Harris Picks Walz

The single most important rule guiding the selection of vice-presidential running mates, the experts say, is: “Don’t pick someone who will hurt you.”  Kamala Harris’s selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is consistent with that maxim.  Walz is a sixty-year-old, balding white male with a centrist reputation made during his earlier career as a member of Congress.  As governor he has tilted to the left since the Democrats gained control of both houses of the state legislature in 2022, but he looks and sounds more like a Midwestern moderate.  In that sense he seems to be a smart pick for Harris, given her somewhat more liberal image.

The real key to understanding Walz, as with so many other people, is to focus on where he’s from originally.  In Walz’s case, it’s a small town in northwestern Nebraska where the Central and Mountain time zones meet.  Raised in a Catholic household by parents of German and Swedish descent, he has the kind of warmth and friendliness for which Midwesterners are justly famous.  (When he married his spouse Gwen he converted to Lutheranism.) Perhaps the most perceptive observation about why Walz was chosen is that “he looks like the kind of person the Democrats have been losing touch with.”

And there is, indeed, a kind of back-to-the-future quality to Walz’s selection.  Two earlier Democratic vice-presidential picks were from Minnesota (Senator Hubert Humphrey in 1964 and Senator Walter Mondale in 1976), and both were similar in background, personality, and political beliefs.  Walz shares with Humphrey an essentially upbeat attitude toward campaigning and governing, something Humphrey used to call “the politics of joy.”  And, like Mondale, whose Secret Service code name was “Norwegian Wood,” Walz comes across as calm at a time when that seems refreshing.  Perhaps most important, both Humphrey and Mondale helped their respective national tickets to prevail in the fall (though neither ever became president themselves).  More than anything else, Harris’s decision to choose Walz to run with suggests that she intends to run a campaign with which mainstream Democrats can identify.

Her choice of Walz also, one suspects, was made partly in response to Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance.  To Trump’s obvious disappointment, Vance has come across as abrasive and even a bit strange since being named the GOP vice presidential candidate.  Harris has countered by choosing a Midwesterner who comes across thus far as nice and conventional.  If the two VP candidates can agree to a TV debate, the dynamic would likely resemble the vice-presidential debate held in the fall of 1976, when Walter Mondale struck most viewers as more likable than his opponent, Kansas Senator Bob Dole.  In what ultimately turned out to be a very close race, Mondale’s debate performance helped the Democratic ticket headed by Jimmy Carter to defeat Republican incumbent Jerry Ford.  If the election turns out similarly this time, Harris’s decision will likely come to be seen as the smartest political move she has ever made.