When Vice President Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate, many pundits He regretted his decision. In their view, the Democratic nominee should have chosen a vice presidential candidate who could mitigate his liabilities and balance his party’s ticket — such as Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
After all, Harris was a liberal senator from one of America’s most left-leaning states, and then he ran for office. A very progressive primary campaign In 2020. To win the swing-state undecided, he must demonstrate his independence from the most radical elements of his party. And electing a popular governor of a purple state — who defied the Democratic activist base On Education Policy And Israel’s war on Gaza– Just do it.
Walz, on this account, is another liberal favorite: as governor of Minnesota, he was Enacting a litany of progressive policies, including recovery suffrage Ex-offenders and creations a Asylum program for trans people Other states deny gender-affirming care. Picking Walz could thrill the subset of Americans who would vote for Harris even if he burned an American flag on live TV and fanned its flames. But that will do nothing to reassure those who don’t like the two words in the phrase “California liberal.”
But there are multiple ways to balance tickets. Or so Harris’ team believes, if the third night of the Democratic National Convention is any guide.
On Wednesday night, Democrats used Walz’s nomination to associate their party with rural American culture and small-town conservative moral sentiments, while staying true to a broadly progressive agenda.
Walz may not be ideologically particularly different from Harris. But he is demographically and symbolically quite different. Harris is the half-Jamaican, half-Indian daughter of immigrant college professors who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Walz was born into a family whose roots in the United States went back to the 1800s and grew up in a Nebraska town of 400, where the ethnic diversity consisted mainly of various flavors of Midwestern white (Walz himself German, Irish, SwedishAnd Luxembourgish descent). Harris is an effortlessly cool veteran red carpet. Walz is a dad joke made physical.
In his persona and biography, Harris represents an America that has unequivocally benefited from the changes of the past half century—a cosmopolitan, multicultural country that has welcomed advances in racial and gender equality, and the knowledge economy that has led to globalization. Contrasting this with taste, Walz shaped an America that felt more at home in yesterday’s world, at least as it is nostalgically misremembered — a world in which moral intuitions seemed more stable, rural economies seemed more healthy, and American elites Even more looks familiar; America that puts Donald Trump in the Oval Office, in other words.
Or at least, the Harris campaign has chosen to associate Walz with all of America’s iconography, trying to incorporate him into the Democratic coalition as much as possible — without actually giving much ground for conservative policy choices.
The introduction to Walz’s speech Wednesday night looks like it could have been scripted by a chatbot asking a “San Francisco liberal” to make a counterargument. A Video completeness Growing up on his family farm celebrated Walz’s hard work, his service in the U.S. military, his skills as a marksman and — above all — his success as a football coach. Democrats leaned particularly hard on the last, most American item on Walz’s resume. Just before the party’s vice presidential nominee took the mic, a group of his former players decked out in their gridiron attire took the stage for a fight song (“Don’t mess withfight song“).
Walz’s current persona is certainly a half-truth. The fact noted Wednesday night was that, despite his parochial roots, Walz was a cosmopolitan intellectual who wrote Graduate Thesis on Holocaust Education and has been China about 30 times. Still, the basic picture the Democrats wanted to paint held true: Walz’s former students and players appeared to genuinely respect him, and the love between him and his family was palpable. It can be worldly, liberal, and a quintessentially natural Midwesterner. And if Walz isn’t next, he’s certainly a good actor on TV.
Walz made subtle use of that persona in his address at the DNC. As both he and Harris have been doing throughout their young campaigns, Walz tried to sell a liberal agenda to conservative positions. He framed social liberalism and safety net programs as logical extensions of rural American neighborhoods, saying that growing up in a small town taught him that “the family down the street, they may not think like you, they may not pray like you. They may love like you. Can’t. But they’re your neighbors. And they all belong to you.”
Walz’s opposition to small-town, middle-American values was not California progressives, but Republican radicals. Speaking of Project 2025, the conservative movement’s second Trump-lauded blueprint, Walz said:
Here’s the thing. This is an agenda that no one wanted. It’s an agenda that serves none but the wealthiest and most extreme among us. And it’s an agenda that does nothing for the needs of our neighbors. Is it weird? absolutely absolutely But this is also wrong, and dangerous.
There is some reason to believe that by wrapping center-left policies in conservative packaging, Democrats may be able to win over a small but significant segment of Republican-leaning independents. Some political scientists found That when moderate and conservative voters are presented with the idea of a progressive, democratic economic policy – it is justified on the grounds that it will help “hold on to the values and traditions handed down to us: hard work, loyalty to our country and the freedom to make our own way”. – Some respond favorably (such as liberal voters, who take no offense to such abstract, traditionalist pieties).
Walz tying himself to rural American symbology — or Harris tying himself to “Coach Walz” — would be enough to blunt Trump’s attack on the Democratic nominee’s supposed “communism“It remains to be seen. But the Democratic ticket is at least trying to make right-leaning Midwesterners feel like they belong (even if they don’t feel like Democrats).
