Trump, Harris deploy J.D. Vance and Tim Walz to wage class war | Wilnesh News

By choosing a running mate, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have opened up a new front in the battle for the White House: winning over ordinary people.

courtship”real america“This isn’t a novel campaign strategy — but it’s Trump, a billionaire The real estate magnate and media mogul, as well as Harris, a career San Francisco prosecutor turned politician, are not involved.

In a country with approximately 130 million registered voters low or moderate incomeHowever, waging class struggle is good politics.

Enter Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Republican Sen. Vance of Ohio, two running mates whose modest backgrounds are central to their political personas.

Walz, who made his Democratic campaign debut this week, immediately painted Vance as an elitist out of touch with reality.

“Like all the regular guys I grew up with in the heartland, J.D. went to Yale,” Walz joked at a campaign rally with Harris in Philadelphia on Tuesday night.

Walz continued that Vance “financed his career by a Silicon Valley billionaire and then wrote a best-selling book vilifying this community.”

“Hurry!” said the governor. “That’s not what middle America is like.”

The attack painted Trump’s vice presidential pick as almost the exact opposite of Walz, whom Harris had just introduced as “a proud product of a middle-class family in rural Nebraska.”

Vance fired back on Wednesday, calling Walz’s comments “pretty bizarre” and defending his rise in America’s social and economic standing.

“I grew up in a poor family” where no one “went to law school,” Vance said at a campaign event in Michigan.

“The fact that Tim Walz wants to turn this into a bad thing, that I actually worked hard through college, law school and accomplished something — to me, that’s the American dream,” he said .

The opening clash showed how each presidential running mate is striving to make himself more authentic, more relatable and more palatable to ordinary Americans than his opponent.

It’s a classic political tactic, but one that’s only started to gain traction since Walz and Vance joined the campaign.

“There’s something strangely comforting about it,” University of Chicago political science professor William Howell said in an interview.

“This is a long-standing feature of our politics that is particularly acute in an era of high inequality,” Howell said.

“There are a lot of things about this election that are unprecedented — this is not one of them.”

President Joe Biden has maintained that tradition since he withdrew his re-election bid in July and endorsed Harris as his successor.

He created an identity for himself “middle class joe,” touting his former status poorest senate member and emphasized that he came from a working-class background in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Harris, who was born and raised in deep-blue California and has roots in San Francisco government, can’t make that claim.

That could be a major issue in her efforts to win over key constituencies such as rural, non-college-educated voters who could influence swing states that decide the election.

as news media Notus said: “Kamala Harris has a Scranton problem.”

At Tuesday’s rally, Harris initially skipped over Walz’s politics, praising his military service and his decades as a high school teacher and football coach. Walz was later elected to Congress in 2006 and served in the House of Representatives until 2019 when he was sworn in as Minnesota governor.

Vance, meanwhile, rose to prominence after publishing his best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” in 2016, which chronicled (and sometimes criticized) the people and Appalachian culture around him growing up.

He served in the U.S. Marine Corps and later graduated from Yale Law School. He won his first and only political race in 2022, winning an open U.S. Senate seat in Ohio.

Now, both Walz and Vance are pitting their working-class bona fides against each other and those at the top.

In a Trump campaign fundraising email Wednesday morning, Vance attacked Harris for appearing in a campaign ad asking for donations to her presidential campaign while wearing an expensive Tiffany & Co. necklace.

The email, written in Vance’s voice, had the subject line “This picture of Kamala makes me so angry.”

In it, Vance claimed that Harris “made her fortune from the Washington swamp so she could wear a necklace that cost more than two months’ salary.”

A Harris campaign spokesman declined to comment on the Trump campaign’s email.

It could be confusing if Vance’s attack on the vice president comes directly from Trump, who has long touted his wealth and love of gold and other high-end items.

In 2005, Trump bought an engagement ring Retail price $1.5 million The value at that time was equivalent to $2.4 million today.

On Monday, Trump received a Rolex watch and a Tesla Cybertruck interview Podcast by Adin Ross.

The next day, it was Walz, not Harris, who contrasted his own working-class experience with Trump’s.

“Donald Trump is not fighting for you or your family,” Walz told a crowd in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

“He never sat at the kitchen table like I did when I was a kid, wondering how we were going to pay the bills. He sat at the country club at Mar-a-Lago and wondered how he was going to cut taxes for his rich friends.”

On Wednesday night, Walz attacked Trump in the same vein again.

“My parents taught us to be generous to our neighbors and to work for the common good,” Walz wrote in a campaign email sent on his behalf.

“Donald Trump, on the other hand? He sees the world differently. He doesn’t know what service is in the first place because he’s too busy serving himself.”

A Trump campaign spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.