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The wait is over. Vice President Kamala Harris has finally picked her running mate in Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Walz has become a favorite of online progressives recently, largely because of his “weird” attacks on Republicans. But there are also solid policy reasons why Walz is beloved of the left wing of the party. He went from a pro-gun rural Democrat in Congress to a governor who has signed legislation that protects abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights, enacted background checks on guns, and expanded free school meals regardless of income.
Back in August 2023, I tweeted: “Walz would be a strong choice for Harris if she were to be the nominee”.
Almost a year later, after Biden’s debacle of a debate performance, just as Walz and other Democratic governors did a stakeout in front of the White House, I suggested him as a potential running mate for Harris if Biden dropped out. “Veteran, longtime congressman from rural Minnesota. Popular governor who has passed major pieces of progressive legislation,” is how I summarized my reasons why.
I can’t say I have a perfect predictive streak by any means, since I briefly suggested last month that North Carolina Roy Cooper would be Harris’s running mate before he took himself out of the running. But there’s a reason Walz — especially when paired with Harris — has been on my mind for a year.
Ahead of the first Republican presidential primary, I saw Walz on Meet the Press.
“That’s a pretty weird group of folks that’s going to be on the debate stage,” Walz said then. It was a preview of his now common refrain that Republicans are weird, and it landed well.
That’s a smaller reason, though. We have to bear in mind that 2024 is, as people smarter than I have said, a “vibes election.” Just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump had all the momentum, even before a gunman tried to kill him. That explained his — somewhat risky — decision to pick Senator JD Vance of Ohio.
The dual choices of Vance and Walz show how Trump and Harris’s campaigns are making a play for rural America with vastly divergent messages. Walz’s focus is more optimistic, focused on showing that expanding opportunities for the marginalized helps rural whites. Meanwhile, Vance offers a mad-as-hell message for rural America, promising a vengeful, scorched-earth approach to elites.
Last week, I wrote that beneath wholesome meetup that was White Dudes for Harris, which Walz joined, it was made clear the Harris campaign understood it needed to shore up white, working class, male voters. Trump has largely championed himself as a voice for the “forgotten man,” including in areas chock-full of white working-class men who previously voted for Democrats. That’s a problem, from Harris’ perspective.
Vance and Walz saw the Trump phenomena from different angles in 2016: As the author of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance sought to explain to his fellow elites why people from Appalachia began voting for a demagogue like Trump. Conversely, Walz was running for re-election in his largely rural district that Trump won. Walz won — but only by 2,549 votes.
Since then, Vance and Walz have both undergone a makeover. Vance — a former venture capitalist with connections to Peter Thiel — has retooled himself as a populist warrior, willing to march with striking auto workers even as much of the GOP remains in thrall to big business.
Like Trump, he’s mostly blamed the plight of rural America on immigrants taking jobs or selling drugs. In his convention speech, Vance said politicians like Biden had caused the country to be “flooded with cheap Chinese goods, with cheap foreign labor— and in the decades to come, deadly Chinese fentanyl.”
For his part, Walz has argued that enacting liberal policies like protecting voter rights and reproductive rights is helpful to people who grew up in his small town in Nebraska. He has said in the past that human rights are “not like a damn pie” — in other words, giving one section of the population civil rights doesn’t take them away from others. He has sought to draw attention to how inequality is systemic rather than the fault of individual immigrants, saying that it’s “the same thing with jobs, same thing with housing, same thing with health care,” during a speech in July.
Similarly, when he delivered counter-programming to the RNC in Milwaukee, he said one golden rule about small towns and the heartland is that “people mind their own damn business.” His position is essentially that the government shouldn’t be involving itself in policing people’s rights and responsibilities. Meanwhile, Vance is strongly behind abortion bans enacted by politicians (even as Trump equivocates on his own position on the issue.)
The Walz approach seems to be working so far. Last week, Inside Washington reported how Senator Joe Manchin, the cantankerous former Democrat from West Virginia who relishes sticking it to his former party, praised Harris’s pivot to the center. On Tuesday, he also praised Walz’s selection, saying: “I can think of no one better than Governor Walz to help bring our country closer together and bring balance back to the Democratic Party.” Considering Manchin is far to the right of anyone who might call themselves a progressive, this is truly a remarkable feat.
Maybe the “weird” talk is working.
