Democrats have spent the last two weeks taunting Republicans for having Ohio Senator J D Vance as their vice-presidential candidate.
Vance, they say, is an unknown “weirdo”, a woman hater and an extremist who proves that Trump’s party is in hock to its most radical wing.
Yet the fact that Harris has just chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate suggests her campaign is more concerned about Vance than they are letting on.
Like Vance, Walz has a milder persona than the candidate at the top of the party’s presidential ticket. Like Vance, Walz has military experience and blue-collar credentials which will help his party in certain crucial swing states. And as with Vance, the old party establishment would probably have preferred someone else: in the Republican case, the former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley; in the Democratic one, Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.
Yet the selection of Walz suggests that the Harris campaign is, similar to Team Trump, more interested in placating its radical wing than in reaching out to undecided voters in the middle. Vance is clearly more religiously devout than Trump, and more passionate about conservative subjects such as marriage and family.
Walz, meanwhile, has been picked in no small part because Democratic strategists feared Shapiro would have triggered a backlash from the party’s progressive base over the issue of Gaza. Walz is no Hamas-sympathiser: he calls the government in Israel; “our truest and closest ally in the region” and has ignored protests urging him to divest the Minnesota pension fund of its Israel investments. But he’s a Lutheran, unlike Shapiro who is Jewish, and his pro-Israel statements therefore do not provoke the deepest ire of the far-Left.
Walz is, at least on the surface, more moderate than Vance, and his amiable, avuncular character will make him attractive to the many voters who are fed up of the craziness of American politics. He used to be pro-gun rights but now says his views have “evolved” under the influence of his children. “Look, I don’t understand everything about Gen Z,” he says. “But I love ‘em.” Judging from the instant reaction to his nomination, Gen Z seem to love him back.
He’s also been chosen because, in his folksy norminess, he is well-placed to label his opponents as beyond the pale without coming across as unhinged himself. He’s credited with inventing the “weird” attack line that Team Harris is now trotting out. And he talks a lot about being a football coach, going shooting with his Republican friends, why he likes eating corn dogs and why cookies are the “ultimate bipartisan entry point.” It’s all a bit cringe-inducing but that’s the point.
With Walz on board, Team Harris are especially excited at the prospect of the crunch vice-presidential debate, the date of which is yet to be decided. Walz and his wife Gwen conceived their children through IVF, which puts him in a strong position to lay into Vance’s Catholic positions on childbirth.
But Vance is no fool, and he will point out that Walz’s radical record belies his clubbable old-boy manner. As a governor, Walz was slow to act against the Black Lives Matter riots, something he later admitted was “an abject failure.”
He has also signed an executive order allowing sex changes for minors and men to play in women’s sports and under his watch large scale fraud took place in Minnesota during the Covid pandemic.
On immigration, Harris’s key weak point, Walz is no moderating presence. He has proposed a “ladder factory” in response to Donald Trump’s border wall and suggested that, without illegal migration, Americans would not be able to eat their Thanksgiving dinner.
But he gives off good “vibes” – and for a lot of Americans that’s what counts.