According to data from Catalist, voter turnout at the 2020 election was the most ethnically diverse in history. Yet of those who voted for Trump, 85 per cent were white men and women, and 58 per cent were not college-educated. Based on exit polling data compiled by The Washington Post in February, over a third of Trump’s supporters are now aged over 65, and 42 per cent live rurally or in a small city.

In three of the key battleground states of this election – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – more than 75 per cent of the population is white, while the median annual household incomes in 2022 were $US73,170 ($110,278), $US73,330 and $US68,990 respectively. In other words, they are textbook white middle-class regions.

Where Trump was born into wealth and has lived in major cities since he was born, Vance comes from a working-poor background. But Vance’s ascension from hardship via Yale University, a bestselling memoir later adapted to the silver screen, and a successful career in Silicon Valley before entering politics, makes him much more removed from the average American family’s experience.

To call Walz stupid or imply he’s not particularly smart, one of Trump’s go-to snipes, doesn’t work either because this is a man who was entrusted by thousands of parents with the education of their children. To punch at that would be, by extension, to punch at them and their intelligence.

Even on the university front, Walz’s experience is more relatable than Trump and Vance. Walz attended his local state university, which is ranked 393rd in the United States, compared with the Ivy League colleges attended by Trump (Pennsylvania) and Vance.

The only real option for the Republican pair, then, is to attack his track record as Minnesota governor. Here, there is ample fodder to spook conservative voters. Since taking office in 2018, Walz has overseen the legalisation of marijuana, codified abortion rights, ushered in protective laws for trans people, and has been criticised for his handling of the protests and riots that occurred across Minnesota following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

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But there are also policies that are harder to weaponise, such as enacting paid family leave for working-class parents and introducing free school meals for public-school children who need them. Though some Republicans fleetingly attempted to paint the latter policy as an act of radical-left socialism, this quickly fell flat because, as Jong-Fast noted when discussing Walz’s track record: “Is feeding hungry children progressive? Jesus did it.”

Given Trump freely mocks people within his own party (remember when he declared the late senator John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he’d been captured during the Vietnam War? Or when he promoted a pejorative term about former Republican governor Chris Christie by urging his supporters not to call him “a fat pig”?) it’s unlikely he’ll be able to resist the urge to personally attack Walz.

Trump has always revelled in aiming his attacks perilously low. Where once it was something he was celebrated for, going after a man who epitomises middle America might be one blow too low, even for him.

Katy Hall is deputy opinion editor.

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