JD Vance and Tim Walz will meet each other on a debate stage in New York City tomorrow night representing two very different types of Midwestern personalities. On one side, a seasoned governor who has won over millions of voters with his effortless dad charm; on the other side, a freshman senator who has repelled millions with a style that is equal parts abrasive and awkward. While Walz has become the face of Minnesota Nice over the last two months, Vance has become the embodiment of “weird,” able to turn the simple act of ordering doughnuts into an exercise in cringe.
Of more consequence to the country, however, will be another contrast: that between two clashing versions of 21st century “populism” that claim to be pro-labor.
Since entering the Senate, Vance has worked hard to cultivate a populist “pro-worker” persona in line with the “New Right” movement whose banner he carries. Together with ideological allies like Sen. Josh Hawley, Vance argues that today’s GOP is fundamentally different from the pro-business party of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. In his acceptance speech last July, he declared that the Republican Party was done “catering to Wall Street” and would instead “commit to the working man.” On the campaign trail, he has called the Trump-Vance ticket “the most pro-worker Republican ticket in history,” and sought to back this up by marching with striking UAW auto workers against Detroit’s “Big Three.” Yet this populist rhetoric has not made Vance popular. Since joining Donald Trump’s campaign last July, his favorability ratings have been consistently in the red, with polls indicating he is an historically unpopular candidate.
Since entering the Senate, Vance has worked hard to cultivate a populist “pro-worker” persona in line with the “New Right” movement whose banner he carries.
Vance’s utter lack of charisma hasn’t helped him pose as a tribune of the common man. But it’s not clear that even several coats of political polish could cover his ideological tracks. For all his calculated talk of the new pro-worker GOP, the senator’s policy record shows little support for policies that would benefit working people and unions. While he claims not to be “a huge fan” of “right-to-work” laws that prevail in most Red states, he opposes the PRO Act, which would expand the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain. In an interview with Politico earlier this year, Vance said he does not support the legislation because it would be “dumb to hand over a lot of power to a union leadership that is aggressively anti-Republican.” Tellingly, the only major labor reform that Vance has backed during his time in the Senate is the so-called Teamwork for Employees and Managers Act, a law that would amend the National Labor Relations Act to revive management-operated “company unions” that have been banned since the New Deal. According to the AFL-CIO, company unions are “nothing more than a scheme to weaken labor unions, dilute collective bargaining rights, and erode worker protections.”
Vance has had little criticism for the abysmal labor record of Donald Trump, who stacked the NLRB and Department of Labor with corporate lawyers and union busters committed to rolling back workers’ rights to organize and collectively bargain. Trump also appointed dozens of right-wing judges who have shielded management from accountability ever since, empowering companies to crush organizing efforts and skirt labor laws. The union-busting billionaire Elon Musk has not spent tens of millions backing the Trump-Vance campaign and House Republicans because they are “pro-worker.”
Vance will have to defend this abysmal record against a governor who is well-positioned — and, likely very prepared — to expose the fraud of today’s right-wing populism.
Last year, the Minnesota governor signed a comprehensive package of labor legislation that secured Minnesota’s place as one of the best states to work in. With the stroke of a pen, Walz and Minnesota Democrats banned noncompete clauses and “captive audience” meetings, established mandatory paid family and medical leave, and bolstered protections for workers in a host of industries, from meatpacking to warehouses to construction. They also established and funded free meals for all public school students and free college tuition for the children of working class families.
These and other policies have helped make Minnesota a top state for working-class people. The state has the highest union density and the highest median wage in the Midwest, and one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. Since becoming governor in 2019, Walz has also slashed the number of workers earning poverty wages by 30%.
Walz’s background poses a second problem for Vance. The governor is not easily characterized as an out-of-touch elitist, and does not cooperate as a foil for the narrative of a Republican revolt against a “wokeist professional class.” Walz is the first person without a law degree at the top of a Democratic ticket since Jimmy Carter, and the first union member at the top of any Democratic ticket ever. Vance, meanwhile, though from debatably humble origins, is now a multimillionaire Yalie who owes his political rise to Silicon Valley billionaires.
Vance will have to defend this abysmal record against a governor who is well-positioned to expose the fraud of today’s right-wing populism.
The fact that Walz is an outlier among top Democrats — most of whom are easy targets for Republican charges of elitism — should give the party pause. The dearth of party leaders with working-class credibility helps explain why 30 years ago the typical Republican district was 14% richer than the typical Democratic district, but by 2020, the mirror opposite had become true. Today nine of the top 10 wealthiest congressional districts are represented by Democrats. In 2016, the populist writer Thomas Frank wrote an entire book about how the Democrats had become “the party of the professional class” after decades of drifting away from New Deal politics and towards technocratic, meritocratic liberalism. Since then, college educated voters have only grown as a share of the Democratic base, a trend most evident in the party’s senior ranks. If there is one critical lesson that Democrats should take away from Walz’s popular candidacy, it is that the leadership could do with less Rhodes Scholars and more union members.
His background will also allow Walz to challenge the gendered GOP caricature of the working class as an army of muscle-bound white men. In 2024, nearly half of working-class people are women; just as many are nonwhite. This diverse cross-section of voters are not inherently any more conservative on social and cultural issues than those in the “professional class,” as right-wing populists frequently suggest. A recent study by the Working Families Party found that different classes are split evenly on most social and cultural questions.
They are not, however, equally split on bread and butter politics. The majority of working- class people support Medicare-for-All, a federal jobs guarantee, rent control and free college tuition at public universities. If Democrats hope to reclaim their status as the “party of the people,” they will have to embrace a more populist economic agenda that attracts more union members and working-class people without college degrees — and then welcome these people into the party’s upper ranks. The alternative is to continue to relinquish “populism” to demagogues like JD Vance.
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