Vice presidential picks seldom swing elections, but they do send signals about how a candidate intends to campaign and govern.
Former President Trump chose to magnify his culture warrior persona with this year’s pick of Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, a younger man who shares Trump’s “Make America Great Again” ideology and rhetorical style. It was a departure from his pick eight years ago of Mike Pence, a former Indiana governor and congressman tapped by Trump to assure evangelicals and mainstream conservatives who were then wary of Trump’s party takeover.
Vice President Kamala Harris, in picking Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is hoping to show her party that she is not giving up on the industrial Midwest, even as Democrats have hedged their bets in recent years by seeking votes in Sun Belt states including Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia. Yet she’s also found someone whose progressive policy agenda is largely in sync with her own, even if Walz presents himself as a commonsense centrist.
Harris — a Black and Asian child of immigrants from California and the first woman to be vice president — has long been viewed as the party’s new face and future, the leader of an electoral coalition that skews young, female, coastal, multiracial and highly educated. Her own selection by President Biden four years ago was seen as a nod to that reality from a consensus candidate picked in part because many Democrats viewed him as safe.
Walz, little known outside Minnesota until a few weeks ago, is seen as a bridge to white working-class voters who have abandoned the party for Trump. A veteran of the National Guard, he looks and talks like the football coach and teacher he was, framing Trump as a “weird” guy with weird ideas, a critique that Harris and others have adopted because it diminishes Trump in a plainspoken manner without sounding alarmist.
“He’s sort of everyman,” said Joel Goldstein, who has written several books on the vice presidency. “He’s not from a glitzy, elite background. He’s not esoteric.”
Elaine Kamarck, a Democratic superdelegate who advised Vice President Al Gore, called him “Joe Six Pack,” and a valuable counterbalance “when you have a Black, Asian woman at the head of the ticket.”
Harris was eager for those everyman credentials when she selected him, according to a person familiar with the selection process who also cited Walz’s status as a hunter from a rural background who won a congressional district that voted for Trump.
In that sense, the pick shares some similarity with former President Obama’s selection of Biden — who loves to speak of “the guys” from his childhood in Scranton, Pa. — when Obama campaigned in 2008 to become the first Black U.S. president.
But Walz, 60, and Harris, 59, share a lot beneath the surface, probably more than Obama and Biden. They are both progressives who are not seen within their party as ideologues in the mode of Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont (an independent who caucuses with Democrats) and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Yet they largely govern to the left.
Harris struggled to define her ideology in the 2020 Democratic primary, but she has since adopted the Biden agenda, which focuses heavily on spending on infrastructure and environmental projects while attempting to expand programs to reduce the burden of child care and college debt. Abortion and voting rights also feature heavily in Biden’s and Harris’ rhetoric, even if policy achievements have eluded them.
Harris wants to use Walz’s Minnesota agenda — a mix of progressive ideas and crossover consumer issues — as a national model, according to the person who spoke about her deliberations. That includes an expanded child tax credit, a ban on so-called junk fees, gun restrictions, and one of the most expansive abortion rights policies in the country, written into the state constitution after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022.
Republicans immediately pointed to those positions as they attempted to label Walz an extremist. They also highlighted a comment Walz made on a recent “White Dudes for Harris” campaign call: “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values,” Walz said. “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”
Many also raised Harris’ decision to pass over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who some Palestinian rights activists were concerned is too sympathetic to Israel. Some Jewish and Republican leaders argued that Shapiro faced outsized scrutiny because he is Jewish.
“It’s a bad omen if she’s going to be pushed off Shapiro because of concerns within the pro-Palestine wing of her party,” said Marc Short, who served as Pence’s chief of staff. “If she’s sensitive to those complaints when she’s probably the most progressive nominee they have had, it doesn’t signal she’s worried too much about placating the middle.”
Short sought to draw a contrast between Walz’s easy Midwestern manner and his views. Pence worked extensively with governors as part of the Trump administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and Walz “could not have been more gracious or more kind,” Short said. “But if you look at the cultural agenda, the [Black Lives Matter] agenda, I think he is not coming from the moderate wing of the Democrat Party, to the extent that they have one anymore.”
Some Democrats were pushing for Shapiro, or Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, for another reason. Pennsylvania and Arizona are two of the most closely contested swing states, according to polling that also shows both men are extremely popular in their home states. Minnesota hasn’t voted Republican in a presidential contest since 1972.
But it does share media markets and cultural ties with neighboring Wisconsin, one of the big seven battleground states. Rep. Mark Takano, a Riverside Democrat who worked closely with Walz in the House on veterans issues, said presidential politics is “more chess than checkers,” asserting that Harris’ pick shows she is looking at the whole board. Takano said he got a text from David Hogg, a young and influential gun control advocate, advocating for Walz before he was mentioned as a top-tier contender.
“He’s somebody who’s very experienced at communicating and connecting with — being relatable to — white working-class voters,” Takano said of Walz. But “he’s getting a lot of enthusiastic responses from the progressive wing of the party as well.”