Thirteen ways of looking at Tim Walz

We have a vice presidential nominee

My basic take on the 2024 Veepstakes is that it’s mostly been a proxy for things that matter rather than a thing that itself matters. But as you’ve no doubt heard, it’s going to be Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

There was previously talk of selecting Mark Kelly as a way of signaling toughness on immigration (Kelly broke with the Biden administration over its handling of asylum policy). But if Harris wants to say Biden was too slow to crack down on asylum, she can do that any time she wants to, and much more commonly, the VP choice flip-flops to align their views with the top of the ticket. Ultimately, the position-taking that Harris actually does matters a lot more than what the VP selection “signals” about potential future position-taking.

Walz was the candidate that doctrinaire progressives wanted, but that doesn’t mean Harris needs to run as a doctrinaire progressive. And of course, like any successful politician, Walz contains multitudes, including a permitting reform bill and a single-stair bill. What matters is how the Harris-Walz ticket chooses to run, and to an extent we’ll just have to see. For now, some initial thoughts:

1. If you put the names of all the Democratic Party senators and governors in a hat and picked one at random to be Kamala Harris’ running mate, the odds are good that you would come up with a worse choice than Tim Walz.

2. That is faint praise, but both the selection of J.D. Vance and the selection of Kamala Harris failed to clear that bar, and in crucial respects, Barack Obama’s selection of Joe Biden based on confusion about his future presidential ambitions also failed to clear that bar. So relative to recent standards, I think Harris did a great job.

3. I also concede that if you limit yourself to the pairwise comparison between Walz and Josh Shapiro, there are various valid reasons to prefer Walz.

4. This, I think, has less to do with ideology or issue positioning than with the fact that even though Shapiro’s electoral track record is solid, he hasn’t actually run very many races. Walz has been in a lot of vigorously contested elections and is thoroughly vetted. I think we can all be confident that there is minimal downside to a Tim Walz pick.

5. Making a risk-averse selection when you are ahead makes sense — but I do worry that Harris’ current lead is genuinely razor-thin. The pick seems a little complacent, and I would rather see her running more aggressively than making a defense choice.

6. The big issue to me is that once again, a flawed set of identity considerations seems to have unduly limited Democrats’ options — in 2020, Biden seems to have only considered Black women, while in 2024, Harris seems to have only considered white men.

7. If you want a popular swing-state governor who is not Josh Shapiro, the answer is Gretchen Whitmer. If you want a Minnesota politician with a strong track record of over-performing in the rural midwest, the answer is Amy Klobuchar. If you want a talented political communicator, the answer is Pete Buttigieg (who is a white man, but who seems to have had being gay counted as a strike against him).

8. White men are only forty percent of the population, and we are a smaller share of Democrats than that. Because other characteristics like age, which state you represent (it obviously wasn’t going to be Phil Murphy), and your current political standing also matter, if you limit yourself in arbitrary demographic ways, you end up forcing yourself into narrow corners. It’s a bad habit in both directions.

9. I’m trying to not be too negative about this pick because I really do think it improves on most recent decision-making. Walz is a good politician. As his fans point out, when he held a pinkish rural House seat, he performed well there. He knows how to do politics. That said, by 2022 he was no longer performing well in his old House seat because he’d become a much more conventional liberal (no longer pro-gun for example) as a statewide officer hold in a blue state.

10. My biggest worry about the discourse is that people mash together a few things that are true — Minnesota is in the Midwest, Walz represented a rural district, Walz has a kind of gruff white guy manner — into a false impression that Tim Walz’s gruff white guy manner has made him popular in the rural Midwest despite conventional liberal politics. The actual story is that Minnesota is a better-educated, more urban, and more liberal state than Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania, so a conventional liberal can do well there without over-performing in the rural Midwest.

11. Walz as a House member was quite moderate. He ranked as the seventh “most bipartisan” member of the 114th Congress.

12. The key thing to note about his time as governor is that Democrats won a narrow majority in the Minnesota legislation in the 2022 midterms. Even though Minnesota is a left-of-center state, they hadn’t had a Democratic trifecta in a long time. So there were just tons and tons of standard Democratic bills that had been backed up for years, and Walz signed a flurry of legislation. This didn’t create the People’s Republic of Minnesota or anything, it mostly reflected the fact that the pre-2022 policy status quo in Minnesota was unreasonable conservative relative to the underlying partisanship. But it does mean that Walz as an individual probably “got more done” than Kathy Hochul or any other blue state governor. Conservatives see a bunch of ammunition in this. Progressives are excited. But I think there’s actually very little to it other than happenstance.

13. The upshot is this strikes me as a safe, low-upside pick — a missed opportunity for Harris to either moderate her image or secure gains in a swing state. But while it’s not what I would have done, it’s better than a lot of recent choices.