Harris and Walz hit the road touting freedom as their message

Good morning and welcome to US Election Countdown. Today let’s chat about:

• The Democratic veep pick

• Harris moves towards the centre

• The shifting Latino vote

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have officially kicked off their welcome tour, taking to stages at rallies across the battleground states.

In their first stop in Philadelphia the pair pitched themselves as defenders of personal freedoms, including abortion rights and safety from gun violence, to raucous applause.

“Some of us are old enough to remember when it was Republicans who were talking about freedom,” Walz said from the Philadelphia podium. “It turns out now what they meant was the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office.”

“In Minnesota . . . there’s a golden rule: mind your own damn business.”

One expression summed up the night, according to the FT’s James Politi, who has been following the newly minted Democratic ticket on the road. Jen O’Malley Dillon, the chair of the Harris campaign, was absolutely beaming, he told me:

“O’Malley Dillon must have felt like she had pulled off an amazing feat: as one of Joe Biden’s closest aides, who stood by him through his distressing re-election campaign but was kept on board by Harris, was now presiding over a burst of extraordinary political energy. The crowds were cheering, the party was united, the polls were looking up.”

Twenty-year-old university student Rebecca Wilson, a campaign field organiser, was one rally attendee invigorated by change on the ticket. She was excited to hold voter registration drives on campus and canvas as much as possible to help Harris.

“I’m very thrilled to have a new candidate that’s younger and there’s a really great balance with Walz added in, to make sure we’re getting the more moderate, middle class, older voters, as well as the younger voters,” she told James. 

The pair were greeted by similar enthusiasm in rural Wisconsin yesterday before hitting their first snag in Detroit. A small group of protesters upset with US policies on Israel and Gaza repeatedly interrupted Harris before they were forced to leave.

You can keep up with the latest voter sentiment with the FT’s new poll tracker, which, along with national and state-by-state figures, allows you to game out various paths to 270 electoral college votes for each of the candidates.

Campaign clips: the latest election headlines

• Trump has vowed to fill the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve should he make it back to the White House, a move that could drive up oil demand by hundreds of millions of barrels.

• The US is not in a recession, but its bumper growth is finally over. [Free to read]

• Here is how Walz beat out Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro for the VP slot on the Democratic ticket. (Politico, Philadelphia Inquirer)

• Their finances couldn’t be more different: while Walz doesn’t own a single stock, JD Vance invests in assets such as gold and crypto. (WSJ)

• The former president has proposed tax cuts for various groups during his campaign. The latest group he’s courting with novel tax cuts are retirees. (NYT)

Join Robert Armstrong, chief US financial commentator, and FT colleagues from Tokyo to London on August 14 at 7am ET/12pm BST for a subscriber-only webinar on the recent trading turmoil. Register now and put your questions to our panel.

Behind the scenes

The vice-president has her work cut out for her: to beat Trump, she needs to appeal to moderate voters without alienating leftwing Democrats.

Her choice of the progressive Walz suggests her formula is to find the sweet spot on the centre-left, as she moves some of her own positions towards the middle.

Harris has eschewed the leftwing positions she adopted during her 2020 presidential run. At the time, she touted single-payer healthcare, a “Green New Deal”, and decriminalising migration to the US [free to read].

“She got into issues she didn’t have this inherent knowledge about and she tried to fake it — and I think people saw that,” California real estate developer Mark Buell, who has backed Harris in every local, state and federal race for more than 20 years, told the FT’s Alex Rogers.

Now, Harris supports more police funding, expanding health insurance access through Obamacare and increasing the number of federal agents patrolling the US-Mexico border. She also has a new tough-on-crime streak, making it clear that she’s proud of her past as a prosecutor.

Megadonors such as investor Bob Pohlad have noted the shift. After a Zoom call with donors, the board member at PepsiCo and the Minnesota Twins baseball team described Harris as:

“so effective, and so, frankly and honestly, different than I had seen her in the short campaign in 2020 . . . and had seen her since then.”

Datapoint

The Latino vote matters more this election than ever before.

Roughly one in five Americans is Latino, and the number of eligible Latino voters has jumped to 36.2mn this year from 14.3mn in 2000, according to Pew. They are far from a monolith, but Democrats are widely expected to get most of their ballots. Yet a clear trend has emerged in recent years: their enthusiasm for Democrats has waned [free to read].

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Latino support for Democrats has fallen at an increasingly fast clip — from a margin of 44 points over Republicans in 2012, to 38 in points in 2016, to 21 points in 2020. Before bowing out of the race, Biden’s support among Latinos was at historic lows.

Now the big question is whether Harris, buoyed by newfound Democratic enthusiasm, will win them back — especially in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada.

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Starr County, Texas, which has the highest proportion of Latinos in mainland America, has not backed a Republican presidential candidate in a century. But this year it is expected to turn red.

Alberto Olivares, a 54-year-old former border patrolman running as the Republican candidate for county sheriff, told the FT’s Myles McCormick:

The [Democratic] party no longer represented me.

I think the people in this county are ready for the first time to vote for a Republican president . . . Latinos, Hispanics, no matter what the origin is, are largely conservative people.

Viewpoints

• Ed Luce thinks Walz — Harris’s blue-collar warrior — can help her win in swing states.

• Chris Giles has advice for Harris: stay away from campaigning on the Biden administration’s economic record.

• Much of the Republicans’ “weirdness” stems from their new friends in Silicon Valley, says Janan Ganesh.

• Other politicians have tried to dress down to win over the “everyman”, but Walz’s camo cap is actually working, writes menswear writer Derek Guy. (Politico)

• Vance, however, told Semafor the idea voters are “more motivated by style than substance” is “insulting”. (Semafor)