How Swing State Democrats Are Challenging Hard-Right Narratives
There’s a common political adage that says “a week is a long time in politics”. In the years to come, the week the American people just lived through will probably be the prime example used alongside this saying.
This Week in Politics
If you were living under a rock, this is what happened: Former President Trump survived an assassination attempt during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. The Republican Party rallied around him at their nominating convention just days later where he formally selected Senator JD Vance as his running mate. Vance is a huge proponent of the ideas expressed in Project 2025, a hateful 900-page blueprint for restructuring America put forward by the Heritage Foundation, the same organization that endorsed each of Trump’s picks to the Supreme Court.
At the same time, current President Joe Biden continued to face calls to step down after a disastrous debate performance in June. Then he fell ill with COVID. Shortly after that, he signalled his decision not to seek his party’s nomination for President and endorsed his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, for the job. Within a day of Biden’s decision, Harris secured the support of enough convention delegates to be considered the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party. 24 hours after beginning her campaign for President, Harris delivered the Democratic Party’s best-ever single-day fundraising total, fueled by half a million first-time donors.
Meanwhile, Republicans have been caught completely flat-footed after planning their entire convention around attacking Biden and installing a Vice-Presidential nominee picked because he would fire up their MAGA base in a campaign they believed they had already won. Now, there are rumours Trump is regretting that pick as the race looks like it will remain tight and swing voters could decide the outcome.
The Democrats are united and looking towards their own convention in August where they will formally nominate Harris and whoever she decides to serve as her Vice-President. Harris ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020 as the ‘Anti-Trump’ and is rumoured to be favouring potential VP nominees who share her view that Democrats should unapologetically campaign on defending human rights, the Constitution, and a progressive future for America. Harris leaned into this messaging ahead of last fall’s election cycle, betting it would be a winning pitch. It paid off and now she’s looking to repeat it with her pick for VP.
The Candidates for Vice-President
During the recent Ontario Liberal Party leadership election, a lot of organizers told me that their candidates couldn’t step out too far in defense of LGBTQ rights — specifically trans rights — because to do so would sink their campaigns. They cited election results in the US as proof that a more ‘centrist’ approach was needed. First off, the halfway point between maintaining our human rights or having them erased would leave us with half the rights we have now and is wholly unacceptable. Secondly, these organizers were simply wrong about how the human rights debate is playing out in the US. And the potential Democratic Party VP picks are proof.
North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper
Roy Cooper served as North Carolina’s Attorney General for four terms. He held the position during the Virginia Tech campus shooting in 2007 and created a task force to respond to it. When Governor Pat McCrory introduced legislation to ban trans people from using public washrooms in the state, Cooper refused to defend the legislation in court as the state’s AG. He then challenged McCrory in the 2016 Gubernatorial election, defeated him, and immediately reversed the legislation after taking office. He also vetoed anti-abortion legislation that would charge and imprison doctors and nurses. Cooper ran for re-election in 2020 and won by almost 5%.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear
Beshear first ran for Governor of Kentucky, a deeply red state, in 2019. He narrowly won the election by winning the big cities but also the Republican suburbs and rural areas. In office, he restored voting rights for 180,000 Kentuckians, allowed Planned Parenthood to offer abortion care in the state, supported resettling refugees in Kentucky, and vetoed legislation that would ban gender-affirming care. He ran again and won in 2023, this time by a margin of 5%. Here’s a viral clip of him defending trans kids:
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro first came to my attention as he was running to be the state’s Attorney General while I was in Philadelphia for the 2016 DNC Convention. As Attorney General, he fought Trump’s anti-trans policies and called for an end to blood donation bans for gay and bisexual men. His messaging during his gubernatorial campaign was clear and unapologetically in favour of loudly defending human rights. He won that election by almost 15% over his Republican rival despite the swing-state nature of Pennsylvania. As Governor, he ended funding for anti-abortion counselling centers and enacted automatic voter registration.
Arizona Senator Mark Kelly
I first heard about Mark Kelly not from politics but from a study NASA began in 2015 on space and the human body. Kelly has an identical twin brother, Scott, who was also an astronaut. Their shared career gave the space agency a unique opportunity to compare the impacts of low-orbit space travel on Scott and compare it to Mark’s baseline as he remained on Earth. Mark Kelly is married to Gabby Giffords, who previously served as a Congresswoman for the state before surviving an assassination attempt in 2011. Kelly ran in a special senate election after the death of John McCain and won with a 2% margin of victory. He founded a gun-control organization with his wife, supports codifying Roe V. Wade into law, supports abolishing the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, and was a co-sponsor of the Equality Act introduced to guarantee anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people. When he ran for re-election in 2022, he increased his margin of victory to 5%.
Defending Human Rights is a Winning Campaign Strategy
Each of these possible VP candidates hails from a swing state. Each of them campaigned unapologetically on human rights despite their Republican rivals campaigning to rescind them. Each of them increased their margin of victory when they went back before the voters and asked to be re-elected. And each of them now finds themselves being vetted for the second highest office in their country because they weren’t afraid to do the right thing.
No matter who VP Harris picks as her running mate, she will have at her side someone who is unafraid to challenge bigotry and ready to passionately defend human rights, even when the pundits and press say it’s a losing proposition. I can’t wait to see who she picks.
