One of Donald Trump’s favorite discussion topics on the 2016 campaign trail was how much money he (allegedly) had. At the time, Trump claimed to be worth some $8.7 billion, much of which related to a sprawling collection of branding agreements. Dubious though his math may have been—Fortune magazine estimated his net worth at less than half that figure—the message to voters was pretty straightforward: In an economy that ostensibly rewards the smartest, best people, wouldn’t it make sense to put a rich guy in the White House?
“I’m the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far,” he explained to The Des Moines Register in 2015. “Nobody’s ever been more successful than me.”
Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator JD Vance, a venture capital guy whose net worth is estimated in the high seven figures, as his 2024 running mate reflects the same basic assumption: The more connected one is to sophisticated money, the more qualified they must be to lead the world’s largest economy in the right direction. In the weeks leading up to the Republican National Convention, an array of deep-pocketed Silicon Valley investor types personally lobbied Trump to add Vance to the ticket, and for a candidate like Trump, there is no endorsement more persuasive than that of another billionaire.
The finances of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, announced last week as Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick, are notably different. According to disclosure forms filed during his time in Congress, neither Walz nor his wife own stocks, mutual funds, or bonds. They have life insurance policies and college savings accounts for their children, but no 401(k). For a time, they rented out a room in their Mankato home for extra income, but when Walz moved into the governor’s mansion in 2019, they sold it for around $300,000—a shade below asking price.
Unlike Trump, Walz has never inked licensing deals to slap his name on luxury hotels, golf courses, or mail-order steak businesses; unlike Vance, Walz has never scored a lucrative book advance for a memoir trashing his hometown as a cesspool of morally weak hangers-on incapable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. As governor of Minnesota, he makes around $128,000 per year, and turned down a raise in 2023 because, per a spokesperson, Walz had appointed the members of the commission that had recommended pay bumps for state officials. Walz and his wife’s only investment-adjacent assets, per reporting from Axios’s Dan Primack, are apparently retirement benefits—both Walzes have pensions from their careers as public school teachers, and Walz spent several decades in the Army National Guard. Walz also has a federal pension benefit as a former member of Congress, which could be worth up to $800,000, per The Wall Street Journal.
Conservative talking heads, as conservative talking heads are wont to do, have framed Walz’s relatively thin portfolio as evidence of his manifest unfitness for higher office. “I want someone with business experience,” one Fox Business pundit said recently. Another agreed, asserting that Walz “doesn’t know what to do with money” and is “financially illiterate.”
Attacks like these might hit with Fox Business’s target demographic, which consists mostly of older white guys who leave the country club locker room TV on mute all day. But Walz’s financial profile means he has a lot more in common with the average voter than either guy whose name appears on the Republican ticket: At $330,000, even the upper bound of Walz’s estimated net worth in 2019 would have put him at about the median for people his age. Democrats and Republicans alike have long searched for politicians whose lived experiences enable them to connect with people who are not millionaires or billionaires. Adjusted for recent competition, Tim Walz is about as close as either party has been able to get.
Americans consistently rank the economy as among the most important issues they consider when casting a ballot. But “the economy” means one thing to the types of people who tend to run for office, and another to the people whose interests they ostensibly represent in Washington. More than half of members of Congress are millionaires; ten have estimated net worths that stretch to nine figures, and nearly 100 are worth a mere eight. There are even more zeroes among the ranks of governors, a handful of whom are billionaires whose government salaries amount to annoying rounding errors on the household balance sheet.
Voters have a very different investment profile. In 2023, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans owned more than 90 percent of stocks, and the bottom half owned just 1 percent. Like Walz, about half of workers do not have a 401(k) or similar employer-sponsored individual retirement account. Again, Walz does have retirement savings in the form of pensions, but this is maybe the only way in which he is something of a financial outlier: Although rates are much higher for public employees, in 2023, just 19 percent of workers participated in a pension plan.
And like Walz, more than one in three Americans—39 percent—do not own stock at all. For households that make $40,000 or less, that number jumps to 71 percent, which makes a lot of sense in a country where roughly a third of workers couldn’t cover an unexpected $400 expense in cash. Generally speaking, the less money you make, the less likely you are to have the luxury of putting some of that hard-earned money into the market.
Trump, of course, still managed to win over a critical mass of working voters in 2016, sometimes by making faux-populist promises he did not keep, and sometimes by appealing to other, grosser “anxieties.” But this time around, when cost-of-living concerns are at the top of mind for many voters, framing Walz as a financial simpleton is wrong as a matter of fact, and dumb as a matter of electoral strategy. For people like Trump and Vance—people who have spent most of their adult lives being rich and aspiring to get richer—returns on investment are the primary indicators of the economy’s health. Trump tweeted frequently about the Dow as president, treating each closing bell as a fresh opportunity to celebrate, complain, or deflect, depending on the size of the number and the direction of the arrow next to it. And for all the millions and billions they’ve banked—and the political influence they’ve accumulated as a result—Vance’s VC backers expect to lose money on most of their investments. They are only able to assume the risk (and debt) associated with these long-shot bets because they have easy access to the capital necessary to place them.
But for the vast majority of Americans—the people whose support Harris and Trump both need to win in November—these more speculative methods of building wealth are simply not options. Venture capital and the stock market are largely abstractions—reliable fodder for presidential debates, maybe, but subjects that have precious little to do with whether someone can afford to take a family vacation, replace the ailing water heater, or just buy school supplies without racking up (more) credit card debt. “The economy” is not the Dow Jones Industrial Average six-month outlook, or a well-timed investment in an app-based sunscreen delivery startup; it is a system that hundreds of millions of people with bills to pay are working hard every day to navigate.
By nominating Walz, in other words, Democrats have someone on the ticket who thinks about money like a normal person, and who can credibly talk about what it means to get by in one of the world’s most unequal developed countries. It is a grim indictment of the U.S. political system that elevating a politician who conceives of the economy in non-Wall Street terms counts as a meaningful accomplishment; it is also a hopeful sign for the future of the U.S. political system that one of the two major parties finally saw the wisdom in doing it.