I wrote yesterday about the fluidity of political ideology and why pollsters don't typically expect the groups they survey to have the same number of conservatives and liberals each time. The words we use to describe someone's ideology — like "moderate" and "progressive" — are very loosely defined. Republicans, for instance, have spent a lot of energy in the past decade and a half fighting over what "true conservatism" really means. Kamala Harris's selection of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate has made me think even more about the way we talk about ideology. Since the announcement, he has been described as dangerously liberal by adversaries and as a progressive who doesn't come across as threatening by supporters. There seems to be consensus that Walz is more left than center-left and that his selection has headed off a potential left-wing backlash at the pass, allowing Harris to avoid any of the turmoil that choosing Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania might have caused. Count me as a firm believer that vice-presidential nominees do not, in general, make much of a difference. But if the main argument the Trump campaign decides to pursue against Harris is that she is too far to the left of the average American voter, the selection of the preferred choice of many online progressives would seem to reinforce a potential vulnerability. At the same time, I'm not certain Americans think of ideology purely in policy terms. Consider the former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, someone I would argue is ideologically quite conservative but nevertheless was often tagged as a moderate during her run for the Republican presidential nomination. I think what we were seeing there is that "moderate" can also be used to describe a temperament. The Trump campaign and its allies have been circulating a clip of Walz declaring, "One person's socialism is another person's neighborliness." It would be hard to construct a more perfect Rorschach test for whether people perceive the idea of a moderate to be about a defined set of ideas or about, in the parlance of our times, vibes. Read Opinion's coverage of the Walz pick and the campaign: Here's what we're focusing on today:
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Wednesday, August 7, 2024
Opinion Today: What sort of V.P. pick is Tim Walz?
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