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So the main protagonists are decided. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, is Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential candidate, the campaign announced on Tuesday. It capped a meteoric rise for Walz, who was barely known until a month ago. He sprang into the national consciousness through his portrayal of Trump and Vance as “weird” – which has since become a signature rallying cry for Democrats against the undoubtedly odd Republican pairing.
Harris and Walz held a barnbusting rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, with the latter thanking his new boss for “bringing back the joy”. We’ll look a closer look at Walz, and what difference he could make to the election, after the headlines.
Here’s what you need to know
1. Another loss for the “Squad”
Cori Bush, the member of the leftwing group “the Squad” who has been outspoken in her criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, will not return to Congress next year. Bush, who was elected in 2018, became the focus of pro-Israel lobbying groups in her Democratic primary, with a subsidiary of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) spending almost $9m to oust her. Wesley Bell, a local prosecutor, was the beneficiary, and will contest the typically Democratic district in November. It comes after Jamaal Bowman, a progressive New York congressman, lost his re-election bid in June, after pro-Israel groups spent $15m in his race.
2. Stock market rebounds... canceling Trump attack line
After a hairy Monday that saw stocks plunge globally amid overblown fears of a US recession, the stock market rebounded on Tuesday – in good news for Joe Biden and Harris. Donald Trump had sought to blame Harris for the sell-off, despite it having nothing to do with the vice-president, branding the downturn a “Kamala Crash”. Trump is yet to comment on the improving market.
3. Democratic party confirms Harris as nominee
Well, we knew it was coming, but Kamala Harris is officially the Democratic nominee for president, after a virtual vote by party delegates on Monday. Harris needed the backing of 2,350 Democrats, and 4,567 delegates voted for her. “Soon, it will be time to come together in Chicago, where we will celebrate together and make clear to the American people that the Democratic Party is the party of freedom, of democracy, of rights, and of the people,” party leaders said in a statement. The Democratic national convention starts 19 August.
Harris goes to the Walz
What a few weeks Tim Walz has had. Until mid-July he was barely known to people in the US – I’d never heard of him, for example, and it’s sort of my job to know these things – but was quietly doing a solid job as the governor of Minnesota, the midwestern state that borders Canada to the north and Wisconsin to the east.
After Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race on 21 July, Walz ascended into the spotlight. Unusually for a politician, people actually seem to like him. And look at him now: potentially vice-president!
For people who don’t like slick guys in suits with tidy hair, Walz is a refreshing figure. He doesn’t have any hair, for one, while on the campaign trail he sometimes wears the kind of baggy T-shirt your dad might put on to mow the lawn. He’s also able to talk like a normal person: it was Walz who came up with the barroom definition of Trump, Vance, and their ilk as “weird”, a characterization now regularly echoed by Democrats, and on Tuesday night Walz razzed Vance over unproven allegations regarding the Republican vice-presidential candidate and a couch.
“These are weird people on the other side,” Walz said in an interview in July. “They wanna take books away, they wanna be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to and don’t, you know, get sugar-coating this: these are weird ideas.”
Walz has an excellent point, but he is more than just some avuncular banter-merchant. He’s shown he can defy political odds, a trait that Harris may need. He ran for the House of Representatives in 2006 in a typically Republican district, defeating his opponent, and won election for Minnesota governor in 2018, and again in 2022.
He won’t be setting the White House agenda, but Walz’s politics should please many on the left. As governor he signed a law that guaranteed all school students get free breakfast and lunch; he was a supporter of LGBTQ rights way before it became mainstream Democratic policy; and he introduced tougher gun laws.
But is it going to matter? Vice-presidential nominees rarely have a huge influence on the ticket – as Trump intimated, in the process of throwing Vance under the bus this week, the public vote for the presidential candidate, not for their deputy.
But Walz is from the midwest – albeit not one of the crucial three swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – and if he can charm even just an extra 10,000 voters across each of those states that could be enough for a Harris win in November. He also appears to have a chance of unifying both the conservative and progressive sections of the party, at least if Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is anything to go by.
Harris and Walz have now headed off for a tour of the swing states – Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and finally Las Vegas, Nevada on Saturday, in what should feel like a victory lap leading up to a warm welcome at the Democratic national convention starting 19 August. (We’ll have daily updates from Chicago.)
But while Walz is riding high, it won’t all be fun and games until the election. He will potentially have to endure an hour standing next to JD Vance, for example, should the pair agree to debate.
Out and about: Philadelphia
At Kamala Harris’s first rally since announcing Walz as her running mate, the mood at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was ebullient, writes Melissa Hellmann. Thousands of people had lined up for the event for blocks.
“I feel ecstatic,” said Joseph Alston, a 69-year-old West Norriton Democratic committee member. Last week, he campaigned for Harris by knocking on doors and handing out flyers in the nearby King of Prussia area. Many people said they were committed to vote against Donald Trump. “They don’t want him anywhere near the White House,” Alston said.
Worst week: Just out here messing around with a dead bear
Who among us hasn’t found a dead bear cub on the side of the road, loaded it in the back of their car, taken a photo with the corpse, gone to do some falconing, had a steak dinner, then staged the decomposing bear’s death to look like a bicycle hit-and-run incident in a local park before heading to the airport?
Robert F Kennedy Jr certainly has! The independent presidential candidate, a scion of the Kennedy political family and keen conspiracy theorist, related the anecdote to Roseanne Barr on Monday, in an attempt to get ahead of an article in the New Yorker. In Kennedy’s defense, he was a young man of 60 at the time, and he only staged the incident because he thought it would be “amusing”.
It’s more bad news for Kennedy, who is polling at about 5% nationally. There were reports that Trump had promised Kennedy a job in his administration if he dropped out of the race, but it has since emerged that Kennedy called Trump a “sociopath” in private text messages, so that job offer may be rescinded.
