Kamala Harris announced Tuesday, Aug. 6, that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is her vice presidential running mate, bringing her campaign up many notches in rural credibility.
Walz grew up in Valentine, Nebraska (population 2,700), on his family’s farm before moving to the even smaller town of Butte, Nebraska (population 300), his sophomore year of high school, graduating in a class of 25 students.
After high school, he joined the National Guard and worked in manufacturing before attending Nebraska’s Chadron State College for a degree in social science education. He taught and coached high school football in Alliance, Nebraska (population 8,000), where he met his future wife, Minnesota-born Gwen Whipple. They married in 1994 and moved to Mankato, Minnesota (population 45,000), in 1996. Walz taught geography and coached football at Mankato West High School, where he also headed the school’s first gay-straight alliance.
In 2006, he ran for Congress as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party nominee (a third party unique to Minnesota whose platform centers “progressive agrarian reform” and advocates for farmers, union workers, and the public ownership of utilities, railroads, and natural resources, as well as social security legislation, according to their website.) He won the disproportionately rural first congressional district of southern Minnesota, beating the district’s six-term Republican incumbent. He represented the district from 2007-2019 before becoming governor of Minnesota.
All this to say: Walz knows rural America.
Unlike many other Democrats, Walz understands what it’s like to be from a small town where no matter your political ideology, neighbors still look out for one another. He’s privy to political nuance in rural communities, like in the congressional district that voted for him and also voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Walz doesn’t hold the same disdain for or condescension of rural folks or Trump supporters that some Democrats are guilty of (Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “basket of deplorables” comment about Trump supporters is the most famous example of this).
This last point is what I find most compelling about him. Walz doesn’t think Trump supporters are dumb or are voting against their own interests; he thinks that Democrats have a messaging problem. In an interview with Ezra Klein, he harkened back to his teaching days to describe this issue.
“The schoolteacher in me keeps thinking, if I give a test, and 90% of the students fail, I can guarantee you it’s not because the kids aren’t smart, there’s something wrong with the test or the way I’m teaching it,” Walz told Klein. “I keep coming back to this: if they’re not voting for us, there’s not something wrong with them, there’s something [about Democrats’ messaging] that’s not quite clicking.”
Since it was first announced Walz was being considered for the V.P. pick, he’s developed his own way of talking about the threat of another Trump presidency by keeping it simple: Republicans are just plain-ole “weird.”
Before Walz hit mainstream media, Democrats were warning of the “existential threat to democracy” that Trump poses, but now they’ve united around Walz’s phrasing. Republicans who want to take books away, to be in your medical exam room – they’re weird for that.
This messaging is refreshing in its simplicity. The way Walz uses “weird” isn’t to shame Trump supporters; it’s to point out how odd Republican policies like book bans or abortion bans really are. Isn’t it counter to personal freedom – one of the fundamental values in the United States – to dictate what a person can and cannot read? Isn’t it a terrible privacy infraction to want a say in the healthcare people receive? Can’t we all just respect each other’s personal freedoms and mind our own business, Walz asks?
As Minnesota governor, Walz has passed an impressive number of progressive policies. Some of his signature accomplishments include investments in public education like free breakfast and lunch for all students, expansion of the state’s child tax credit, protections for reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare, a $1 billion investment in affordable housing and expanded voting rights access, to name just a few.
But he’s got critics, too. His governor’s campaign ran on a “One Minnesota” message meant to bridge the state’s rural-urban divide, but some Minnesota pundits say once he was armed with a Democratic trifecta in the governor’s office and in both chambers of the state legislature, his “One Minnesota” message changed.
“But once he got that trifecta, his message shifted to: ‘This is what we can do with single party control, the era of gridlock is over,’” said Hamline University professor David Schultz in a CNN interview. Other pundits have wondered whether he’ll be able to rekindle the unity that message spurred if the Harris-Walz ticket loses in November.
Even with these critiques, Walz seems to be a strong choice for the Harris campaign.
He hits many of the demographic factors Harris’ advisers were looking for, whether officially or not: He’s a White, rural, middle-age veteran who has won over the internet through a single word. And the power of the internet is nothing to scoff at – one of this summer’s it-girls, musician Charli XCX, declared Kamala Harris a “brat” (a counter-intuitive compliment that references Charli XCX’s hit album), and enthusiasm for Harris soared among young millennials and Gen Z. Capitalizing on Walz’s internet virality is a good strategy for getting young voters.
Pair that with Walz’s rural credibility (he recently said he could out-shoot Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance in a pheasant hunt), and the Harris-Walz ticket could be a force to be reckoned with.
Claire Carlson is staff correspondent of The Daily Yonder, where this article was originally published in its email newsletter, Keep It Rural. See DailyYonder.com.
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2024
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