JD Vance's landslide in the American election campaign
At the age of 40 (he turns 40 on 2 August), James David Vance has become the big winner at the Republican Party Convention in Milwaukee. His speech, outlining the broad outlines of the electoral programme, is a real wake-up call that will force the Democratic Party to speed up the inevitable replacement of Joe Biden.
JD Vance was introduced by Donald Trump Jr, the first-born son of the former US president, who seems to have been a determining factor in his father's choice of him as his vice-presidential candidate. He convinced him on the basis of three qualities that Trump considered no other aspirant had, including all those who competed with him in the primaries and whom he defeated and eliminated with lightning speed. In order of importance in the Trumpist strategy, these virtues are: loyalty, youth and his establishment in three decisive Midwestern states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
And, before taking the microphone, JD Vance embraced his wife Usha, a famed lawyer with Indian roots, cementing her in the audience as "a powerful illustration of the American dream". The Republican vice-presidential candidate also fired up those who feel left out or neglected by the system by evoking his own humble origins in Middletown, Ohio. Memories that he captured in his novel "Rural Elegy", also made into a film, which portrays the deep, rural, deindustrialised America in which he himself grew up and grew up.
Having served in the Marine Corps and succeeded in the competitive world of Silicon Valley, JD Vance broke into politics as recently as 2022, winning the Senate seat after an aggressive campaign. In the campaign that has virtually just begun, he unequivocally declared his values: "In the town I grew up in, people built with their hands and loved God, family, community and country with all their hearts". A full-blown attack on the so-called "woke" culture, embodied by the Democratic Party, whose main features it has exported to a Europe that is already increasingly disavowing its Christian roots.
Vance took the argument further, accusing what he called "career politicians", including Joe Biden, of having neglected those lands and people of the country, whose trade and immigration policies have harmed, if not ruined, families like his own. Accordingly, he declared that "enough of coddling Wall Street; now let's engage with working people". He admitted to directly addressing the Rust Belt, the nation's industrial belt, which includes Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, by announcing that "no more foreign labour. We will fight for America's citizens, for their jobs and for their wages", concluding that “I will be a vice president who will never forget where he comes from”. A statement all the more important because, should he win the elections and hypothetically replace Trump, it ensures the forcefulness and continuity of the slogan with which Trump won over so many supporters: America First.
On foreign policy and relations with NATO partners, Vance continued in the vein of warning "our allies that they must share the burdens of keeping the peace in the world". He made it abundantly clear that being part of the Atlantic Alliance and enjoying its protection does not come for free and that he will demand that its members deliver what they promised and what they owe. It is only fitting that Spain, second from the bottom in terms of budgetary contributions, should take note.
JD Vance's vibrant speech catapults the Republican candidacy even further. Nor was it innocent for Vance to put current Vice President Kamala Harris in the boot of figures from the past. The exhibition of youth, already endowed with a great professional background, in addition to her clarity of ideas and poise to explain them, puts the Democratic Party in the predicament of finding as soon as possible an electoral ticket that can face the overwhelming irruption of Vance and the attraction of Trump to repeat a flattering promise to the ears of more than a few disenchanted citizens: Make America Great Again.