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Amy Fried is a retired political science professor at the University of Maine. Her views are her own and do not represent those of any group with which she is affiliated.
Remember when people used to talk about which candidate you’d like to have a beer with?
Often that was joined with a query — which I liked better — about who you’d like as your neighbor. This question got people to think about what it would be like to have the candidates live nearby. Would they be helpful or troublesome, friendly or belligerent?
I’ve been blessed by some great neighbors. One knit me a blanket when I was getting chemotherapy, others shared vegetable seedlings, and we’ve cared for each other’s pets when one of us was away. We don’t always agree on politics but that doesn’t matter.
Neighborliness can include socializing but it doesn’t mean butting in where one doesn’t belong.
I’ve thought about this a lot in considering our state and the current crop of presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
A bit after moving to Maine in 1997, I started saying “Maine is the Midwest of the Northeast.” Specifically, I was thinking of similarities between Maine and Minnesota, where I went to graduate school and met my husband.
Minnesota isn’t just like Maine because of its woods and waters, but also because of its warmth, its political civility, its independent streak, the frequent high quality of its political leaders and, yes, its neighborliness. Both states have people deeply incorporated into their communities, who give back.
This year the Democratic nominee for vice president is Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. From a rural small town, Walz was an inspiring social studies and geography teacher, his school’s football coach and a member of the National Guard who served 20 years and then re-enlisted after Sept. 11 and went four more years. By the time he retired at age 41, months before his unit was deployed, and before running for Congress, he had spent nearly 60 percent of his life in the Guard.
The Democrats’ presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, is also from a middle-class background. Harris spent a good deal of her career, as a prosecutor and attorney general of her state, focused on keeping people safe where they live. By eliminating the backlog of rape kits in California, she made it more possible to catch rapists.
In his 12 years in Congress, Walz was a member of the Rural Caucus, focused on veterans’ needs and was ranked as highly bipartisan and effective. As governor, he prioritized families, passing a child tax credit, providing free school breakfast and lunch, making public colleges free for families making under $80,000 a year, and initiating paid family leave.
While from different places and with different professions, Harris and Walz share a sense of joy. The pair has generated extraordinary enthusiasm, with crowds chanting “USA, USA!”
They’re engaged in aiding and connecting with others while believing, as Walz puts it, that it’s good to “Mind your own damn business.”
In contrast, Republican presidential and vice-presidential nominees Donald Trump and JD Vance come off like busybodies, even control freaks. Vance (and Project 2025) backed stopping women from going out of state to get abortions and support monitoring women’s menstrual cycles. Trump said he could restrict contraception and medication abortion.
Both Republicans have an air of judging others and engage in rude name-calling. According to a recent New York Times article, Trump not only calls Harris things like “crazy Kamala” in public, but also reportedly “a bitch” in private.
Vance insults women who haven’t had biological children, calling them “childless cat ladies” who are “sociopaths” and Vance said “we have to go to war” with the notion that women might decide not to have kids. He also wrote a book about his family blaming people in Appalachia for their poverty.
What kind of neighbors would these candidates be?
It’s easy to imagine Trump and Vance gossipping and calling others’ names, being judgy but not helpful.
In contrast, one can envisage Harris and Walz pitching in at a neighborhood event or shoveling snow for an elderly person. They’d fly their American flags right side up and donate so a school group could travel or buy uniforms.
The good neighbor test isn’t meaningless or trivial. In fact, with its emphasis on community, it says a lot about who should be in the White House.
