Kamala Harris set up a virtual primary for the Democrats who wanted to join the party’s 2024 ticket as her vice-presidential running mate. She offered them all—governors and senators, progressives and centrists, East Coasters and Midwesterners, Southerners and Westerners—an opportunity to secure the nomination. And they all gave it their best.
So how did Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, arguably the least well-known and least politically connected of the finalists, come from the back of the field to win Harris’ confidence?
Democratic Party insiders and the political pundits who listen to them are struggling to figure out what just happened. But there is nothing complicated about the Walz surge.
“Their idea of freedom is to be in your exam room, your bedroom. You know, banning books, we’re banning hunger. These are Democratic policies.”
What Walz recognized—to a far greater extent than more centrist and cautious VP prospects such as Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro—was that Democrats wanted to add a happy warrior on the ticket with Harris, whose replacement of President Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee has given the Democrat’s 2024 prospects a significant boost in morale and in the polls.
Walz had no problem fitting the bill. His record and political instincts positioned him as a candidate who is capable of winning where Democrats need to prevail in the race against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance.
As a Democrat who had won six races in a rural, Republican-leaning congressional district in southern Minnesota and then two terms as the governor of a politically competitive Midwestern state, Walz knew exactly how to rally the party base and to reach out to the progressive-leaning independents who must be mobilized to defeat the Republican right.
Where other Democratic candidates and party strategists had struggled for years to figure out how to characterize Trump and the MAGA cabal that has taken over the Grand Old Party, Walz got to the point in his first interviews as a VP contender. “You know there's something wrong with people when they talk about freedom: freedom to be in your bedroom, freedom to be in your exam room, freedom to tell your kids what they can read,” Walz toldMSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “That stuff is weird.”
The “weird” line went viral, as Democrats from across the ideological spectrum embraced what turned out to be a highly effective critique of Trump and Vance.
But there was much more to Walz’s appeal.
In a remarkable series of cable TV appearances in late July, at a point when the former teacher and National Guard master sergeant was still in the back of the pack of Democratic vice-presidential prospects, Walz made an argument for Harris and the party that was rooted in the rural values of regions where Democrats have struggled to compete in recent years.
“I grew up in a small town of 400 people. I have said I had 24 kids in my class—12 were cousins—graduating. That’s small-town America,” began Walz in one of his first MSNBC appearances during the VP race, turning the tables on Trump and Vance. “I said the thing that most irritates me........