It has been the most action-packed period I’ve ever seen in a US election in my lifetime. The closest comparison is probably with 1968, which also involved wars, civil unrest in the US, assassinations and a presidential resignation.
So it’s finally all settled. In the USA the Democrat and Republican Parties have finally selected their candidates for President and Vice President in the 2024 election:
- Democrats: current US VP Kamala Harris for President with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for VP.
- GOP: former President Trump running for the job a third time, with Ohio Senator J D Vance for VP.
This comes after President Biden’s ongoing slide in the polls, which started in late 2023 and had him looking like a loser this year; a catastrophic debate performance by him, done in late June to arrest the slide but which made it worse; an assassination attempt on Trump; and finally, weeks of machinations and vicious infighting with The Powers That Be inside the Democrat Party as they pushed out Biden and coronated a queen, with almost monolithic support from the US MSM.
It has been the most action-packed period I’ve ever seen in a US election in my lifetime. The closest comparison is probably with 1968, which also involved wars, civil unrest in the US, assassinations and a presidential resignation.
I’ll write a about the two Presidential candidates in a separate post. This one is about the respective VP nominees.
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VP’s don’t usually count in Presidential elections, although when the Blob senses that one may represent a fundamental shift, things can turn nasty, as Sarah Palin found out in 2008 when it was obvious she was more popular with GOP voters than McCain – and for reasons that had to do with policy and the recent history of the GOP. Palin was the result of the failure of the Tea Party movement that had picked the GOP up off the floor after 2008, miraculously delivered them a massive win in the House in 2010 just four years after they’d lost it (and which came close to taking the Senate), and then got stiff-armed by them. She was also the harbinger of the age of Trump.
Similarly I think both Walz and Vance may mean more than would normally be the case and that shows in the simple fact that both men actually reinforce the ideas of their Presidential candidates whereas VP picks are usually designed to balance them.
So in 1960 NE Liberal JFK picks Southerner LBJ, in 1980 California Reagan picks NE patrician GHW Bush to keep the country-club, Rockefeller crowd onside, Arkansas “rube” Bill Clinton picks insider Senator Al Gore (although both were Southerners), McCain picks Palin, Obama picks Biden, and so on.
Tim Walz, Democrat
By a fluke it so happens that one of the most influential and long-standing right-wing blogs in America, Powerline, has two of its founders being long-time residents of Minnesota and thus very familiar with Mr Walz. To say the least they’re not impressed and when you look at the roll call of what he has done he makes California’s Gavin Newsom look moderate
- Enforced one of the strictest C-19 lockdowns in the USA, acting like a dictator for 15 months (the link includes commentary from lawyer Kevin Roche, former general counsel to UnitedHealth and CEO of its Ingenix division,who described Walz as an “incompetent blowhard”). These restrictions were so insane that they had cops firing paintballs at people for sitting outside on their porches. And just to make sure people stayed inside Walz set up a “snitch line” for informers, which stayed open until June 2022 (click the link to hear the recording).
- The largest fraud in the State’s history took place on his watch: Feeding Our Future, which has stolen $250 million and counting. What did Walz know and when did he know it?
- Refused to send in the National Guard as Minneapolis burned during the massive George Floyd riots, even as the mayor – a very liberal Democrat himself – explicitly begged Walz for help. Walz later said the riots happened because of a lack of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion)
- Enabled a very liberal approach to crime, including releasing prisoners early and insuring charges are often dropped for gun crime arrests and worse, via having an actual Antifa supporter, Keith Ellison as the State Attorney General. Defunding the Police was popular until around 2023 when the massive increase in crime could no longer be denied: now they’re begging for cops, but who would work there?
- Watched the Minnesota CBD slowly die in the wake of the riots ($500 million of damage) and in the face of the rising crime rate. The closures range from big businesses to small ones.
Crime is up. Bullet holes in the glass on the commercial buildings and elsewhere [are] no longer uncommon. There [are] rampant homelessness and drug use. Restaurants have gone out of business. Businesses have gone bankrupt. Large buildings are vacant. Operating businesses are fleeing to the suburbs. Skyways are empty. Public and private employees are working from home. I could go on and on but we trust that you understand the point. – Attorney Kelly Hadac - Increased taxes in 2023, even as the state was running a surplus of $18 billion and had been raising taxes for decades.
- Democrats are praising Walz for owning almost nothing, not even investments for retirement. Well when you’re a Leftist you don’t need to because the taxpayers support your lifestyle. As possibly the best example, in 2023, while waiting for the Governor’s mansion to be renovated Walz & family moved into an 8,000 sq ft, 3.5 acre lakeside home with a monthly rent of $US 17,326. Check out the photos. Marie Antoinette II.
- Radicalised the education system in the State. “Ethnic studies” was intended to sound harmless but today it means that
Fourth-graders must “identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.” High-school students are told to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness” and are taught to view themselves as members of “racialized hierarchies” based on “dominant European beauty standards.”
Passing legislation to require tampons being put in boys toilets is just a bonus. - Passed the most extreme abortion law in the US, doing so with a 1-seat State Senate majority won by 321 votes, which was hardly a mandate. They even made pedophilia a protected category (read the link).
- Passed a law that will prevent parents across the USA from getting their kids back if they get to Minnesota for trans surgery and treatement: effectively legalising state kidnapping. Even in Liberal Minnesota this (and the abortion law) were opposed by a majority of voters. When the session was done it was found that 59% of Minnesotans disapproved of what was done during the session, while only 37% approve.
But it was in the books so who cared? - Praised, on video, a “Master Teacher”: one Asad Zaman executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim American Society. Zaman has supported the October 7 massacres by Hamas and posted a link to a neo-Nazi film that glorifies Adolf Hitler.
- A big, long-time fan of China: “It means that everyone is the same and everyone shares. . . The doctor and the construction worker make the same.” A perfect match for Harris’s price control ideas. “It was almost a daily revelation of how much he adores the communist regime,” the former student said, who was on one of Walz’s 30, CCP-funded trips to China. Listen to a survivor of Mao talk about all this.
In a strange echo of Bernie Sanders, Walz chose to honeymoon in China on June 4, 1994, the 5th anniversary of the Tianamen Square massacre, which is wierd. “Walz has always been fascinated by Communist China,” a news story claimed. “He remembers from his childhood pictures of Mao Tse-Tung hung in public places and carried in parades.” He “jumped” to come to China “fearing the door to the People’s Republic might close after the protests of 1988.” - Is on record saying, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”
See also, What America Needs To Know About Tim Walz.
In short, he is the most Left-Wing governor in America, his Leftism runs across both economics and culture and there is not one area where Kamala Harris would be any different. The cherry on top is that Minnesota is not a swing state, having voted Democrat in every Presidential election since Nixon’s landslide win in 1972, whereas Pennsylvania is a must-win state and Governor Shapiro is the popular Democrat Governor.
So why did she pick him? The only remaining balance is that he’s White and Male, but there were other white Democrat males that would have added other balancing factors as well.
Strangely enough I think the answer is the same as for Trump’s VP pick.
J D Vance, Republican
Vance popped up on the radar of many people back in 2017 before he ever ran for office, courtesy of Trump’s surprising win in the 2016 election causing people to ask what was driving his win, and coming across Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy, which had been a best seller the year before (I see a post about it here at No Minister by The Veteran). The book had drawn much admiration from the sighing and sobbing classes across the nation and was even made into a movie, starring none other than Glenn Close and Amy Adams and director Ron Howard.
I first posted about him here in early 2021 when he wrote an article for NewsWeek that had decidely tough things to say about Corporate America and the betrayal of the working class:
Let’s pause for a second to appreciate one of the wealthiest men in the world complaining about paying hard-working staff $20 an hour. The only thing he was missing was the Monopoly Man hat and cane.
More Lefty praise followed the article – tempered by his pointing out how much Big Business supported the Democrat Party – but needless to say this was all before he decided to run for office as a Republican, at which point he became the Devil. Or Hitler. Probably both (see RF Kennedy).
Given his scepticism about free trade, mass immigration and recent US foreign policies it’s not a surprise that he aligns with Trump, but they’ve had their differences in the past, with Vance harshly criticising him a few years back (incidentally another example where Trump’s critics are wrong when they talk of him as vindictive).
If there is daylight between the two it may be on social conservatism. Vance is a Catholic convert whereas Trump has always been a social liberal. Sure, the Left hammer Trump about the SCOTUS abortion decision, courtesy of the three judges he put on the court, but it’s only in the last decade that he become more conservative on the subject and then only to the point of saying it should be in the hands of the States, which is a perfectly justifiable argument for Federalism. And Trump has not only been explicit about that he’s shut down any talk of a Federal abortion-ban law and pretty much wiped the subject from this years GOP Convention policy. To be fair, it seems that Vance fully supports him in all this as well.
One aspect where Vance provides more than balance for Trump is in his superior handling of the MSM. Here are four master class examples, first with three from a series of Sunday morning current affairs shows…
And then from when he visited the border and got an NYT reporter gagging to show wonderful the news was about a recent, small reduction in the inflation rate.
REPORTER: “I wanted to ask you about the latest economic news from this morning, with inflation now being under three percent, the lowest rate since mid-2021. What is your, sort of, reaction to that news?“
VANCE: “Well, I think the crowd reaction says it all. Look, when they say that inflation is down, they mean from a baseline where groceries are already 30 percent more expensive than they were when Donald Trump was president. And they’re not saying it’s coming down. They’re just saying it’s not going up as fast as it was three years ago. That is not a reputation or a record to brag on, that’s a record to be ashamed of. Why did it take them so long to get inflation to where it is, and why are prices so high? It’s because Kamala Harris failed to do her job.“
Not just better than Trump but better than almost any other GOP politician. Vance not only refuses to accept the premise of their questions, he explains why the premise is wrong, and then goes on to make the argument he wants on the point they raised.
This is more than just ignoring the question and staying on message, which is what Western pols have been taught to do for decades now and which is predictable and boring.
Unlike Trump he does not get distracted or riff in ways that can sometimes work and sometimes don’t. About the only rough patch I’ve seen Vance go through was over his “childless cat ladies” comment of many years ago, and even that he navigated well enough that it died in a matter of days.
Put another way, Vance is the superior version of Trump in arguing for his policies. There are still questions over whether Vance or anybody else can appeal to Trump’s voters come 2028 and beyond (no Democrat has replicated Obama’s success with their voters), and of course getting those policies through Congress is yet another test if Vance ever becomes President, either via Trump’s resignation or death in office, or under his own steam.
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The key point is that Vance has been selected by Trump to carry forward his ethos within the GOP when Trump departs the scene. MAGA will survive; the Bush-Romney-Cheney-McCain wing will not return, any more than the Rockefeller wing did after Reagan (even with GHW Bush in the WH).
And that is also the reason behind Harris’s pick of Walz. As was said of the Russian soldiers at Stalingrad, if she falls, he picks up the rifle and marches forward towards the same goals. The difference is that I think TPTB in the Democrat Party, the same ones that booted Biden, made the selection of Walz, and the reason they did was that Harris has proven to be such an empty vessel in her entire career that her chances of implementing all that she has talked about in the past are slim even if she becomes President, especially if the GOP control Congress.
A President Harris would likely be the 4th term of Barack Obama.
A President Walz would most certainly be.
No Minister 
interesting read, thanks for posting it. I thought this was an interesting statement
”Put another way, Vance is the superior version of Trump in arguing for his policies”
it’s always been the thing with Trump. People go on about the man but ignore his policies.
The response to Vance’s cat lady comments have been fascinating. The real problem with the comment was that it resonated with suburban families where sometimes the Mom is a swing voter, and skewered the Democrats for exactly who they are. That’s why they’re so upset about it and have been banshee wailing about how sexist and out of touch with women Vance is, which just proves how little they understand Middle America. For my part, he just said out loud what others have been saying about the Democrats for years. There’s also no greater demographic dividing line between Democratic and Republican women – Republican women are married with kids, and Democratic they/thems are not. So it’s curious to me how many Right leaning commentators have criticised Vance for the comment as if it was a mistake. Nope, the message is to suburban women – crazy Kamala does not represent you.
By the way, that other politically involved property billionaire, the normally astute Sir Bob Jones, has gone completely TDS on this subject, and even described Trump as having “no redeeming features”. I can only assume it’s because he still reads newspapers, and hasn’t cottoned on to the fact that they’re lying to him.
I saw it. He’s lost the plot entirely. He’s going to vote against almost every policy and ideological idea – aside from free trade – that he’s ever supported just because Trump offends him.
I think it’s a class thing, as it appears to be with a few other right-wingers & libertarians: “he’s not our kind dear”!
Re Vance managing the Press, this guy does it extremely well as well: Pierre Poilievre
The Canadian Media get roasted by him over and over. No messaging only for Pierre, he is aggressively dismantling the premise of the question and furthering his message in a sequence.
Some of the Youtube clips of Pierre destroying Canadian reporters are sublime – the one in an orchard while eating an apple is effortless and total control
That clip in the orchard is what the internet was made for. It is superb.
I got that video when I did a post last year on a similar interview was dealt with by Seymour.
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