US election campaign: The problem vice president

Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger US election campaign: The problem vice president 6 hours • 4 minutes reading time J.D. Vance chooses dramatic words. A future under Kamala Harris would be "hell," shouts the Republican vice presidential candidate from a stage in the US state of Nevada. Harris's previous record is a "disaster" and the fact that she is now running in the presidential race instead of Joe Biden is nothing less than a "coup". That's his job: Donald Trump has brought Vance to his side as a man for harsh attacks on political opponents - and actually also as a link to the working class. But since his nomination as Trump's vice president, the Republican himself has offered a surprising amount of scope for attack. The attack on childless people Vance is currently being caught up in all sorts of statements from the past. The preliminary climax: sexist statements about childless people. In an interview in 2021, the father of three described leading Democratic politicians - including Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now running for the White House herself - as "childless cat women" who were unhappy with their lives. The clip from that time resurfaced after his rise to Trump's vice president, spread rapidly and brought him a lot of criticism. It was not Vance's only statement in this direction. He has expressed his position that childless people should have less say in a democracy in various ways, even claiming that people without children tend to be "disturbed" and "psychotic". His most recent attempt to defend these comments did not end the debate. Many women - an important voting group among whom Trump has recently lost support anyway - do not particularly like criticism of childlessness. Such accusations are unlikely to be a hit with men without children either. The laughing stock Things have not gone well for the senator from the state of Ohio in his first weeks as Trump's vice president since mid-July. He is struggling with poor poll ratings and the fact that many Americans have never heard of him. Most recently, a raunchy joke about Vance caused such a furore on social media that it made national headlines despite its lack of substance. The internet can be merciless. Trump, who himself loves to provoke, is unlikely to be bothered per se if his vice president makes headlines with controversial statements. But alienating important groups of voters cannot be in Trump's interest. And if the man at his side becomes a public laughing stock, Trump is even more likely to dislike that. The Republican presidential candidate is already being asked whether he is still happy with his vice president choice and feels compelled to publicly defend his partner over the childless comments: Vance loves families. The lack of experience Trump had committed to Vance before his Democratic opponent Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Vance is half Trump's age (78) - and in a campaign that initially focused primarily on Biden's advanced age and mental deficits, such a young vice president seemed to serve for a moment as a sign of dynamism and agility. But now Biden is out of the election campaign - and Vance's "youth" is becoming more of a problem. The Republican has only been in the Senate since January 2023. He has no government experience, nor any long political past. Harris' campaign is systematically using this for its own purposes. Vance is "one of the least prepared" candidates for the office of vice president the country has ever seen, says Mitch Landrieu, a member of Harris' campaign team. "He hasn't even run a company. He has never led anything.” And now it could happen that Vance would have to lead the USA in one fell swoop if Trump wins the election and then something happens to him, warns Landrieu. This is exactly the argument Trump has used against Harris in recent months: that Biden is in danger of changing his mind at any time and that she would then take over. However, the 59-year-old has far more experience than Vance: she was district attorney of San Francisco, later attorney general in California for six years, then a senator in the US Congress for four years before becoming the first woman to be elected vice president. But not so close to the working class Another problem: Trump explicitly chose Vance as someone who would secure him the votes of the working class in particularly hotly contested states, such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Vance comes from a working-class family, grew up in unstable conditions in Ohio and was raised by his grandmother. After graduating from school, he joined the military and served in Iraq. His memoirs “Hillbilly Elegy” about that time became a success.