even improve, 10–15% go on to develop dementia each year, with cognitive impairment progressively becoming severe enough to significantly impact on daily function and lead to changes in behaviour and personality.

Cognitive function can vary

A range of factors, including genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors, influence variations in cognitive function.

While some of these factors (such as genetics) cannot be modified, others can be. For example, in a study that followed people for eight years, physical inactivity, smoking and alcohol consumption were associated with increased cognitive decline. Increased cognitive decline relative to normal age-related changes can make it difficult for people to carry out everyday tasks, such as remembering to pay bills, attend appointments or take medications.

On the flip side, addressing these factors could offer some protection against cognitive decline.

Age-related cognitive decline can be different for different people.
fizkes/Shutterstock

There are also short-term influences to consider. After the debate, Biden’s team argued he was unwell and had jet lag.

Evidence shows multiple factors can negatively affect the relationship between age and cognitive function. These include jet lag, viral infection, stress or even poor sleep, which may all be relevant in the current case.

So sometimes, episodes that might look like cognitive decline can actually be temporary, due to these external factors.

What about Biden?

While President Biden has shown some difficulties with speech and memory in recent appearances, this doesn’t necessarily mean he’s experiencing cognitive decline.

Much of the speculation regarding Biden’s cognitive state has been based on people watching video footage of the president. But it’s crucial to stress that a person’s cognitive status cannot be determined without formal assessment. Some medical experts have urged President Biden to undergo such neurological testing and make the results public.

It’s also worth remembering that former President Trump is not without a history of his own verbal gaffes.

Ultimately, until actual medical evidence to the contrary becomes available, we must beware of becoming “armchair physicians” and stay focused on policy issues. More

The image of the would-be assassin at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13 is now part of history. A young man in beige lying dead on the flat roof. Minutes earlier, this self-appointed executioner had been pointing his rifle at Trump, aiming to shoot the former president in front of his followers.

What drove this young man to try to kill? Thomas Matthew Crooks was 20 years old, two years out of school and still living with his parents in a town an hour away from the shooting. In his 2022 school yearbook photos, Crooks bears little resemblance to the assassins of film and television who are typically hardened, self-reliant executioners or highly professional hitmen or women.

As far his marksmanship goes, former classmates said Crooks had been rejected from the school rifle team because he was a terrible shot. But coldblooded killers come in all shapes and sizes, as I discovered when I interviewed a number of killers from the streets of Belfast for my 2005 book, Protestant Boy.

These killers, caught up in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, belonged to various paramilitary organisations. They had organisational and social support, and ideologies that allowed them to justify their acts – even the murders of completely innocent civilians.

Belonging to a paramilitary organisation allowed them to build a shared narrative: “The state do even worse things than us,” they would say indignantly, “with the SAS and their shoot-to-kill policy.”

Lone wolf

In contrast, so-called lone-wolf assassins have no group like this to fall back on, to share and dilute responsibility for their actions. They’re on their own, without the protection of a socially-shared narrative.

Psychological research reinforces this notion of difference. American researcher Clark McCauley and colleagues have suggested that mental disorder is particularly prevalent in lone-wolf terrorists. Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber”, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Jared Loughner, who shot and severely injured US congresswoman Gabby Giffords and killed six others in 2011, was schizophrenic. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi who killed 77 people the same year, was originally also thought to suffer from schizophrenia, but his diagnosis was subsequently changed to narcissistic personality disorder.

In 2015, psychologists Emily Corner and Paul Gill conducted an analysis of 119 lone-actor terrorists and a matched sample of group-based terrorists, and found the probability of a lone-actor terrorist having a mental illness was 13.5 times higher than a group-based terrorist.

But while some form of mental disorder may be a risk factor for lone-wolf terrorism, there are additional factors which seem to be critical. These include holding a strong personal or political grievance, coupled with some form of desensitisation to violence through a gradual escalation of violent behaviour.

The story of Mark Chapman, John Lennon’s killer, suggests that status-seeking can also be important. This may be even more prevalent now in our social media-dominated world, coinciding with what some psychologists suggest is a dramatic rise in narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder.

A photo of Thomas Matthew Crooks aged about 18, taken from his 2022 school yearbook.
CBS news

When this narcissism is combined with lack of empathy, callousness and emotional flatness of the kind you tend to find in psychopathy, then you can have a particularly dangerous combination.

What drives an assassin?

How prevalent are these factors among assassins? A 1999 report by US psychologist Robert Fein and Bryan Vossekuil, then executive director of the National Threat Assessment Center with the US secret service, analysed all people who attacked, or approached to attack, a “prominent person of public status in the US since 1949”. There were 83 assassins analysed: most (86%) were male, the vast majority (77%) were Caucasian, and more than half (55%) had seen service in the military.

In their 2013 article, which looked at data from the Fein-Vossekuil report, McCauley and colleagues, , suggested that grievance is indeed a significant factor for assassins (67%). In 71% of cases, a prior history of weapon use was also identified, and in 59% a history of interest in violence. Some 44% of the assassins studied by Fein and Vossekuil were found to have had suicidal thoughts or had attempted suicide.

While different assassins and lone-wolf terrorists clearly act on a range of different motives, there appear to be common elements: some sort of mental disturbance; a festering grievance vented in echo chambers on the internet, or bottled up inside but rarely properly articulated. There is also, generally, an interest in violence combined with desensitisation to that violence, and a desire to raise their social status through any means.

Crooks only succeeded in injuring Trump, so if he set out to kill the former president, he failed in his objective. But we all know his name now, and that might well have been very important to him. More

As the sound of gunshots interrupted Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, the former US president clutched his right ear before squatting to the ground.

Members of the Secret Service quickly surrounded Trump, who fiercely pumped his fist towards the crowd. It was during this moment an instantly iconic photo was taken as Trump stood, fist raised, in front of the US flag – blood running from his ear to his cheek.

Almost immediately, conspiracy theorists from all parts of the political spectrum began to speculate over the attempted assassination.

I’m a researcher who studies how conspiracy theories are formed online, with a particular focus on those that impact democratic proceedings. Following this incident, my investigation across several platforms reveals how various conspiracy theories have rapidly emerged – and what they might mean for democratic proceedings in the future.

A Reddit users implies the blood visible on Trump’s face was fake.
Reddit

Conspiracy theorists ask: who is responsible?

Just hours after the incident, the FBI released the shooter’s identity: 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. Crooks fired multiple shots from a nearby rooftop outside the rally venue, killing one attendee and critically injuring two others. He himself was also killed at the event. A motive has not yet been determined.

Despite the shooter’s identity being released, one major conspiracy adopted by both the political left and right is that the assassination attempt was staged and/or planned. But who is supposed to have staged it? This is up for debate depending on which online circles you frequent.

One Reddit user commenting on the use of supposedly ‘fake blood’.
Reddit

Left-wing conspiracy theories seem to point the finger at the Republican party. Their supposed “evidence” is that there was no blood on Trump’s face until he raised his hand to his cheek (although this is difficult to confirm based on videos posted online). Nonetheless, they claim Trump used a squib to release fake blood.

Other “evidence” is that the Secret Service allowed Trump to stand and pose as he was escorted offstage. According to these theories, if there was an active shooter Trump would have been taken away with much more urgency.

TikTok users took to the platform to speculate.
Tiktok

Right-leaning supporters of the “staged” theory point to either President Joe Biden, the US Department of Justice, or other powerful actors as being either explicitly or implicitly responsible.

Their “evidence” also involves the Secret Service. Many have said the shooter should have been clearly visible and interrupted by the Secret Service before the attack. Some conspiracy theorists go as far as to say the shooter knew which roof he could conduct the shooting from without being interrupted.

They either point to the Secret Service as being remiss in the security planning of the rally, or actively complicit in the shooting.

A political opportunity

In 2022, a study based in the United States found belief in conspiracy theories can be strongly associated with certain psychological traits and non-political worldviews.

Specifically, the researchers found conspiratorial thinking isn’t consistently associated with a particular political party, but with how extreme a person’s beliefs are. This is seen both for extreme-left and particularly for extreme right-wing political beliefs.

It’s also reflected in what is emerging online following the Trump assassination attempt, wherein social media users of various political leanings are helping spread the conspiracy that the incident was staged.

The reasons for conspiratorial beliefs can be psychological, social or political. They may range from seeking a sense of identity and community, to distrust in the government and other institutions.

For political figures and other influential actors, conspiracy theories are weaponised for personal gain.

With Senator J.D. Vance having been chosen as Trump’s running mate, we can expect to see more fuel added to the flames. Vance is one of the most prominent politicians claiming the Biden administration is responsible (whether directly or indirectly) for the assassination attempt.

This sentiment has been echoed by several others, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Congressman Mike Collins.

Meanwhile, X (formerly Twitter) chief Elon Musk has reposted multiple messages from an alt-right political activist asking how the shooter was able to crawl onto the closest roof to a presidential nominee, suggesting the Secret Service was intentionally remiss. One of these posts has garnered some 91 million views so far.

While X has served as a hotbed for conspiracy theories following the event, the comment sections of other platforms and news articles have also become places of debate. Anywhere users can deliberate and share their views, conspiratorial thinking can propagate.

Screenshot of comments promoting conspiracy theories. The comments were made on a New York Post article which broke the name of the shooter.

The politicians amplifying the conspiracy theories are contributing to increased tension in the lead-up to a highly contentious election. This includes Vance, who may well end up in the US presidential line of succession if Trump wins the election in November.

What are the consequences?

Beyond highlighting the deeply partisan nature of US politics, what might these conspiracy theories mean in the long run?

Previous findings indicate presenting explicit conspiracy theories to people results in lowered trust in elections. As voters from both sides of the political spectrum are exposed to conspiratorial thinking (and increasingly adversarial discussions) around the assassination attempt, it may become difficult for people to trust the democratic proceedings accompanying the 2024 election.

A poll conducted earlier this year found 25% of Americans believe it was possible the January 6 Capitol attack was organised by the FBI. This is despite an extensive investigation by the US Congress and hundreds of legal cases involving participants in the riot.

In 1963, Jack Ruby murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, after the latter was accused of assassinating Kennedy.
New York Post

Research also suggests distrust in the government and institutions can lead to people changing the way they interact with the political system. Some may be pushed to vote for governmental change or independent candidates in a bipartisan system, while others may withdraw from engaging with democracy altogether.

One might hope the recent escalation in political violence will lead to a more tempered approach to politics in the upcoming months. But if the current state of things is any guide, the outlook for democracy is concerning. More