Kamala Harris’s coronation as the Democratic nominee was greeted with applause across the party’s establishment—but not among progressive populists. Harris herself remains a cipher on economic issues. But her donors and senior advisers—Big Tech and Wall Street types galore—led the likes of Matt Stoller, the antitrust activist, and the editors of The American Prospect to sound the alarm, especially in light of Donald Trump’s veep choice, J.D. Vance.
“Harris has gone a long way toward bolstering her left-populist flank.”
By picking Tim Walz as her running mate, Harris has gone a long way toward bolstering her left-populist flank and neutralizing Vance’s potential appeal. Walz can’t be framed as a neoliberal Democrat in the Clinton-Obama mold. This makes it all the more urgent for Team Trump to lean away from both online culture-warring and conventional GOP messaging—and lean into a positive, bread-and-butter populism.
Walz’s origin story—a son of deep-rural Nebraska with degrees from Chadron State College and Minnesota State—attests to leading Democrats’ fears that Vance could deepen the class realignment of the two parties. But Walz doesn’t just bring his humble roots. He also has a formidable record of governing as a populist and Midwestern-style social democrat.
Last year, he led his state legislature’s enactment of a sweeping pro-worker law, which Steven Greenhouse, the veteran labor reporter, described as “one of the most pro-worker packages … that any US state has passed in decades.” And rightly so. Among other measures, the law:
- set up a New Deal-style standards board for nursing homes, one of the most viciously exploited sectors in the labor market;
- banned non-compete clauses that limit workers’ bargaining power by preventing them from seeking employment at competing firms or starting their own businesses;
- required warehouses—hello, Amazon—to be transparent about the productivity requirements they impose on workers;
- prohibited anti-union captive-audience meetings—one of the main tools used by union-busters to drive down the share of Americans protected by collective bargaining;
- proscribed employers from forcing employees to attend political meetings, one of the most grotesque and anti-democratic forms of privatized coercion I highlighted in my book Tyranny, Inc.—and one, by the way, that empowers “woke” h.r. departments.
On the pro-family front, meanwhile, Walz marshaled a bill, the Paid Family and Medical Leave Act, which “allows Minnesota workers to take up to 12 weeks a year with partial pay to care for a newborn or sick family member and also allows workers 12 weeks to recover from a serious illness or health problem,” as Greenhouse reported. It’s the sort of legislation that self-proclaimed pro-family Republicans have too long resisted, even as they have lamented declining marriage and birth rates.
All this should be a wake-up alarm for the Trump-Vance campaign. The Democrats have assembled a team that can appeal to their party’s diversity-obsessed professional class while stopping—or at least, slowing down—the hemorrhage of working-class voters.
After a successful convention—featuring a platform that defended entitlements and embraced manufacturing renewal; a keynote from Sean O’Brien of the Teamsters; and a speech from Vance that didn’t mention tax cuts or small government—the Republican side has found itself cornered into a defensive posture on culture-war issues.
This has partly to do with the mainstream media’s return to lockstep once Joe Biden was successfully deposed. Even so, the populist element of the Trump phenomenon has been strangely muted since the convention. Beyond closing the border, there hasn’t been an easy or satisfying answer to working people’s question: What will the Republicans give me if I pull for them? Walz, by contrast, allows Harris to give decent answers to that question, even if he doesn’t end up setting the policy course of a Harris administration.
Just labeling Harris-Walz “left-wing” won’t do. Nor will it suffice, without more, to hammer Walz’s woeful response to the rioting of 2020. The reset Trump-Vance is looking for will come from combining border security and law and order in the streets with a concrete pro-worker, pro-family agenda. Now is the time to either embrace the PRO ACT or come up with a real reform alternative. To make birth free. To attack Big Tech and Wall Street. To promote regional wage boards in nonunion industries. To push a robust, national family-leave agenda. And much else of the kind.
Or as one senior Republican operative told me: “It’d be smart to start outflanking her now” on populism.