Tim Walz Joins the Anti-weirdness Ticket

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz will be the Democratic nominee for vice president. He’s likely been tapped not for his liberal policies but for his amiability and optimism, in a bid to attract voters tiring of the gloom and doom pushed by Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.

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The “Normal” Appeal

I admit that to write about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, I had to overcome two biases. One is that he has both a cat and a dog. Last winter, he added another cat—a shelter rescue—to his home, and as Mark Twain said, “When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction.” The other bias is a bit closer to my heart. He and his wife had a long and difficult road to having a child, an experience my family knows very well. Their journey led to IVF and ours to adoption; both of us were blessed with beautiful daughters. And because the Walz and Nichols families never gave up and somehow knew it would work out, we gave our daughters the same name: Hope.

Now, does all that mean that Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen the right running mate? I don’t know. Walz is a very liberal Democrat; as a recent Voice of America profile noted, under Walz, Minnesota has “allowed undocumented immigrants to obtain a driver’s license, expanded background checks for gun transfers, legalized recreational marijuana, and offered protections for people seeking or providing gender-affirming health care.” He is not going to enlarge the diversity of the campaign’s policy positions. But I suspect that Harris was not making her choice based primarily on Walz’s politics, and I can only speculate about why Walz was chosen over the other apparent finalists, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.

Taking a pass on Kelly is the easier call to explain. He has a solid personal background as a military officer and an astronaut; he is a dedicated husband who cared for his wife after she was nearly killed in a mass shooting. But he hasn’t been in the Senate very long, and he’s been criticized by supporters of organized labor—whose efforts will be crucial to a Democratic win in November—over his initial unwillingness to sign on to a pro-union bill. He is a competent but not particularly electrifying public speaker, and although he comes from an important swing state, Harris may be able to make up lost ground there without him on the ticket.

Shapiro is a more complicated option. The obvious case for choosing Pennsylvania’s popular governor—his approval rating at home is an impressive 61 percent—is that he could help lock down the state’s 19 electoral votes. Without Pennsylvania, Harris’s chances of victory functionally drop to zero, and if Shapiro could deliver the Keystone State, he would shore up the most worrisome vulnerability in Harris’s Electoral College math.

But not so fast. Choosing Shapiro carried plenty of risks. First—and let’s just say it plainly—trying to appeal to four or five swing states with a ticket that is Black and Jewish is a lift in a country where racism and anti-Semitism remain real problems. You might wish America was different, and in most states, the ethnic and racial composition of the ticket wouldn’t matter. But even having him in the mix would fuel anti-Semites and other kooks who want to dirty the political waters. If Harris chose Shapiro, they’d say that she was bending to the secret influence of the Israel lobby; if she didn’t choose him, then she was just another Jew-hater like so many of the students protesting on elite campuses.

In fact, the right-wing commentator Erick Erickson already tried that latter line of attack today: “No Jews allowed at the top of the Democratic Party,” he groused on X. (“News to me,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer fired back.) Shapiro’s positions on Middle East affairs, as my colleague Yair Rosenberg has noted, are similar to Walz’s, but the reality—however unfair it might be—is that a Jewish candidate could have ended up a lightning rod for prejudices and distracting arguments that the Harris campaign could otherwise attempt to avoid.

Shapiro supporters could argue that he already won a state that is, as the Democratic strategist James Carville described it back in 1986, two big cities at each end and Alabama in the middle. In that case, however, why not leave him in Pennsylvania as Harris’s surrogate? Nominating Shapiro could backfire and look too much like a cheap bid for 19 electoral votes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—but even the most cynical ticket-balancing shouldn’t be that obvious. Shapiro, whatever his current success in Pennsylvania, is a lawyer (with a degree from Georgetown) who has never worked very far from politics. If the goal is to increase the ticket’s Middle American cred, his résumé is not that helpful.

Harris was reportedly also vetting Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Beshear is a proven winner in a red state, and although he’s a young and appealing politician, the governor of a small, unwinnable Southern state might not be the optimal pick in a tight race. Short-listing Beshear at least had some logic to it; the Buttigieg boomlet made no sense at all, and seemed to emanate from excited liberals imbibing a wee too much social-media hooch. Buttigieg is a talented speaker who may well have a great future in elected politics, but that future will have to start with being elected to something again. (And no, snagging first place in Iowa’s weird caucuses does not count. Just ask President Rick Santorum.)

Walz does not balance the ticket in terms of policy, but if Democrats are trying to build a Team Normal to take on Team Weird—as Walz himself dubbed the Republicans—then a Nebraska native who became Minnesota’s governor makes a lot of sense. As Jill Lawrence wrote in The Bulwark today, Walz—a hunter and a guy who looks comfortable holding a piglet at a state fair—can speak to voters both in the cities and in rural areas. (He won election to Congress by flipping a GOP-held district in 2006 and was reelected five times.) Ezra Klein, meanwhile, noted while interviewing Walz that he projects “Midwestern dad vibes.”

Walz, in other words, comes across in public like a normal person with a life story that most Americans can understand. He spent most of his working years before politics as a beloved high-school teacher and football coach. (He reminds me of one of my wonderful and unflaggingly liberal history teachers, who wrote “Up the Irish and the Democrats” in my yearbook.) Politics is full of lawyers and policy wonks from glitzy schools; Walz went to local state schools and got the kinds of degrees in social science and education common to teachers. He served as an enlisted man in the Army, reaching the rank of command sergeant major—a significant achievement, as retired Army Lieutenant General Mark Hertling explained on X today.

Walz also talks like an ordinary American, which could be a big advantage in 2024. Trump is a babbling autocrat; Vance tries to talk like Trump and sounds like an inauthentic babbling autocrat. Harris can be awkward when she’s not sticking to a script; she’s gotten a lot better since her short-lived 2020 presidential bid, but I suspect that of the four of them, Walz will likely have the easiest time connecting to voters who just want to hear from someone who speaks simply and directly.

I admit that I am eager to see Walz debate Vance; as former Senator Claire McCaskill said today, Walz “is really the guy that J. D. Vance is pretending to be.” Vance and his book about working-class Americans, Walz told Klein, offend him: “Those are my people,” he said. “And I know they’re not weird. I know they’re not Donald Trump.”

If Harris’s goal was to add ideological centrism to the ticket, Walz is a risk. If, however, Harris is trying to appeal to millions of ordinary Americans by adding a man who lives and sounds like the people she is trying to reach, then Walz was a solid choice.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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