The NPR Politics Podcast - So Who Are These Vice Presidential Picks Meant To Appeal To?

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

Kamala Harris' running mate Gov. Tim Walz has spent his time in the key mid-west states and is in many ways fulfilling the core obligation of a VP pick: do no harm. Sen. JD Vance, Trump's pick, has been campaigning across the battlegrounds and has often found himself driving the news cycle. They're both largely focused on appealing to men.This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and campaign correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben.The podcast is produced by Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Thomas, and I'm currently driving a car that, if it were a person, would be old enough to vote, through gridlock traffic in downtown Kansas City, with a clutch that doesn't like to go into first or second gear unless you ask really nicely. This podcast was recorded at 1.38 p.m. on Thursday, September 26th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be trying not to upset the other drivers with my very clunky car. Okay, here's the show. But what kind of car is it? I know, that's what I was wondering.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And today on the show, the running mates. What exactly have J.D. Vance and Tim Walz been up to on the campaign trail? These two men will obviously meet for the first time this coming Tuesday at their vice presidential debate. And we will, of course, cover that on the pod. But, Tam, part of the reason I wanted to have this conversation is I'm not even entirely sure what these running mates have been up to.

But then I thought about it and you realize that's partly by design, right? It's not really the vice president's candidate's job to make news all the time. Yeah, I was just talking to someone who has helped presidential candidates prepare for debates. And he said the first job of the vice president is to do no harm. And then he reminded me of another job of the vice president, which is basically to check and make sure the president has a pulse every day. This also applies to the candidates. Essentially, you don't want to get out ahead of your nominee. You don't want to cause headaches for your nominee. You don't want to create news cycles about yourself instead of your nominee

and their policies and what they'll do for the American people. So basically, the job of the vice presidential running mate is to be forgotten and also to attend fundraisers, to hold rallies that will obviously be smaller than the rallies that the candidate holds, but to sort of force multiply. snippets of J.D. Vance is in my reels or in these videos because he's been doing, it seems to me, a lot of media and sort of non-traditional spaces. And that does sort of defy the norm in which I think of former vice presidential candidates as just being really tightly controlled of what they say and what they do. And he seems to have a pretty long leash. Yeah. I mean, you were just asking, what are these vice presidential candidates doing? Well, if you're asking specifically about Vance, he's talking a lot. This was compiled by Axios. As of September 19th, they counted up the interviews that different candidates have done. Harris had

done three. Walz had done four. Trump had done 14. Vance, 59. Wow. That is amazing. And in addition to those 59 interviews he's done, Vance has done a lot of also podcast interviews, so has Trump. But here's one Vance did on the podcast Full Send. I might add that this podcast, like several other podcasts they've appeared on, is a very friendly one. Here they are talking about the reaction to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Currently, you try to Google the attempt assassination on Donald Trump and it doesn't even come up. This is crazy, yeah.

And it's like, that's one of the most concerning things. It's crazy. It's like... You type in assassination of TRU and it doesn't autocomplete Trump. Yeah. It happened two weeks ago. A lot of these people, not coincidentally, have really large male audiences. So I asked the Trump campaign, hey, what podcast influencers, et cetera, have these guys appeared with? And both Trump and Vance together, I believe

it was nine podcasts that the campaign told me they had been on. Vance is really flooding the zone. Yeah. Oh, very much. And of those nine, there were seven that Edison, a market research firm, had data on. Of those seven podcasts who do have pretty large audiences, five of them have audiences that are at least three quarters male. It's huge. And six of them have audiences that are majority male. So they are getting men and largely young men. Well, it might be an understatement to say that J.D. Vance's messaging towards women has not been the most successful rollout of the campaign. He does seem

much more comfortable and much more in his own skin when he's talking to these, you know, for lack of a better word, bro-y spaces. Yeah. And I really think you can consider J.D. Vance the first extremely online person we have had on a presidential ticket. I mean, the guy is very comfortable on Twitter and in these spaces with a lot of these pod guys. And to be clear, these hosts are almost exclusively guys. He argues on Twitter. He knows how to meme all of that stuff. So, yeah. And by virtue, in part, of a lot of these clips that have been dug up where J.D. Vance has talked about childless cat ladies and menopausal women, their job being to take care of kids, etc., etc. Yeah, he doesn't have a lot of appeal to women. So he's really, really getting at the base. And

this is something that's really important to keep in mind when you're looking at the Trump-Vance media strategy in talking to these podcasters who are male and who have these young male audiences, right, is that Donald Trump, everybody knows who he is. If you hate him, you hate him, you like him, you like him. And if you're going to vote, you know if you're going to vote for him or not. So in other words, he may have hit a ceiling with likely voters. What you really have to wonder is, can he turn out other voters? And so the idea with the strategy quite easily could be, well, let's get these young voters, especially young male voters who don't have huge turnout rates, and see if someone that young men spend a lot of time with in their ears saying, hey, Donald Trump is warm and fuzzy. And here he is talking about his relationship with his late alcoholic brother, that might soften you up a bit for Donald Trump and get you out the door when otherwise you might not have voted for him.

Tim, it's so striking comparing Vance to Mike Pence, Donald Trump's first vice president, who was stylistically so much softer, more on message, appealed more to sort of the evangelical, more socially conservative base. I mean, J.D. Vance seems to be a personification of MAGA in all of its forms. Absolutely. And I covered Vice President Pence a lot. I traveled around the world with him. And he would essentially come out and say, President Trump sent me here to say this. And then Pence wouldn't actually deliver Trump's message. Pence would deliver a version of Trump that was Pencean. Yeah, more Ronald Reagan. I can coin a phrase. So essentially, Pence would never allow that there was any space between him and Trump.

But he he almost created this Trump that didn't exist and was more acceptable. What Vance has done is he essentially seems to be forming himself into the mold of what Donald Trump would want. An example of this is he's not the original origin of the false story about Haitian migrants eating pets in Ohio. But he was the first one to really amplify it. Then Trump, hours later, is talking about it on the debate stage. And then Vance spends the next two weeks defending it, digging in, saying he had to create this story so that people would pay attention to immigration. Really just no apologies. Vance is a mini me of Trump right down to the outfit, right down to sort of the way he is approaching messaging. The thing that I would add about Vance to second everything Tam is saying is that rather than trying to tamp down some sort of a problem or conflict that Trump

has in the media, he is very willing to just keep it going and keep the cycle going. I mean, you get the sense when you hear him talking that he's just always spoiling for a fight. There was one clip I wanted to play of a press conference he did last month in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. And it starts off with a pretty simple question about having a beer with him. There's an old saying in politics that what can swing undecided voters in a place like Wisconsin is whether you seem like somebody they would like to have a beer with. Yeah. Why would people in Wisconsin want to have a beer with you? Well, I guess, I guess they'd like, they'd want to have a beer with me because I actually do like to drink beer. And I probably like to drink beer a little bit too much, but that's okay. I'm sure

the media won't give me too much crap over that. He starts off giving an answer that, you know, is relatable. Who doesn't like beer and have one too many occasionally? But he cannot resist getting in that dig. Sticking it to you. Yes. And he does that so often. He is really always spoiling for a fight, especially against the media, very much like Trump. There's something about the Trump fans campaign, depending on how this election shakes out, in that running an entirely base-focused campaign will either be the most brilliant thing they could have done if they win the election or will be seen as somewhat deranged if they lose it in that there has been almost no effort by these two men or this campaign to expand beyond people

that they believe agree with them already, to independents, to swing voters, to women, which they're losing by significant numbers generationally. It may pay off, but it is a campaign that I think is running a hugely risky strategy in the big arena of national politics. All right, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about Tim Walz. And we're back. And Tim Walz has been spending a lot of time on the campaign trail, of course, but he does seem to be focused in those key blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Yes, indeed. He is spending lots of time in the blue wall, in part because, you know, it's easier to get there from Minnesota than it is from Washington, D.C. And he is still based

at his home base in Minnesota, still has a day job. He definitely does still have a day job as governor. And he also, you know, he has gone to North Carolina. He's gone to Georgia. He's done some of these other campaign swings. And he has been doing fundraisers in the big cities. But what he's doing in many of these stops, and he is on the road constantly, what he's doing in many of these stops is going to parts of these states where, you know, Democrats don't often go, where Democrats are not expected to do well, but where they could do better than they've done before. He is bringing his brand of sort of Midwestern dude who doesn't patch the holes in his flannels and, you know,

cleans his gutters, cleans his gutters, got to clean the gutters. And you know what? He was right about that. This is one of the several sort of social media-centric interviews that he's done. And in that case, he talked about, like, nobody tells you that cleaning gutters is so important and it's so tough. And he's right. It is one of the worst parts of homeownership is realizing that gutters exist. Tell us more, Tab. You don't want to know. No. And I mean, the thing that I keep wondering about with Tim Walz is that he definitely is, you know, a former football coach and a former teacher and he is a veteran and so on and so

forth. He has all of this kind of regular guy, small town, blue collar cred, all of that. Democrats, especially on social media, have gone crazy about that, right? They seem so excited to have someone who looks and sounds like him and seems to be genuinely that person on their side and voting for them. The question to me is, is it coastal elites who are excited to have that Midwestern dad coach guy? We've got one. Yeah, exactly. Look, he's with us, we swear. Or is he really going to bring other guys along for the ride? And that is a really important question and one that I have had as I watch him because,

you know, early on it was like, oh, wow, this is fun. Look, he's got these things. He's changing car parts and he's got the camo hat. And now the campaign has sold like a kajillion of these camo hats that say Harris Walls. But does that get grading? Does it become a shtick instead of an authentic, you know, reflection of who you are? I do feel like they've co-opted my culture and, you know, it grates on me. Is that Midwest culture? Yes. Yes. I mean, but this does get it like, Danielle, which I know is a favorite topic of yours, but manliness, right?

That like if the Republican Party has a structural problem with women right now, the Democratic Party has a structural problem with men, particularly sort of men that look like Tim Walz. Straight, white, older men who just have been drifting away from the Democratic Party. Yeah. And also younger men for that matter. We've seen that in poll after poll as well. Right. And this is something that I talked to people about. You remember it was, oh, let's see, we're in September. It was a month, a month and a half ago when all of those calls, like black men for Harris, white dudes for Harris started ramping up. We had any fill in the blank demographic for Harris. So I did a story on all of these men groups and said, OK, normally when we talk about gender and demographics in elections, often we don't focus on men. When we talk about gender, we're usually focused on women.

I was talking to the men and asking them, OK, why is it important to have these calls? And they were saying that, you know, Tim Walz is a white, straight guy who is falling in line behind Harris and is quite clearly telegraphing. He is not trying to overshadow her. He is saying, I have no further ambitions. I am your vice president. And he's creating that permission structure for other men to, yeah, get in line behind this woman. And perhaps the hope is that a lot of these men will do so who might not have otherwise done so or who might have had whatever reservation to doing that. He presents atmospherically or however you want to say it with a lot of characteristics that you would see in a conservative man. Right. He loves football. He was a coach. He likes hunting. He likes hunting. He wears the flannels. All of the things that you currently would associate with a conservative man. And yet he is a progressive man. And he is, you know, part of his thing as part of this campaign is to say, like, you can be a man and you can support abortion rights. The one thing that I do want to add to all of this, by the way, is bear with me on this,

but there is a sort of bizarro world way that Tim Walz and Donald Trump resemble each other if we're talking about manhood. And that is over and over. I talk to Republican voters who say what I say, what do you like about Trump? They say he tells it like it is. He's a straight talker. Tim Walz also really tries hard to be a straight talker. Think about him saying, in a small town, you mind your own damn business, you know, and he tries to frame progressive policies in such a way that instead of sounding intellectualized or, you know, scholars say, he tries to frame them in ways that they sound just common sense. You know, well, it's just common sense that if a woman has a health problem, it's just between her and her doctor. He's not talking about facts or figures when he's talking about economics or anything like that. He's just

trying to say, well, this is just how it should be. And he's not talking about intersectionality or any of the sort of progressive buzzwords. He is using plain language to talk about progressive policies. Right. And if J.D. Vance is using places like more conservative podcasts and influencers to get at voters, Tim Walz, he's also done a little bit of that in podcast and influencer interviews. But Tim, he's also reaching out to football audiences. Yeah, well, he is. First off, he is a man of Instagram. He has many an Instagram video, including this one where he is talking about repairing his car. And then he ties it to Project 2025, which is a conservative roadmap produced by the Heritage

Foundation that has become the Democratic boogeyman of this election in remarkable ways. To be able to work on this thing, you got a manual. It shows you exactly what to do to fix things on this. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have a manual, too. It's called Project 2025, and it's a way to stick it to the middle class by giving tax cuts to the wealthiest. And this weekend, he's expected to go to a Michigan football game. He also has done various drop-ins, including with Harris, at like a high school where the teams were practicing. This is a thing he does. He gives like a, you know, a coach

speech to high school kids and then gets all of the Instagram footage of him in coach mode. One thing that we know is that Vice President Harris was really enamored with the idea of coach walls, insists on calling him coach walls or coach. And that is because people love coaches. Everyone has a coach who took an interest in them or, you know, they took an interest in their kid or helped them achieve something that they didn't know that they could achieve. That's like coaches have this sort of mythic quality in American life, and Walls is tapping into that. And look, I do think we should note, just maybe a final point here, is that we do have some data to the question of whether it's working. And it is notable to me

that from the point that J.D. Vance became the running mate to today, he has become less popular. His unfavorable rating has gone up by double digits. And the opposite is true with Tim Walz. Since he became the nominee, he is now liked by more people than he is disliked. It's still lower numbers, but the trajectories of these two men have been different. And I will say that Vance has done a lot more interviews. Walz has done only a handful of interviews, not a ton. We're expecting him to do more, but he hasn't done a ton.

And if he does more, it'll probably be with like sports podcasts. And his stump speech is basically the same every time. His goal is not to make news. You know, the only news he wants is Tim Walls visited. And meanwhile, when Vance is doing his interviews often, i.e. almost always, he is answering for Trump. Trump often gives confusing, conflicting answers. And Vance comes out and is asked, hey, what did Donald Trump mean by this? And Vance gives a version of what he says the answer is.

And sometimes he does conflict with Trump. And it ends up making Vance look worse because then— It drives the news cycle in all the wrong ways. Yeah. All right. Let's leave it there for today. And we'll have more to say about all of this next week after the debate. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.