Americans’ first impressions of Walz are positive, negative for Vance
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has made a positive first impression after Vice President Kamala Harris announced him as her running mate. But Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), former president Donald Trump’s choice for vice president, is not winning the popularity contest.
A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll finds 32 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of Vance and 42 percent find him unfavorable, a net favorability rating of -10 points.
For Walz, 39 percent are favorable and 30 percent are unfavorable, giving him a net positive rating of nine points. It’s still early for both Vance and Walz, with more than one-quarter of Americans saying they don’t have an opinion of each. The two candidates agreed this week to face off in a debate on Oct. 1.
Within their parties, both men are well-liked. Vance’s net favorability among Republicans is +55 and Walz’s is an even higher +72 among Democrats.
But Vance struggles beyond typically Republican-leaning groups. He has negative favorable ratings among men (-12), women (-8), and both people under 40 (-22) and 65 and older (-4) — as well as those in between (-4). Despite Vance deriding Democratic leaders for not having children — including Harris, who has two stepchildren — his net favorable rating is -10 among both parents and those without children at home.
Vance receives net positive ratings among White Christians, including +37 net favorability among White evangelical Protestants, +2 among White non-evangelical Protestants and +6 among White Catholics, though the latter two margins are not statistically significant. He’s also net positive among rural Americans (+13 points), albeit negative among urban (-20) and suburban Americans (-10).
But on the Democratic ticket, Walz’s ratings are positive among most groups, though not overwhelmingly. He’s net positive 16 points among people under 40 and six points positive among those 40 and older. Walz is seen positively by both men (+9) and women (+9), is net positive among Black people (+41), and Latinos (+15), while White people split roughly down the middle for both candidates.
As in voting patterns, there are sharp differences among White people by educational attainment: Walz is 18 points positive among White people with college degrees, while Vance is 22 points negative with the same group. And where Vance is nine points positive among White people without bachelor’s degrees, Walz is 11 points negative.
In a separate question, the Post-ABC-Ipsos poll finds 52 percent of Americans approve of Harris’s choice of Walz as running mate and 44 percent disapprove. And 45 percent approve of Trump’s choice of Vance, while 50 percent disapprove. More Democrats approve of Walz’s selection (92 percent) than Republicans approve of Vance as the choice (82 percent).
Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a former venture capitalist, has served as a U.S. senator since January 2023. Walz, a former schoolteacher and football coach, served as a U.S. congressman and has been governor since 2019.
Ratings of these running mate picks are more negative than most past selections. An August 2020 Post-ABC poll found 54 percent of Americans approved of Biden’s selection of Harris and 51 percent approved of Mitt Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul D. Ryan in 2012; roughly 3 in 10 disapproved of each. While Post-ABC surveys didn’t measure reactions to Trump’s 2016 choice of Mike Pence, a July 2016 Gallup poll found 37 percent of voters saying Trump’s selection of Pence was “excellent” or “pretty good,” while 45 percent said it was “only fair” or “poor.”
The Post-ABC-Ipsos poll was conducted online Aug. 9-13 among 2,336 U.S. adults, including 1,901 registered voters. The sample was drawn through the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, an ongoing panel of U.S. households recruited by mail using random sampling methods. The margin of error is plus or minus two percentage points for U.S. adults and 2.5 points among registered voters. Error margins are larger among other subgroups.