Vice President Kamala Harris chose a former public school teacher who coached high school football, a veteran who went to college on the GI Bill, and a Democrat who is at home in the Midwest as her running mate. Gov. Tim Walz now joins her on the presidential ticket.
Walz made his introduction to a national electorate Tuesday, delivering a rebuke to the Trump-Vance campaign that was thoroughly chipper, often cutting, and occasionally ever so passive aggressive. Harris has found her pit bull, an attack dog of the breed of “Minnesota Nice.”
He began with mild boilerplate. “Donald Trump sees the world a little differently than us,” he said at a Philadelphia rally. “First of all, he doesn’t know the first thing about service. He doesn’t have time for it because he’s too busy serving himself.”
Then another zinger: “Violent crime was up under Donald Trump,” he said pausing for effect in front of a crowd hanging on his every word. “That’s not even counting the crimes he committed.”
And finally, a knowingly low blow as Walz went on the offensive, while perhaps trying not to be too overtly offensive, even if that meant spreading malicious misinformation. The Democratic candidate for vice president winked and nodded at untoward and false internet allegations that Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance had intimate knowledge of a piece of home furniture in his youth.
“I’ve got to tell you, I can’t wait to debate the guy,” he said, barely able to contain himself. “That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.” The crowd laughed. Harris beamed at the man introduced as “Coach,” and Walz cracked himself up, adding with a laugh, “You see what I did there?”
The left won’t clutch their pearls at that internet slur, especially when delivered by a good-natured candidate immediately dubbed by the press as “everybody’s favorite uncle.” After the “locker room talk” of the initial Trump candidacy, the nation may be all right with a Democratic candidate working blue. Walz certainly has a working-class biography to back up the folksy schtick.
Harris may have blunted Republican advances in the Midwest by picking Walz, or at least signaled she does not intend to allow the heartland to go undisputed in November. She now has a blue-collar candidate by her side who can appeal to blue-collar voters in much of the same way President Biden did for former President Obama more than a decade ago. The Minnesota governor seems ready for that class warfare fight. “Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland,” he said with obvious sarcasm, “J.D. studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community. Come on, that’s not what middle America is!”
Despite more than a decade in Congress, the governor is relatively unknown at the national level. The race to define him began even before Harris and Walz stepped on stage. The Trump-Vance campaign reacted to the pick by calling Walz “a rubber stamp” for Harris’ “dangerously liberal, weak, and failed agenda.” Michael Whatley, co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said in a brief interview with RealClearPolitics that Walz was the “ideological soulmate” of the vice president, and therefore, unacceptable to the nation.
Other Republican operatives and officials, meanwhile, seemed downright giddy in their private conversations, elated that Harris had picked a progressive rather than a moderate like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
Those Republicans were quick to point to the Minnesotan’s past comments about illegal immigration, laws that allowed those undocumented to obtain driver's licenses, and his handling of the riots in Minneapolis as examples of liabilities to be exploited. A Democratic operative close to the Harris-Walz campaign replied, “good luck.”
“Good luck trying to brand the small-town, rural, gun-owning governor who had an A+ rating from the NRA until every Republican caved in the face of taking action post-Parkland,” the operative told RCP. “If the same losers who ‘vetted’ J.D. Vance are going to do oppo on Gov. Walz, I feel pretty good about our chances.”
While presidential campaigns are seldom won on the strength of the vice-presidential candidate, the selection of Walz seemed like a turning point. Not long ago, Republicans were living the dream. Democrats, a nightmare. The left was bracing for defeat after Biden delivered a catastrophic debate performance in Atlanta and then refused for several weeks to go quietly into the night. The right, meanwhile, enjoyed rare unity and good headlines after Trump survived a failed assassination attempt. Everything has changed. And Harris said as much.
“We are the underdogs in this race,” Harris said while introducing Walz, “but we have momentum, and I know exactly what we are up against.” The crowd packed inside Temple University’s Liacouras Center numbered, according to campaign estimates, nearly 14,000. Weeks earlier, a much smaller number, around 4,000 per local press estimates, had filed into that arena for Trump. Democrats now hope those figures hold.
While it was Walz who pioneered the attack that Trump and Vance were “weird,” it was the policy and his biography that Harris laid out in Philadelphia that previews the coming months. The vice president did something rare for Democrats when she noted that Walz, a veteran, was once “one of Capitol Hill’s best marksmen” who had won “a bipartisan sharpshooting contest year-after-year.”
She hailed his work as the first governor to codify abortion rights at the state level after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and also heralded his expansion of voting rights in Minnesota. “When you compare his resume – shall we? – Trump’s running mate, well, some might say, it’s like a matchup,” Harris told the crowd, “between the varsity team and the JV squad.”
The enthusiasm inside the arena reflected the swell of political contributions the Harris campaign was counting by the end of the arena. Together the two had raised more than $20 million dollars in less than 24 hours since Walz was announced as Harris’ running mate. The only thing left to do now, the governor said, was to get down to work.
“Over those next 91 days, and every day in the White House, I’ll have Vice President Harris’ back,” he said. “And we’ll have yours.” There would be no rest for the weary, he explained: “We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”
Democrats now have their complete ticket and a rush of enthusiasm that is worlds apart from the mood inside their party just a few short weeks ago.
