Today Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris announced that she had selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. The decision was a surprise, as many observers had considered Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro to be the favourite throughout her search process. However, picking Walz may give Democrats a chance to broaden their appeal with voters they’ve been losing for a long time.
Walz’s biography offers some hints of this possibility. His presence makes this the second Democratic ticket in a row to feature a candidate who did not attend an Ivy League school. He is also notably the first Democrat on a presidential ticket since Jimmy Carter not to have gone to law school. Before entering politics, he was a schoolteacher and high-school football coach, and served in the Army National Guard.
Walz also spent six terms in Congress representing the state’s First Congressional District, a large rural area whose population is fairly working-class and which grew more Republican-leaning during his tenure. He proved to be popular there, outrunning the Democratic presidential nominees in three straight elections, including narrowly winning the district while Hillary Clinton lost it by 16 points.
Moreover, throughout his career Walz has enjoyed the backing of organised labour and championed economically populist policies to benefit workers, including expanded sick leave, bans on non-compete clauses, and protections against wage theft. He also signed $2.6 billion to fund infrastructure projects that required union labour and removed the college degree requirement for the vast majority of state jobs, giving non-college-educated residents a path toward upward economic mobility.
On the whole, this experience paints a picture of the type of candidate who might be able to help Harris expand her appeal with key constituencies that Democrats have been losing for some time: namely, the white working class.
But Walz carries some downsides as well. Unlike Shapiro, he does not hail from a swing state — a tipping-point state, at that — so his presence doesn’t offer Harris the immediate chance to increase her odds of winning the Electoral College. And even in his run for governor in 2018, Walz did not demonstrate much ability to bounce back in areas of the state that had drifted away from Democrats during Obama’s presidency, including in his old district. His inability to outpace even Joe Biden in many of these areas stands in contrast to Shapiro, who ran ahead of the President all across Pennsylvania, often by double digits.
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