Dad Is on the Ballot
7 min read
Yesterday, Kamala Harris announced that her running mate would be Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota. Walz was a dark-horse pick among the top contenders, but has a clear appeal to the Harris campaign. He is a 60-year-old former educator and veteran. He has progressive bona fides and is well respected, plainspoken, and an effective campaigner.
But Walz has another asset to bring to bear on the 2024 race. His male-pattern baldness, bushy white eyebrows, and capacious midwestern cheeks evoke that of an American League Central baseball manager, and he exudes a familiar, affable energy—the kind that suggests the governor could easily teach you how to change a tire or hang some shelves in your family room. Walz is, in other words, extremely dad-coded.
This matters in the same way that all of the online attention toward Harris matters: The internet loves dads. Walz has slid perfectly into a load-bearing trope of social media. There are many successful accounts on digital platforms that trade entirely on the image of a middle-aged man who likes sensible white New Balance sneakers; a well-kept yard; a good deal; manning a grill; baseball on the radio; watching bad action films from 2004 (on basic cable, with commercials); texting in all caps; bad jokes; asking where his reading glasses are; Costco (see: “a good deal”); pretending to be emotionally unavailable while being a secret softy; the hardware store; World War II documentaries; and unironic Steely Dan listening. Some of these accounts, such as Instagram’s popular @raddad, chronicle the exploits of the beer-drinking, grill-cleaning dads of America via memes and videos. Other aggregators offer what I’d call Dad Solidarity—funny, relatable parenting content by dads, for dads. TikTok has its own DadTok dynamics, where accounts such as @yourprouddad offer fatherly affirmations, while speaking to the camera as if it were their child. On Reddit, r/happycryingdads is the internet’s repository for heartwarming videos of proud dads shedding tears of joy.
All of these posts celebrate and elevate a particular idea of a person: a normal guy who is uncomplicated and decent. He isn’t cool, and he knows it—a self-awareness that brings a kind of liberation. From a strategic standpoint, the Harris campaign seems to understand that the Dad is exactly the right meme to counter the alienating and extremely online tendencies of the right wing. While good vibes online may not do all of the necessary work of drawing voters to Harris in November, optics do matter in elections: President Joe Biden seemed unfit in the June presidential debate, which triggered calls for him to drop out. Optics, and the attention they allow one to command, especially matter when running against Donald Trump, a reality-TV persona who adores attention and lashes out in a most off-putting manner when he’s not getting enough of it.
Although the governor has spent plenty of time talking about his record—which includes presiding over a state that codified abortion rights, mandating expanded background checks for guns, and instituting paid family and medical leave for workers and free lunch in schools—this isn’t always the content you’re most likely to see shared online. Scroll through social media, and you just might stumble upon Walz filming a video from the front seat of a 2014 Ford Edge, talking about the faulty headlight harness (and how to replace it for just $7.99 at NAPA Auto Parts); or talking about how much he loves maps; or that time his dog locked himself in a second-story bedroom. Or perhaps you’ll see footage of Walz riding the Slingshot at the Minnesota State Fair with his daughter Hope, wearing a camo dad hat, and playfully arguing over whether a turkey corn dog is vegetarian as Hope rolls her eyes. (It’s no mistake that the campaign is selling a $40 camo hat as official merch.)
Once Harris formally announced Walz as her running mate, the Dad posts flooded my timelines. “tim walz is outside cleaning my grill,” one Threads user posted. “Tim Walz just slipped me a 20 on my way out the door because ‘you never know if some place doesn’t take credit cards,’” another responded. “Tim Walz is the dad an entire generation wish they had instead of the one they lost to Fox News,” someone said on X. Each winking, Rockwellian koan was a bit of dad fan fiction. Walz as a neighbor, raking your leaves for you. Walz letting your husband borrow his power washer. Walz at Home Depot offering advice on hex bolts. Walz “taking care of the wasps’ nest for you.” Many of these examples project a small-town, working-class relatability that is often claimed by the right, which suggests that Walz’s image flips the dynamic, making his political opponents look like out-of-touch elites by comparison.
Perhaps this is little more than a burst of enthusiasm for Democrats as the general election takes shape post-Biden. But Walz’s Dadness may be a key reason his anti-Trump message stuck this summer. Walz leapfrogged other vice-presidential hopefuls with a series of viral television appearances in which he ridiculed Trump as “weird,” and said Trump and his VP pick, J. D. Vance, are “telling us what books to read” and have a desire to “be in your exam room.” The attack line stuck in part because “weird” is a vague yet all-encompassing term that gets at the core tenets of the MAGA agenda: It’s extreme, invasive, and, per a 2023 poll, not at all popular with a majority of Americans. And it’s contributed to a political culture that ruins Thanksgiving.
Walz’s very dadness makes him a perfect avatar to deliver that critique. After all, the online dad stereotype projects an unflappable kind of quiet, suburban normalcy: one that contrasts harshly with Vance’s status as a venture capitalist who pals around with Silicon Valley reactionaries such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. “Weird,” as deployed by Walz, is an ideological descriptor, but it’s also a way to categorize the far-right internet. Like Musk, Vance shitposts on X about wokeness, looking to pick up likes and reposts from edgelords with stale quips about political correctness run amok. He has spent an inordinate amount of time calling people cat ladies on the platform. These posts demonstrate a fluency in online culture-warring, enough for one high-profile poster to dub Vance “basically a member of frog twitter,” a reference to a cartoon-frog meme that was once the avatar of far-right online trolls. Vance has reportedly been influenced by the neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin, a blogger who has written under the pen name Mencius Moldbug and advocated for a technocratic surveillance state, as well as the destruction of the federal government in favor of rule by a CEO or monarch. Just explaining this is exhausting—Dad is losing interest and ready for a nap in his recliner.
By contrast, Walz’s appeal—both to the Harris campaign and to the Democrats who are enthused by his rapid ascendence—might signal that the X-addled, shitposting tendencies of the MAGA internet, once an asset to the Trump campaign and far-right movement, might be a liability in 2024. The extremely online right’s obsessions (many of which are contained in the unpopular Project 2025 agenda) are unbound from the prosaic concerns of Americans (as evidenced by the way right-wing influencers tried to get “Tampon Tim” to stick yesterday in reference to Walz signing a gender-inclusive bill that provides menstrual products in school bathrooms).
This is a problem especially for Vance, who projects an extreme onlineness that may alienate him from voters (early polling suggests unfavorable ratings) who don’t share his fringe obsessions or speak in the parlance of X. His peculiar joke about Diet Mountain Dew being racist, which drew barely a chuckle at a campaign rally in July, is precisely the type of quip that would have played well to a hyper-engaged MAGA audience on X but, when removed from the context of the internet, sounded stilted and odd—it wasn’t quite clear what he was referencing. Walz projects the image of, well, a regular guy who might give sound automotive-repair advice. He doesn’t make strange pandering jokes about the soda, although he does drink it.
The online excitement over Walz’s dad energy (which includes but is not limited to: TikTok supercuts of his speeches set to a gentle acoustic version of the Cranberries song “Linger”) is partly due to this projection of his being mostly detached from the toxic sludge of online political discourse. In a recent interview, he chastised MAGA rhetoric for alienating people, telling the interviewer to “turn on the internet and see what cat people do when you go after them.” The phrase resonated. “Turn on the internet” is, of course, a perfectly calibrated dad phrasing, both endearing and charmingly out of touch.
The trope of Dadness, as refined by the internet, is a cherished caricature. Dad fixes things, but he is also an anchoring presence, tethered not to the choose-your-own reality of the internet but to the solid ground of the physical world. Dad is above the fray, in part because he doesn’t know how to log on and access it. Sure, he’s aware of it, but mostly because he hears about it from his kids. He’d rather not engage—a feeling that may be familiar, even aspirational, to voters tiring of an era of doomscrolling and weird, hyper-online politics.
