Does the Tim Walz Pick Matter?

When Donald Trump picked JD Vance as his running mate, he whiffed. Overconfident in victory, he doubled down on the MAGA base. Has Kamala Harris now made the same mistake in choosing the sixty-year-old Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a hero to the progressive wing of the Democratic party who popularized the term “weird” to describe Trump and co.?

Pundits such as Jonathan Chait are fretting that Harris missed an opportunity to move to the center. “What the selection does,” he wrote, “is forfeit her best opportunity to send a message that she is a moderate.” But there are good reasons to suspect that Walz, whose hard-hitting, no-nonsense, straight-talking speaking style has turned him into a social media sensation, might be able to compensate for some of Harris’ weaknesses in attracting voters in the Midwest.

Walz, who was born in 1964, grew up in Nebraska. After moving to Minnesota in the 1990s, he taught social studies at Mankato West High School and coached the football team, which won several championships. Walz has served in the National Guard for several decades and went on to push for veterans’ benefits. He has also served multiple terms in Congress, where he voted against intervening in Syria in 2013. He has also called for a “working” ceasefire in the Gaza war and should be able to bring many of those who voted “uncommitted” back into the Democratic fold. Choosing Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, by contrast, would have ensured that Harris had inflamed the disputes among Democrats surrounding Israel and the Gaza war.

Walz can speak effectively about the social issues that are proving to be an albatross around the Trump campaign’s neck—specifically, the issue of IVF. As Vance’s unbridled statements about women are being unearthed on what seems like almost a daily basis, Walz will surely focus on his own family’s experiences. He and his wife, Gwen, tried to have a child for seven years before fertility treatments finally succeeded. “It’s not by chance that we named our daughter Hope,” Walz has said. Vance voted against a Senate bill to protect IVF, prompting Walz to declare on MSNBC, “I don’t need him to tell me about my family. I don’t need him to tell me about my wife’s healthcare and her reproductive rights.” The only thing he and Vance apparently have in common is a taste for Diet Mountain Dew. Perhaps the loser of the election can send the winner a case of it.

No doubt Walz will be pummeled for the rioting that took place in May 2020 in the Twin Cities after the murder of George Floyd. The Trump campaign is licking its chops at the thought of depicting Harris and Walz as radicals who are unfit, if not incapable, of governing America. The rap on Walz is that when the Black Lives Matter riots took place, he froze, failing to send in the National Guard in a timely fashion to end the looting and violence. Walz needs to provide a clear and compelling account of why he waited three days to dispatch the National Guard—the best way to do that is probably by highlighting his own service in it. If he debates JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, this episode is sure to be a major line of attack.

Still, even as Walz and Vance joust, it’s reasonable to wonder whether any of it will really matter. Speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week, Trump himself responded to a question about Vance by observing, “Historically, the vice-president—in terms of the election—does not have any impact. I mean, virtually no impact.” It’s not clear that it will be any different in 2024 than in the past.

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. In 2008, his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times. He is the author of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.

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