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Sixteen days after Joe Biden stepped aside and cleared the field for Kamala Harris to become the presumptive Democratic nominee, his vice president has chosen a running mate of her own.
And Republicans, seeking to avoid a misstep the party made when it was caught off guard by Biden dropping out, were ready Tuesday with their attacks.
Tim Walz and JD Vance are now the vice presidential nominees for their respective parties. Both men were picked for their supposed appeal in the industrial midwest, as both campaigns sought an effective message-bearer in states like Wisconsin and Michigan.
But Vance’s ascension to the presidential ticket has yet to net the Trump campaign any positive results. As Democrats scrambled to respond to a disastrous debate performance from Joe Biden in late June, the Republican presidential nominee picked an Ohio senator with less than two years’ worth of experience in the job and a litany of his own political baggage to join the GOP ticket. Now, with Harris roaring back into contention in every swing state poll, the incumbent president and his running mate both are eager to blunt Harris’s momentum while recapturing some of their own.
They are seemingly hoping that a line of attack against Walz and Harris both as “far-left” will be what does it. Echoing the concern-trolling from #NeverTrump Republicans who have joined the right flank of the Democratic Party as well as some conservative Democrats worried that the party is insufficiently vocal about its support for Israel, Trump’s allies have begun attacking Harris for picking Walz over Josh Shapiro — the Pennsylvania governor was the target of criticism from progressives who took issue with a college essay in which he wrote that “Palestinians will not coexist peacefully” with Israelis and would attempt to “ruin” any chance at a peace deal.
Those attacks are getting ugly very quickly. Falling back on a crutch the GOP has used now for decades, Vance dipped his toe into Islamophobia on Tuesday as he responded to a question from a reporter at his event in Philadelphia. In front of the crowd, he declared that Harris had “bent the knee” to the “Hamas wing” of the Democratic Party.
“Kamala Harris is running as a San Francisco liberal, she has governed as a San Francisco liberal, and she’s chosen a running mate who will be a San Francisco-style liberal,” Vance added.
JD Vance criticizes Gov. Tim Walz (D) as a "San Francisco-style liberal."
— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) August 6, 2024
Vance worked in venture capital in San Francisco from 2013-2017.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Walz visited the city for the first time last month. pic.twitter.com/Dnvc7wC1nr
For months, allies of former President Donald Trump have used such Islamophobic language to describe both the Israeli assault in Gaza and the response from protesters in the US to the Biden administration’s continued financial and military support for it. Trump himself has described both Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom gave a Senate floor speech calling for new elections in Israel and the removal of Benjamin Netanyahu, as “becom[ing] Palestinian”, seemingly using the ethnic group as a slur.
But Tuesday’s comments from Vance are a sign that the Trump campaign may make the Democrats’ internal hand-wringing over support for the Israeli military a greater campaign issue in the months ahead, while aiming other attacks at Walz aimed at concocting an image of a far-left politician that replaces the reality of Walz’s fairly middle-of-the-pack Democratic voting record. Trump echoed Vance’s attacks in a Truth Social posting, calling the Democratic ticket “the most Radical Left duo in American history”.
Other Trump allies have signalled that Walz’s handling of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests which devolved into riots in the city of Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd will be another issue that Republicans use to attack the Minnesota governor. Walz has batted away such criticism in interviews and vowed to defend his record as governor.
Vance and Trump, meanwhile, remain under the spectre of a label describing them as “weird” which Walz and other Democrats have been pushing as the Ohio senator tries to explain the intent behind his comments from 2021 attacking childless Americans and claiming they have less of a “stake” in the future of the country.
The former president was even seemingly doing some wishcasting Tuesday afternoon following the announcement of Walz as Harris’s running mate, and suggested on Truth Social that Walz may not be on the ticket at all.
“What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE,” Trump posited.
