Janice R. Andrews
A new ABC News/Ipsos study shows that there is a big difference in how people feel about the vice presidential candidates as the 2024 election gets closer. The study, which came out on Tuesday, shows that Senator J.D. Vance’s favorability rating has stayed at 32% since early August. On the other hand, Governor Tim Walz’s favorability rating has gone up from 39% to 42% since the Democratic National Convention.
The fact that this gap of 10 points exists shows how Walz might affect Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. Walz’s rising fame was shown even more when he joined Harris for her first in-person interview since she started running for office in late July. Even though there is a gap in favorability, experts warn that the success of a vice presidential candidate is not always enough to decide the election for president.
Chris Devine, who wrote “Do Running Mates Matter? In the paper The Influence of Vice Presidential Candidates in Presidential Elections, it was said that vice presidential candidates tend to be “less popular” than the main candidate. “They’re less of a way of appealing to Americans kind of broadly,” Devine said. “They’re really popular within their own party.”
The people who like Vance and Walz are alike because they are both white guys from the Midwest who come from working-class, blue-collar backgrounds. However, their popularity scores among voters as a whole are very different.
The study also showed that about one-fourth of voters have not yet decided how they feel about either the Republican or Democratic nominees for vice president. Vance joined Trump’s campaign at the Republican National Convention in July, and Walz was named Harris’s running mate on August 6. Both of them are still fairly new to the national stage.
Along with being more popular, Walz is also seen as more ready to become president if needed, which gives him an edge over Vance. The study shows that 49% of Americans think Walz is ready to become president if needed, while only 41% think Vance is ready to do so.
Vance, who is 40 years old, is in his first term as a U.S. Senator from Ohio. He was elected in 2023. Vance was in the Marines, wrote a best-selling autobiography, and worked as a venture capitalist before he ran for office. He went to Yale and got his law degree there.
Walz, on the other hand, is 60 years old and has been in public office for more than ten years. Walz was in the Army and used to teach. From 2007 to 2019, he was the representative for Minnesota’s first congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. Having won the election for governor of Minnesota, he quit his job in Congress and has been governor there since 2019.
As the election draws near, the rising dislike gap between the vice presidential candidates may affect how voters see them, but it’s still too early to tell what effect it will have on the race as a whole.
