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.”

The Trump-Vance ticket remains nearly anathema to traditional suburbia, to attitudinally moderate white people with college degrees, to the proverbial “soccer moms” and soccer dads, of all races, who also have plenty of childless women friends insulted by Vance’s bizarrely repetitious verbal attacks on them. With only a small subset of blue-collar workers still being “swing voters” between Trump and Harris (the majority are with Trump already), it is these centrist white people and professional strivers of all races who form the biggest bloc of undecided voters for the fall campaign. Trump is doing nothing to appeal to them.

On the other hand, Harris’s choice of Walz also won’t attract them — to say the least. His extremely left-wing record coddling illegal immigrants, delaying the use of the National Guard to quell deadly riots, taking funds away from police forces, and opposing school choice is all a huge stink bomb for these swing voters. And for the parents among them, Walz’s embrace of the Left’s radical war on parents should be a deal-killer if the Trump campaign does a decent job highlighting it. Willful state judges easily could read a law Walz signed as justification for removing children from the custody of parents who do not approve of a child’s alleged wish to “transition” between genders.

As Republican Glenn Youngkin proved in winning the governorship of Virginia, which had trended rather heavily Democratic for more than a decade before his victory, the backlash against the Left’s war on parents can be politically powerful. Indeed, the Youngkin campaign’s most potent slogan was “parents matter.” Walz, though, has enacted laws saying that transgender ideology obviates parental rights.

Despite Walz’s folksy manner and rural background, this same radical record also could repel the remaining group of “persuadable,” or “swing,” voters among blue-collar or farming constituencies, the same way it will repel suburbia. Indeed, most of the persuadable people from those constituencies are more culturally moderate-to-conservative than suburbanites, so Harris’s choice of Walz can be seen as an insult to their values.

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And that’s just a brief overview of the reasons why the vice presidential nominees of both major parties leave so much of proverbial Middle America feeling ignored and unwanted. Both presidential nominees made choices to try to energize the cultural “bases” of their support further, rather than to attract voters still genuinely on the fence or, more likely, appalled by both choices.

Unlike Walz, at least Vance isn’t so readily identifiable as an ideological extremist but rather just a weird ideological amalgam of MAGA myths and resentments. If Republican campaigns are run intelligently, they should be able to scare thoughtful voters about the radicalism of the Harris-Walz ticket.