Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate on Tuesday morning. It’s the culmination of a two-week sprint for the vacancy left by Harris’ sudden ascension to the top of the ticket. In such a crowded field of talent under consideration, Walz got the nod not by default. He wasn’t merely the least objectionable candidate. He earned it.
Of all the candidates the VP took under consideration—Walz, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro—Walz had the lowest national profile two weeks ago. The former enlisted soldier, schoolteacher, and member of Congress had worked with the Minnesota Legislature to pass a raft of progressive laws over the past couple of years, but he had never been presented to a national audience.
That changed with Walz’s first appearance two weeks ago on Morning Joe, the MSNBC proving grounds for the would-be running mates to perform their routines.
“What I know is, people like J.D. Vance know nothing about small-town America,” Walz said. He described a state of divisiveness in the country where “we can’t even go to Thanksgiving dinner with our uncle because you end up in some weird fight that is unnecessary.” After that got a chuckle, he added, “Well, it’s true—these guys are just weird. They’re running for ‘He-Man Women-Haters Club’ or something.”
Weird took off, earning a battlefield promotion to the top of Democratic talking points against Donald Trump and Vance—both of whom offered plenty of material afterward to earn the descriptor. Suddenly, the previously little-known Minnesotan was in high demand across platforms, doing the Dew and prosecuting the case against the Republican ticket.
“Who’s asking for this crazy stuff?” Walz said in another MSNBC interview in late July. “Who’s asking to raise the price of insulin? Who’s asking to get rid of birth control? They do these focus groups or whatever—who’s sitting in a bar in Racine, Wisconsin, saying, ‘You know what we really need? We need to ban Animal Farm.’ Nobody is.”
Walz’s main competition for the slot, if any of the reporting during the past two weeks is to be believed, was Shapiro. The case for Shapiro was obvious. He’s a gifted orator and talented campaigner governing the most important swing state in the country. He’s popular in his state, and his selection could have added a decisive point or two to the Democratic ticket’s vote share there.
But to the extent an opposition campaign against a candidate was able to coalesce in this rapid process, it was targeted at Shapiro. Some of Shapiro’s rhetoric about Israel’s war in Gaza and the campus protesters of a few months ago struck a nerve with the left, and Shapiro’s support for private school vouchers in Pennsylvania had earned him criticism from teachers unions. The specific targeting of Shapiro’s views on Israel, as opposed to Walz’s roughly similar stance, seemed to some Democrats flatly antisemitic. The revelation of a college newspaper column Shapiro had written about Palestinians being “too battle-minded” for self-governance, even if decades old, may have made his selection too high a risk for the Harris campaign as it seeks to project unity heading into the convention. With Walz having blitzed the media for weeks, making a lot of friends but apparently zero enemies within the Democratic coalition, the “Do No Harm” choice presented itself.
How will Republicans go after Walz? The pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc., in its first blast after the reported pick, described him as an “incompetent liberal” with “creepy far-left views,” citing trans rights legislation Walz had signed. It also made reference to Walz’s leadership during riots following the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
But Walz is not atop the ticket. The more meaningful arguments on VP selections for opposing campaigns are what they indicate about the nominee herself. And Republicans will argue not just that Walz himself is a reflection of the “dangerously liberal” candidate atop the Democratic ticket, as the Trump campaign put it in a statement about “Radical Leftist Tim Walz” on Tuesday. They’ll say that Harris revealed her true colors by caving to the left’s demands.
“San Francisco liberal Kamala Harris’ ideological comfort zone remains at the very far left fringes of her party,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Will Reinert said in a statement. “By snubbing Pro-Israel Shapiro it’s the clearest sign yet that 2024 Kamala is the same as the 2019 primary Kamala.”
This argument would have more oomph if, in siding with the left’s preferred candidate among the available options, Harris had burned other major constituencies within the Democratic coalition. But no element of the coalition, as best I can tell, had an actual problem with Walz. Democrats from the left to the middle have seen two weeks of the guy, and they like him. He may have been progressives’ favorite, but he also knows how to reach out to the middle, which is how he stayed in Congress for 12 years representing a more rural, middle-of-the-road district. In showing he could offer something for everyone, he made his own destiny.