Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Somehow "won" a lot of votes from his momma's basement.

When President Joe Biden announced that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on July 21—less than three weeks ago—the horizon for the 2024 presidential election suddenly shortened from years to about three months. That shift apparently flummoxed the Republicans, who briefly talked about suing to make sure that Biden, rather than Harris, was at the head of the Democratic ticket, even though the Democrats had not yet held their convention and Biden had not officially become the nominee when he stepped out of contention. Lately, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has suggested that Biden might suddenly, somehow, change his mind and upend the whole new ticket, although Biden himself has been strong in his public support for Harris and her vice-presidential running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and Democrats held a roll-call vote nominating Harris for the presidency.

The idea that presidential campaigns should drag on for years is a relatively new one. For well over a century, political conventions were dramatic affairs where political leaders hashed out who they thought was their party’s best standard-bearer, a process that almost always involved quiet deals and strategic conversations. Sometimes the outcome was pretty clear ahead of time, but there were often surprises. Famously, for example, Ohio representative James A. Garfield went to the 1880 Republican convention expecting to marshal votes for Ohio senator John Sherman—General William Tecumseh Sherman’s brother—only to find himself walking away with the nomination himself.

As recently as 1952, the outcome of the Republican National Convention was not clear beforehand. Most observers thought the nomination would go to Ohio senator Robert Taft, the son of President William Howard Taft, but after a tremendous battle—including at least one fist fight—the nomination went to war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, who challenged Taft because of the senator's opposition to the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Taft supporters took that loss hard: Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. drove Eisenhower’s victory, prompting right-wing Republicans’ enduring hatred of what they called the “eastern establishment.”

The 1960 presidential election ushered in a new era in politics. While Eisenhower had turned to advertising executives to help him appeal to voters, it was 1960 Democratic nominee Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy who was the first presidential candidate to turn to a public opinion pollster, Louis Harris, to help him adjust his message and his policies to polls.

Political campaigns were modernizing from the inside to win elections, but as important in the long run was Theodore H. White’s best selling account of the campaign, The Making of the President 1960. White was a successful reporter, novelist, and nonfiction writer who, finding himself flush from a movie deal and out of work when Collier’s magazine went under, decided to follow the inside story of the 1960 presidential campaign. “I want to get at the real guts of the process of making an American president—what the mechanics, the mystique, the style, the pressures are with which an American who hopes to be our President must contend,” White wrote to Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN).

White set out to follow the campaigns of the many primary candidates that year: Democrats Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, and John F. Kennedy and Republicans Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller.

Before White’s book, political journalism picked up when politicians announced their candidacy, and focused on candidates’ public statements and position papers. White’s portrait welcomed ordinary people backstage to hear politicians reading crowds, fretting over their prospects, and adjusting their campaigns according to expert advice. In heroic, novelistic style, White told the tale of the struggle that lifted Kennedy to victory as the other candidates fell away, and his book spent 20 weeks at the top of the bestseller lists and won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

White’s book emphasized the long process of building a successful presidential race and the many advisors who made such building possible. In the modern world a presidential campaign lasted far longer than the few months after a convention. In his intimate portrait of that process, White radically transformed political journalism. As historian John E. Miller noted, journalists who had previously covered the public face of a candidacy “now sought to capture in minute detail the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the candidates and their strategy boards and to probe beneath the surface events of political campaigns to ascertain where the ‘real action’ lay.”

For journalists, seeing the inside story of politics as a sort of business meant leaving behind the idea that political ideology mattered in presidential elections, a position that political scientists were also abandoning in 1960. It also meant getting that inside story by preserving the candidates’ goodwill, something we now call access journalism. Other journalists leapt to follow the trail White blazed, and by 1973 the pack of presidential journalists had become a story in its own right. White told journalist Timothy Crouse that he had come to regret that his new approach to presidential contests had turned presidential campaigns into a circus.

Over time, presidential campaigns began to use that circus as part of their own story, spinning polls, rallies, and press coverage to convince voters that their candidate was winning. But now the 2024 election seems to be challenging the habit of seeing a presidential campaign as a long, heroic sifting of advice and application of tactics, as well as the perceived need for access to campaign principals.

Yesterday, apparently chafing as the Harris-Walz campaign turns out huge crowds, Trump called reporters to his company’s Florida property, Mar-a-Lago. Those determined not to miss any twist of the campaign—and who had enough advance notice to make it to Florida—listened to him serve up his usual banquet of lies: that doctors and mothers are murdering babies after they’re born; everyone wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, no one died on January 6, 2021; he loves autocrats and they love him; and so on. The journalists there did not ask him about the recent bombshell report suggesting that Egypt poured $10 million into his 2016 campaign.

But, as conservative writer Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted, Trump appears nonetheless to have gone entirely off the rails. He claimed that the crowd he drew on January 6 was bigger than those who gathered in 1963 to hear the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous I Have a Dream speech, and he told the entirely fabricated story of surviving an emergency landing in a helicopter with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. As Nichols put it, “The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.”

But the media appears to be sliding away from Trump: today he angrily insisted he could prove that the dangerous helicopter trip actually occurred, leading New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman to note that “Mr. Trump has a history of claiming he will provide evidence to back up his claims but ultimately not doing so.” When asked to produce the flight records he claimed to have, Trump “responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice.”

In contrast, as presidential candidates, first Biden and now Harris have not appeared to bother with access journalism or courting established media. Instead, they have recalled an earlier time by turning directly to voters through social media and by articulating clear policies that support their dedication to the larger project of American democracy.

Yesterday, after journalists had begun to complain that they did not have enough access to Harris, she came to them directly on the tarmac at the Detroit airport and asked, “What’cha got?” All but one of their questions were about Trump and his comments; the one question that was not about Trump came when a journalist asked when Harris would sit down for an interview.

Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR) reposted
Peter Henlein@SwissWatchGuy
·
Aug 9
In August of 2016, DJT held 27 rallies.

In August of 2024, he will only do one rally.

The GOP nominee literally can’t be bothered to campaign.

Stephen Miller@StephenM
The assistant football coach who gives tampons to underage boys.

"His name is Jon Tester, and I don't speak badly about somebody’s physical disability. But he's got the biggest stomach I have ever seen. I said, I swear that's the biggest stomach. I have never seen a stomach like that"

Republicans against Trump@RpsAgainstTrump
·
3h
Donald Trump has been in a foul mood the past few weeks and has repeatedly called Vice President Harris a "bitch" in private, the N.Y. Times' Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report.

Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR)@HC_Richardson
1h
So here's the thing about the alleged hack of the Trump campaign: why would anyone, any longer, take anything they say at face value. Hacked? Maybe. Getting ahead of a disaster? Maybe. Let's see how it plays out before assuming that serial liars are telling the truth

Amy A
@lolennui

It’s every parent’s nightmare: you check your child’s bulletproof backpack and find a tampon

Reporting Highlights

• Deep State Battle: Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could fight the so-called deep state on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.

• New Videos: Dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025 were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.

• Advice Given: “If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”

Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.

One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.

The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.

In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”

“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.

In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”

Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, falsely saying that he knew nothing about it and had “no idea who is behind it.” In fact, he flew on a private jet with Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 2025. And in a 2022 speech at a Heritage Foundation event, Trump said, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

A review of the training videos shows that 29 of the 36 speakers have worked for Trump in some capacity — on his 2016-17 transition team, in the administration or on his 2024 reelection campaign. The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation two weeks ago of Paul Dans, the leader of the 2025 project, and they are referenced on the project’s website. The Heritage Foundation said in a statement at the time of Dans’ resignation that it would end Project 2025’s policy-related work, but that its “collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue.”

The Heritage Foundation and most of the people who appear in the videos cited in this story did not respond to ProPublica’s repeated requests for comment. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign who features in one of the videos, said, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.”

Project 2025’s 887-page “Mandate for Leadership” document lays out a vast array of policy and governance proposals, including eliminating the Department of Education, slashing Medicaid, reclassifying tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be more easily fired and replaced, giving the president greater power to control the DOJ and further restricting abortion access.

Democrats and liberal groups have criticized the project’s policy agenda as “extreme” and “authoritarian” while pointing out the many connections between Trump and the hundreds of people who contributed to the project.

“Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 have always been disingenuous,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The discovery that the vast majority of speakers in Project 2025 training videos are alumni of the Trump administration or have other close ties to Trump’s political operation is unsurprising further evidence of the close connection there.”

Several speakers in the videos acknowledge that the Trump administration was slowed by staffing challenges and the inexperience of its political appointees, and they offer lessons learned from their stumbles. Some of the advice appears at odds with conservative dogma, including a suggestion that the next administration may need to expand key government agencies to achieve the larger goal of slashing federal regulations.

Rick Dearborn, who helped lead Trump’s 2016 transition team and later served in the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff, recalled in one video how “tough” it was to find people to fill all of the key positions in the early days of the administration.

The personnel part of Project 2025 is “so important to the next president,” Dearborn says. “Establishing all of this, providing the expertise, looking at a database of folks that can be part of the administration, talking to you like we are right now about what is a transition about, why do I want to be engaged in it, what would my role be — that’s a luxury that we didn’t have,” referring to a database of potential political appointees.

Dan Huff, a former legal adviser in the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, says in another video that future appointees should be prepared to enact significant changes in American government and be ready to face blowback when they do.

“If you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it’ll damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially — look, I get it,” Huff says. “That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But please: Do us all a favor and sit this one out.”

“Eradicate Climate Change References”

The project’s experts outline regulatory and policy changes that future political appointees should prepare for in a Republican administration.

One video, titled “Hidden Meanings: The Monsters in the Attic,” is a 50-minute discussion of supposed left-wing code words and biased language that future appointees should be aware of and root out. In that video, Kozma says that U.S. intelligence agencies have named climate change as an increasingly dire threat to global stability, which, she says, illustrates how the issue “has infiltrated every part of the federal government.”

She then tells viewers that she sees climate change as merely a cover to engage in population control. “I think about the people who don’t want you to have children because of the” — here she makes air-quotes — “impact on the environment.” She adds, “This is part of their ultimate goal to control people.”

Later in the video, Katie Sullivan, the former acting assistant attorney general under Trump, advocates for removing so-called critical race theory from public education without saying how the federal government would accomplish that. (Elementary and secondary education curricula are typically set at the state and local level, not by the federal government.)

“The noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology should be excised from curriculum in every single public school in this country,” Sullivan says. (Reached by phone, Sullivan told ProPublica to contact her press representative and hung up. A representative did not respond.)

In a different video, David Burton, an economic policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, discusses the importance of an obscure yet influential agency called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The Trump administration used OIRA to help roll back regulations on economic, fiscal and environmental issues. Under Biden, OIRA took a more aggressive stance in helping review and shape new regulations, which included efforts to combat housing discrimination, ban the sale of so-called ghost guns and set new renewable fuel targets.

Burton, in the Project 2025 video, urges future political appointees to work in OIRA and argues that the office should “increase its staffing levels considerably” in service of the conservative goal of reining in the so-called administrative state, namely the federal agencies that craft and issue new regulations.

“Fifty people are not enough to adequately police the regulatory actions of the entire federal government,” Burton says. “OIRA is one of the few government agencies that limits the regulatory ambitions of other agencies.” (Burton confirmed in a brief interview that he appeared in the video and endorsed expanding OIRA’s staffing levels.)

Expanding the federal workforce — even an office tasked with scrutinizing regulations — would seem to cut against the conservative movement’s long-standing goal of shrinking government. For anyone confused by Project 2025’s insistence that a conservative president should fill all appointee slots and potentially grow certain functions, Spencer Chretien, a former Trump White House aide who is now Project 2025’s associate director, addresses the tension in one video.

“Some on the right even say that we, because we believe in small government, should just lead by example and not fill certain political positions,” Chretien says. “I suggest that it would be almost impossible to bring any conservative change to America if the president did that.”

A Trump Government-in-Waiting

The speakers in the Project 2025 videos are careful not to explicitly side with Trump or talk about what a future Trump administration might do. They instead refer to a future “conservative president” or “conservative administration.”

But the links between the speakers in the videos and Trump are many. Most of those served Trump during his administration, working at the White House, the National Security Council, NASA, the Office of Management and Budget, USAID and the departments of Justice, Interior, State, Homeland Security, Transportation and Health and Human Services. Another speaker has worked in the Senate office of J.D. Vance, Trump’s 2024 running mate.

Sullivan, the former DOJ acting assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s Office of Justice Programs, which oversees billions in grant funding, appears in three different videos. Leavitt, who is in a training video titled “The Art of Professionalism,” worked in the White House press office during Trump’s first presidency and is now the national press secretary for his reelection campaign.

A consistent theme in the advice and testimonials offered by these Trump alums is that Project 2025 trainees should expect a hostile reception if they go to work in the federal government. Kozma, the former USAID deputy chief of staff, says in one video that “many” of her fellow Trump appointees experienced “persecution” during their time in government.

In a video titled “The Political Appointee’s Survival Guide,” Max Primorac, a former deputy administrator at USAID during the Trump administration, warns viewers that Washington is a place that “does not share your conservative values,” and that new hires will find that “there’s so much hostility to basic traditional values.”

In the same video, Kristen Eichamer, a former deputy press secretary at the Trump-era NASA, says that the media pushed false narratives about then-President Trump and people who worked in his administration. “Being defamed on Twitter is almost a badge of honor in the Trump administration,” she says.

Outthinking “the Left”

The videos also offer less overtly political tutorials for future appointees, covering everything from how a regulation gets made to working with the media, the mechanics of a presidential transition process to obtaining a security clearance, and best practices for time management.

One recurring theme in the videos is how the next Republican administration can avoid the mistakes of the first Trump presidency. In one video, Roger Severino, the former director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Trump-era Department of Health and Human Services, explains that failure to meticulously follow federal procedure led to courts delaying or throwing out certain regulatory efforts on technical grounds.

Severino, who is also a longtime leader in the anti-abortion movement, goes on to walk viewers through the ins and outs of procedural law and says that they should prepare for “the left” to use every tool possible to derail the next conservative president. “This is a game of 3D chess,” Severino says. “You have to be always anticipating what the left is going to do to try to throw sand in the gears and trip you up and block your rule.” (In an email, Severino said he would forward ProPublica’s interview request to Heritage’s spokespeople, who did not respond.)

Operating under the assumption that some career employees might seek to thwart a future conservative president’s agenda, some of the advice pertains to how political appointees can avoid being derailed or bogged down by the government bureaucrats who work with them.

Sullivan urges viewers to “empower your political staff,” limit access to appointees’ calendars and leave out career staff from early meetings with more senior agency officials. “You are making it clear to career staff that your political appointees are in charge,” Sullivan says.

Other tips from the videos include scrubbing personal social media accounts of any content that’s “damaging, vulgar or contradict the policies you are there to implement” well before the new administration begins, as Kozma put it.

Alexei Woltornist, a former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, encourages future appointees to bypass mainstream news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Instead, they should focus on conservative media outlets because those are the only outlets conservative voters trust.

“The American people who vote for a conservative presidential administration, they’re not reading The New York Times, they’re not reading The Washington Post,” Woltornist says. “To the contrary, if those outlets publish something, they’re going to assume it’s false. So the only way to reach them with any voice of credibility is through working with conservative media outlets.”

And in a video about oversight and investigations, a group of conservative investigators advise future appointees on how to avoid creating a paper trail of sensitive communications that could be obtained by congressional committees or outside groups under the Freedom of Information Act.

“If you need to resolve something, if you can do it, it’s probably better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy and say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do here?’ Talk through the decision,” says Tom Jones, a former Senate investigator who now runs the American Accountability Foundation.

Jones adds that it’s possible that agency lawyers could cite exemptions in the public-records law to prevent the release of certain documents. But appointees are best served, he argues, if they don’t put important communications in writing in the first place.

“You’re probably better off,” Jones says, “going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through and making the decision, as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.”

There is “clear” Russian involvement in the far-right riots and security services will be looking closely at the instigators, a former head of the MI6 Russia desk has said.

Christopher Steele, the ex-spy who compiled a notorious dossier on Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia, said that security officials would be “looking very carefully” at the people encouraging anti-immigration riots in the past fortnight.

After a violent assault on a children’s dance class in Southport last month, rioters attacked mosques, police officers and a hotel in Rotherham housing asylum seekers. The unrest was whipped up by far-right activists online who falsely claimed that a Muslim immigrant was behind the attack.

Speaking to Times Radio, Steele said of the riots: “I think it’s clear there is some Russian involvement. The degree to which that’s happened and the effectiveness I think is still out for question. I mean, when you look at the original disinformation that surrounded the Southport killings, that does seem to have come from a Russian linked website.”

The origin of the false claim about the Southport stabbing perpetrator appears to be an outlet called “Channel3 Now”, which is styled to resemble a mainstream American network news channel and mixes potentially AI-generated US and UK news material. This website posted spurious claims that the Southport attacker was “on the MI6 watch list” and was “known to mental health services”. This was amplified by prominent far-right influencers.

Steele said that the security services “will be looking very carefully at the instigators of these activities, including people like Tommy Robinson, even conceivably Nigel Farage, who incidentally said that we were being misinformed by the government about Southport”.

Robinson, the former leader of the English Defence League whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has been posting reams of material on platforms including X praising anti-immigration protesters from his holiday in Cyprus.

Farage has come under fire for stoking conspiracy theories about the Southport attack by questioning “whether the truth is being withheld from us”. He has said he condemns “all acts of political violence”. The Guardian contacted Reform UK for comment.

Steele said security officials would be “looking at things like their travel movements, who they’ve been in touch with, monetary transfers, and so on, because that will reveal or not, as the case may be, a pattern of behaviour, which can lead to some conclusions about the degree to which Russia has been interfering in this situation.”

Pushed on whether MI6 would be looking at Farage’s movements and messages, Steele said: “The security services require warrants, obviously, to do some of that. But I think essentially, looking at communications, looking at travel, looking at financial transfers is the heart of this problem. And if we’re going to get to the bottom of it, certainly the government should be doing those things in terms of the instigators.” He added: “Now, whether Nigel Farage in the end is defined as an instigator of this, I don’t know.”

The prime minister’s official spokesperson said last week that ministers were examining “the involvement of state actors” in the unrest.

“Clearly we have seen a lot of activity online, much of which may well be amplified, or have the involvement of state actors, amplifying some of the disinformation and misinformation that we’ve seen,” the spokesperson said. “And that is something that the NCA [National Crime Agency] and DSIT [Department for Science, Innovation and Technology] are looking at, in relation to what we’ve seen online.”

The spokesperson added: “Some of the disinformation that we’ve seen online attracts amplification from known bot activity – which as I say can be linked to state backed-activity.”

Ministers have said they will re-examine laws about misinformation after online falsehoods contributed to the riots. Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, said that the Online Safety Act which came into force last October but has yet to be fully implemented was “not fit for purpose”.

Under the legislation, social media companies face fines of up to £18m or 10% of their global turnover if they fail to take robust action against content inciting violence or terrorism.

Anybody think the opening ceremony is worth any pixels? Seems to be hairlipping the world.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota governor Tim Walz to be her running mate seems to cement the emergence of a new Democratic Party.

When he took office in January 2021, President Joe Biden was clear that he intended to launch a new era in America, overturning the neoliberalism of the previous forty years and replacing it with a proven system in which the government would work to protect the ability of ordinary Americans to prosper. Neoliberalism relied on markets to shape society, and its supporters promised it would be so much more efficient than government regulation that it would create a booming economy that would help everyone. Instead, the slashing of government regulation and social safety systems had enabled the rise of wealthy oligarchs in the U.S. and around the globe. Those oligarchs, in turn, dominated poor populations, whose members looked at the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few people and gave up on democracy.

Biden recognized that defending democracy in the United States, and thus abroad, required defending economic fairness. He reached back to the precedent set by Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 and followed by presidents of both parties from then until Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Biden’s speeches often come back to a promise to help the parents who “have lain awake at night staring at the ceiling, wondering how they will make rent, send their kids to college, retire, or pay for medication.” He vowed “to finally rebuild a strong middle class and grow our economy from the middle out and bottom up, giving hardworking families across the country a little more breathing room.”

Like his predecessors, he set out to invest in ordinary Americans. Under his administration, Democrats passed landmark legislation like the American Rescue Plan that rebuilt the economy after the devastating effects of the coronavirus pandemic; the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that is rebuilding our roads, bridges, ports, and airports, as well as investing in rural broadband; the CHIPS and Science Act that rebuilt American manufacturing at the same time it invested in scientific research; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other things, invested in addressing climate change. Under his direction, the government worked to stop or break up monopolies and to protect the rights of workers and consumers.

Like the policies of that earlier era, his economic policies were based on the idea that making sure ordinary people made decent wages and were protected from predatory employers and industrialists would create a powerful engine for the economy. The system had worked in the past, and it sure worked during the Biden administration, which saw the United States economy grow faster in the wake of the pandemic than that of any other developed economy. Under Biden, the economy added almost 16 million jobs, wages rose faster than inflation, and workers saw record low unemployment rates.

While Biden worked hard to make his administration reflect the demographics of the nation, tapping more women than men as advisors and nominating more Black women and racial minorities to federal judicial positions than any previous president, it was Vice President Kamala Harris who emphasized the right of all Americans to be treated equally before the law.

She was the first member of the administration to travel to Tennessee in support of the Tennessee Three after the Republican-dominated state legislature expelled two Black Democratic lawmakers for protesting in favor of gun safety legislation and failed by a single vote to expel their white colleague. She has highlighted the vital work historically Black colleges and universities have done for their students and for the United States. And she has criss-crossed the country to support women’s rights, especially the right to reproductive healthcare, in the two years since the Supreme Court, packed with religious extremists by Trump, overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

To the forming Democratic coalition, Harris brought an emphasis on equal rights before the law that drew from the civil rights movements that stretched throughout our history and flowered after 1950. Harris has told the story of how her parents, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, who hailed from India, and Donald J. Harris, from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and bonded over a shared interest in civil rights. “My parents marched and shouted in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s,” Harris wrote in 2020. “It’s because of them and the folks who also took to the streets to fight for justice that I am where I am.”

To these traditionally Democratic mindsets, Governor Walz brings something quite different: midwestern Progressivism. Walz is a leader in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which formed after World War II, but the reform impulse in the Midwest reaches all the way back to the years immediately after the Civil War and in its origins is associated with the Republican, rather than the Democratic, Party. While Biden’s approach to government focuses on economic justice and Harris’s focuses on individual rights, Walz’s focuses on the government’s responsibility to protect communities from extremists. That stance sweeps in economic fairness and individual rights but extends beyond them to recall an older vision of the nature of government itself.

The Republican Party’s roots were in the Midwest, where ordinary people were determined to stop wealthy southern oligarchs from taking over control of the United States government. That determination continued after the war when people in the Midwest were horrified to see industrial leaders step into the place that wealthy enslavers had held before the war. Their opposition was based not in economics alone, but rather in their larger worldview. And because they were Republicans by heritage, they constructed their opposition to the rise of industrial oligarchs as a more expansive vision of democracy.

In the early 1870s the Granger movement, based in an organization originally formed by Oliver H. Kelley of Minnesota and other officials in the Department of Agriculture to combat the isolation of farm life, began to organize farmers against the railroad monopolies that were sucking farmers’ profits. The Grangers called for the government to work for communities rather than the railroad barons, demanding business regulation. In the 1870s, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois passed the so-called Granger Laws, which regulated railroads and grain elevator operators. (When such a measure was proposed in California, railroad baron Leland Stanford called it “pure communism” and hired former Republican congressman Roscoe Conkling to fight it by arguing that corporations were “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment.)

Robert La Follette grew up on a farm near Madison, Wisconsin, during the early days of the Grangers and absorbed their concern that rich men were taking over the nation and undermining democracy. One of his mentors warned: “Money is taking the field as an organized power. Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?”

In the wake of the Civil War, La Follette could not embrace the Democrats. Instead, he and people like him brought this approach to government to a Republican Party that at the time was dominated by industrialists. Wisconsin voters sent La Follette to Congress in 1884 when he was just 29, and when party bosses dumped him in 1890, he turned directly to the people, demanding they take the state back from the party machine. They elected him governor in 1900.

As governor, La Follette advanced what became known as the “Wisconsin Idea,” adopted and advanced by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. As Roosevelt noted in a book explaining the system, Wisconsin was “literally a laboratory for wise experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole.” La Follette called on professors from the University of Wisconsin, state legislators, and state officials to craft measures to meet the needs of the state’s people. “All through the Union we need to learn the Wisconsin lesson,” Roosevelt wrote.

In the late twentieth century, the Republican Party had moved far away from Roosevelt when it embraced neoliberalism. As it did so, Republicans ditched the Wisconsin Idea: Wisconsin governor Scott Walker tried to do so explicitly by changing the mission of the University of Wisconsin system from a “search for truth” to “improve the human condition” to a demand that the university “meet the state’s workforce needs.”

While Republicans abandoned the party’s foundational principles, Democratic governors have been governing on them. Now vice-presidential nominee Walz demonstrates that those community principles are joining the Democrats’ commitment to economic fairness and civil rights to create a new, national program for democracy.

It certainly seems like the birth of a new era in American history. At a Harris-Walz rally in Arizona on Friday, Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona, who describes himself as a lifelong Republican, said: “I do not recognize my party. The Republican Party has been taken over by extremists that are committed to forcing people in the center of the political spectrum out of the party. I have something to say to those of us who are in the political middle: You don’t owe a damn thing to that political party…. [Y]ou don’t owe anything to a party that is out of touch and is hell-bent on taking our country backward. And by all means, you owe no displaced loyalty to a candidate that is morally and ethically bankrupt…. in the spirit of the great Senator John McCain, please join me in putting country over party and stopping Donald Trump, and protecting the rule of law, protecting our Constitution, and protecting the democracy of this great country. That is why I’m standing with Vice President Harris and Governor Walz.”

Vice President Harris put it differently. Speaking to a United Auto Workers local in Wayne, Michigan, on Thursday, she explained what she and Walz have in common.

“A whole lot,” she said. “You know, we grew up the same way. We grew up in a community of people, you know—I mean, he grew up… in Nebraska; me, Oakland, California—seemingly worlds apart. But the same people raised us: good people; hard-working people; people who had pride in their hard work; you know, people who had pride in knowing that we were a community of people who looked out for each other—you know, raised by a community of folks who understood that the true measure of the strength of a leader is not based on who you beat down. It’s based on who you lift up.”