With Vice President Kamala Harris’s selection of extremist Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as her running mate, both parties have now shown their middle fingers to large swaths of Middle America. Harris’s gesture, though, is more pronounced and more contemptuous.

Former President Donald Trump made a mistake on numerous fronts, including political, when he chose Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his running mate. As I wrote when the choice was first announced, “Politically, Vance is strong only among subpopulations in which Trump already is well ahead, mostly white workers, but brings no new voter groups or states closer to supporting Trump. What Trump doesn’t realize is the visceral reaction against Vance that exists among a large subset of voters still undecided between the lesser of the two evils of Trump and Biden. They see him as callow, fake, and woefully inexperienced, with neither the gravitas nor the integrity to be a leader of the free world.”