Tim Walz is surely the only major-party Vice-Presidential nominee whose candidacy was propelled into being by a single word: “weird.” “These are weird people on the other side,” he said of Republicans, two days after Joe Biden dropped out of the Presidential race. The Minnesota governor had been using the word for months, but, with a new candidate and a new calculus, it caught fire. Out of nowhere, it seemed that the former high-school teacher and football coach might have solved a riddle that had bedevilled the Democrats for nearly a decade. They’ve been huffing and puffing about broken laws, endless lies, a skein of felonies, a mean streak, and the prospect of a Donald Trump White House variously draconian or dysfunctional—all very real. But then came Walz, in his Plains deadpan, tweeting, as Trump went on about Hannibal Lecter, “Say it with me: Weird.”
Democrats and friendly commentators picked it up. Harris told supporters that Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, were saying things about her that were “just plain weird.” Her campaign team started using it, and, soon, so did Pete Buttigieg and Chuck Schumer. And, of course, it got under Trump’s skin. Echoing his 2016 debate remark to Hillary Clinton, “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet,” Trump said, predictably, “Well, they’re the weird ones. Nobody has ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.” But it was Walz who had captured the Democratic Zeitgeist, and rode it right onto a ticket that has an even shot at winning the White House in November.
Walz—who boasts of his rural roots in a party that skews urban, suburban, and highly educated—has a reputation for being affable and approachable, always likely to talk with his legislative opponents, even as he has pushed a strikingly progressive agenda, from guaranteed abortion rights to universal free meals for schoolchildren. In keeping........