US election: What to keep in mind during today's clash between Tim Walz and JD Vance

By Leigh Sales, ABC

A twist few people could have predicted in the surprise-packed US presidential election is the triumphant return to public life of The Mooch.

If you've forgotten, Anthony "The Mooch" Scaramucci was the brash, reflector sunglasses-wearing finance guy from Long Island who briefly acted as Donald Trump's press secretary in 2017. He lasted a grand total of 10 days before Trump sacked him.

This year, The Mooch is back, co-hosting a podcast called The Rest is Politics US with former BBC journalist Katty Kay, modelled on the immensely popular British program of the same name with Labour media legend Alastair Campbell and former Tory MP Rory Stewart. Both are huge hits, consistently near the top of podcast charts.

Scaramucci and Kay offer excellent insights into campaign strategy and American political history. They have a vast network of contacts keeping them abreast of inside thinking in the Trump and Harris camps. A bonus is their witty banter (in a recent episode, The Mooch suggested that the 50-day term of the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, Liz Truss, could be measured as "five Scaramuccis").

After the recent presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Kay and Scaramucci declared it a comprehensive Harris victory, the all-but-universal analysis of the media and political commentariat.

"Certainly, if this was a job interview and you had to choose between these two people who to make CEO of your company, just on the case of who was better prepped and who had the better temperament and who was more lucid and calm and gave more cogent answers, I think it would be hard to deny that you wouldn't have given the job of CEO to Kamala Harris," Kay declared, to The Mooch's firm agreement.

Of course, any rational analysis of that debate had to assess Harris as the more prepared, coherent, measured and sensible candidate.

There is a problem, though, with picking the winners of political debates and predicting electoral victory through that prism - something worth bearing in mind today when you read about the vice-presidential clash between Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz.

We vote with our emotions

The issue is this: If voters are hiring a president based on the qualities one looks for in a CEO, wouldn't Hillary Clinton have stormed to victory in 2016?

Against Trump, she was also the more prepared, coherent, measured and sensible candidate.

On that measure, Al Gore would have decimated George W Bush in 2000 too.

In an election likely to turn on a small shift of votes in a small number of states, seemingly small things could end up being of outsized significance.

To move the discussion back to The Rest is Politics franchise, the considered and accomplished Rory Stewart would have smashed the smart but shambolic Boris Johnson in their 2019 tussle for leadership of the British Conservative Party.

And if voters are hunting for a preferred CEO, wouldn't you expect Harris to already hold a crippling lead over Trump in opinion polls?

Instead, they are close to a national dead heat (The New York Times poll tracker, which collates credible polls, has Harris inching ahead but right at the margin of error.

How can the election even be competitive if it's true that Harris is so clearly the person you'd hire as CEO?

It's because the way people think about politics, form their political beliefs and vote for their preferred candidates is not the same as the way they hire an employee. A political decision is far more closely tied to emotions.

To a significant degree, we vote based on our values and beliefs - which are linked to our emotions - not on targets, profit and KPIs - the intellectual language of the workplace, where emotions and deeply held personal and religious views are meant to be kept private.

We often vote for a party because we hate the other one

In his 2020 book Why We Are Polarized, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein examines voter motivation. Fifty years ago, people voted mostly according to what's called positive partisanship: you vote for the party you like the best. That's usually because its values align with your own and because you believe in what the party stands for. Even on issues you personally know little about, you trust your party to pick the right policy based on your shared priorities.

For example, in Australia, take the complicated field of renewable energy subsidies. Labor supporters who don't know much about the subject would likely trust Labor to be motivated by core beliefs on climate change action and collectivism.

At the other end of the spectrum, Liberal voters would trust their party to be driven by belief in the free market, small government and individual choice, the values its supporters hold dear. Voters put faith in their preferred parties to choose policies that are consistent with their publicly stated principles. In other words, people vote FOR something.

Not so much anymore though. In his book, Klein notes that in recent decades, American voters have become more motivated by negative partisanship than positive. In other words, you vote for a party because you really hate the opposing party. You don't have to particularly like, trust, understand, agree with or even know what your party is offering, you simply have to find it less offensive than the values and beliefs of the other side.

What are the implications of growing negative partisanship for the 2024 US presidential election?

Whose message will resonate more?

One of them is the open question as to whether Harris's campaign vibe, based in joy and hope, is the right fit for the times.

The public mood is sour. Opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Americans feel their country is heading in the wrong direction and that they are deeply concerned about inflation, the cost of living, border control and crime. Many of those voters are looking to shake up a system that they feel has let them down for a long time.

What will resonate more: Harris's positive message that we can work together to fix this, or Trump's bile-filled and resentful diatribes?

Another implication is that negative partisanship is a field in which Trump has always excelled. His ability to whip up rancour and anger against his enemies is politically unprecedented. He violates accepted standards of public conduct in this pursuit. In the 2015 Republican primary campaign, he publicly sledged American war hero Senator John McCain as a "loser" because he had been captured and interred in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp for five years.

Trump's most notable moment in the recent debate against Harris was falsely claiming that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pet cats and dogs. Amid the controversy that followed, Trump's running mate, JD Vance, admitted their campaign had no problem concocting fabrications whenever they saw an advantage in doing so.

The only surprising thing about Trump's cats and dogs remark was that commentators acted as if it was shocking, or potentially a game changer. Trump has been making similar remarks for years and they work for him. Voters may know logically that Trump has taken things too far, or that he has made a false statement, but the "vibe" resonates.

In the case of the "cats and dogs" comment, such an extreme remark ensured immigration would be front and centre as a post-debate talking point. The message Trump no doubt wanted voters to take away is, "Sure, he may have gone too far with that cats and dogs thing - still, at least we know for certain that he's anti-illegal immigration … he's definitely more down that end than Harris."

If Trump walked away from the debate with undecided voters positive that he is tougher than Harris on immigration, one of the key issues in this election , that's a plus for him, regardless of whether he "won" the debate by appearing more like a competent chief executive.

- ABC