The Progressives Get Their Pick
5 min read
In the realm of presidential politics, progressives have become accustomed to disappointment. Joe Biden wasn’t their first (or second) choice in 2020. Nor, for that matter, was Kamala Harris. And Democratic nominees typically pick moderates for their running mates. So when Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her choice for vice president this morning, progressives experienced an unusual feeling: elation.
“It just feels so different and unexpected not to be let down and to be actually excited by a politician’s choice,” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me by phone shortly after the news broke. “Kamala Harris had lots of choices in front of her, and she picked the most popular, exciting one.”
Progressives had latched onto Walz’s dark-horse candidacy over the past two weeks, seeing him as a more appealing option, both ideologically and politically, than Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, whom many believed to be the front-runner. Walz, a former teacher and high-school football coach, impressed liberals with his governing success in Minnesota, where he’s signed legislation enacting paid family leave, expanding the child-tax credit, protecting abortion rights, and lowering the cost of insulin. More recently—and perhaps more important—he charmed them with his folksy takedowns on cable news of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.
“He’s just plainspoken and direct, and he’s very funny,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who served with Walz in the House, told me. “He’s got the common touch, and I think it’s an ingenious choice.”
In Walz, progressives believe they have found a Democrat who can connect with rural and white working-class voters in the crucial battlegrounds of the Midwest without compromising on the party’s policy platform. “He’s the anti-elite candidate. He comes across as the everyman,” Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of the progressive group Our Revolution, told me this morning. He called Walz “a perfect counterbalance” to Harris, whom Republicans have tried to portray as, in his words, “an out-of-touch California elite.”
In winning over Harris, Walz appears to have benefited from the condemnation that many liberal activists heaped on Shapiro due to his support for Israel and his criticism of pro-Palestinian student protesters. Shapiro could have been the first Jewish vice president, and his defenders saw a current of anti-Semitism in the campaign against him. Walz is also a longtime supporter of Israel, as were each of the reported finalists in the Harris veepstakes, but they received relatively little criticism for it.
“Gaza was definitely a negative for Shapiro,” Geevarghese said. But he denied that anti-Semitism played any part in the left’s opposition to him. “It’s not that Shapiro’s Jewish. It’s that he has sided more with Israel than with protesters and the protest movement.” (Like many politicians in both parties, Shapiro criticized the demonstrations on college campuses this spring, although occasionally in harsher terms than some other Democrats did. He also criticized Israel’s handling of the war.)
The case for Shapiro had centered on Pennsylvania—likely a must-win state for Harris—where his approval rating is above 60 percent. “I was just blown away at how much electoral resonance Josh had in the exact communities that we need to win in Pennsylvania or do well in,” Representative Ro Khanna, a California progressive who grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, told me. Although most Democrats said they were happy with any of the candidates Harris was considering, some said that given the stakes of this year’s election, to select anyone other than Shapiro would be a risk. Khanna wasn’t one of them, though; he called Walz a solid pick.
Harris’s announcement drew praise across a wide ideological spectrum, from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. In the final days leading up to the selection, however, the largely behind-the-scenes contest between Walz and Shapiro had become a stand-in for larger Democratic fights that the party’s embrace of Harris had otherwise suppressed. The proxy war dismayed some party allies, who urged progressives to stop their attacks on Shapiro. “It’s a false binary,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me. She said that although she was “ecstatic” about the choice of Walz, she would have been just as happy if Harris had picked Shapiro or any of the other finalists, including Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky.
Despite more than a decade in Congress and nearly six years as the governor of a mid-size state, Walz had virtually no national presence until two weeks ago. Even some of the progressives championing his candidacy knew relatively little about him. I spoke with one Democrat who referred to Walz as a “grandpa” and was shocked to learn that, at 60, he’s only a few months older than Harris. (Walz’s two children, one a teenager and the other in her early 20s, are both younger than Harris’s stepchildren; he has no grandchildren.) Others admitted to being unfamiliar with his ideology and record. Democratic Representative Hillary Scholten of Michigan told me that she “wasn’t necessarily familiar with him on the national stage, but as a governor of one of our Great Lakes states, he certainly has a profile of being a problem-solver.”
The race to define Walz is now on. Noting his support from progressives, Republicans quickly tried to tag him as “a radical”—a Democrat who, in the words of Minnesota Representative Tom Emmer, “has worked to turn Minnesota into Harris’ home state of California.”
But Walz has broken with Democrats in the past. While in the House, where he served from 2007 to 2019, Walz once earned an A rating from the National Rifle Association, and he voted with Republicans in 2012 to hold then–Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. He’s since become a champion of gun control, and Holder ran the vetting operation that ended in Harris’s selection of Walz as her running mate.
No matter his record, progressives are adopting him as one of their own now that he’s reserved a spot on the Democratic ticket. And for the first time in a while, they’re saying they won.
