Democrats and the media initially fawned over the selection of Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ running mate for his folksy appeal, but rural America decisively rejected the Democrat ticket on Tuesday night anyways.
Walz often sported casual clothes or a camouflage baseball cap on the campaign trail, presenting himself as a down-to-earth former coach seemingly as interested in hunting and football as in governing. Harris and Walz evidently fell flat with rural Americans on Tuesday night, losing the popular vote and every single swing state, hemorrhaging support from formerly-reliable Democratic voting blocs and leaving some Democrats second-guessing the decision to pass on popular Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania as Harris’ running mate.
No vice presidential nominee was going to save Harris from defeat, according to Maryland-based Democratic strategist Len Foxwell, but the selection of Walz and the campaign’s depiction of him to voters were nevertheless bad decisions, he explained to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“I don’t believe that any vice presidential candidate could have salvaged Kamala Harris’s candidacy, period,” said Foxwell. “That said, I do think that Tim Walz’s vice presidential candidacy represents yet another botched opportunity by the Harris campaign … They fixated on his background as an assistant football coach, and began to call him coach, as opposed to what he really was, which is a former congressman and successful governor. And then at the 11th hour, they tried to put him in canned and staged rural settings that made him look both uncomfortable and inauthentic.”
In one such “canned” moment, Walz went on a pheasant hunt in Minnesota in early October, wearing hunting gear and carrying a gun to highlight his familiarity with rural America. However, Walz struggled to load his firearm and said aloud that its kick hurts his shoulder.
That the “brain trust” of the Harris campaign decided to pitch Walz to the electorate as something of a “punchline” was a strategic error, Foxwell explained.
“The manner in which he was handled reflects just how consumed this candidacy and how consumed our party is with identity politics,” said Foxwell. “And quite candidly, I think the man deserved better.”
President-elect Donald Trump over-performed with rural voters in the 2024 race, and the soon-to-be 47th president also managed to flip Walz’s home county in Minnesota on Tuesday. Male voters also showed out in force to back Trump, supporting the president by a ten-point margin, according to CNN exit polls.
Harris reportedly picked Walz in part because his bio would “play well in the industrial ‘Blue Wall’ states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,” Politico reported in early August; the Harris-Walz ticket went on to lose all three states. Politico also reported at the time that many congressional Democrats representing rural, competitive districts viewed Walz as someone who could effectively reach voters in “flyover country” because of his own past experience representing such an area in the House.
However, Walz endorsed or enacted a bevy of radical left-wing policies in his capacity as Minnesota’s governor and as a vice presidential candidate, including greenlighting the state to take custody of children from parents who oppose sex-change surgeries and saying the Electoral College “needs to go.” Billionaire left-wing megadonor Alex Soros also hosted Walz for a visit in Soros’ swanky Manhattan home in September.
Adolph Mongo, a Democratic strategist in Michigan, was sharply critical of the Walz pick, telling the DCNF that there is “no question” that Shapiro or Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper were better options.
“I look at Pennsylvania and say, ‘Shit, why would I go get the governor of Minnesota? No, I don’t think so. Why would I get the Governor of Iowa? No, I don’t think so,’” Mongo told the DCNF. “Trump went and got this guy out of Ohio, right smack in the middle of the blue wall, right? And people say, ‘Oh, that was not a good move.’ Yeah, he fooled everybody. That was a good move on his part. So getting back to the original question, yeah, it was a bad pick.”
Pennsylvania was widely considered to be the most important swing state in the 2024 presidential race, and Trump ultimately won it by about 143,000 votes. Numerous polls indicated that Shapiro was the most popular politician in Pennsylvania as of August, even being favorable in the eyes of some Republicans in the state, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
“It doesn’t take a genius. I could’ve made a good pick for her,” said Mongo.
However, not all Democrats are as sour on Walz as Foxwell and Mongo.
Dheeraj Chand, a Democratic data strategist who has done previous polling work but did not work on the 2024 race, believes that Harris’ loss is “not a question of Walz or Shapiro,” but instead principally the result of having only about 100 days to run a full presidential campaign.
“As much as Trump and Vance want to run as the party of ‘normies,’ they’re both Ivy League graduates who are rich with other people’s money. Trump inherited it. Vance had a job working for a billionaire, they’re rich on other people’s money,” Chand told the DCNF. “Kamala Harris is the daughter of an immigrant who worked at a university and went to a public law school. Tim Walz is very famously Tim Walz, high school coach. The brand they were trying to build, the identity they were trying to build was middle-class, normal people up against Ivy Leaguers. And it almost worked, but it didn’t.”
The vice presidential choice is not the only Harris campaign decision that is drawing renewed scrutiny following her lopsided defeat. Harris dodged interviews for about the first month of her candidacy, repeatedly declined to distance herself from President Joe Biden’s record and flip-flopped on a host of crucial policy positions she espoused during her first run for the presidency.
Another Democratic strategist echoed Chand’s contention that picking Walz was not what did in the Harris campaign.
“I don’t think it was one thing in the Midwest. I think there’s something deeper going on, and we have to really see something other than exit polls to really be able to suss out,” the strategist told the DCNF. “But I don’t think it’s Tim Walz. And I don’t think Shapiro would have made a difference, because she lost Michigan as well. So, it wasn’t in Michigan and Wisconsin. So as far as I can tell, it was not Tim Walz’s fault.”
Featured Image Credit: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on stage at the Democratic National ConventionMinnesota Gov. Tim Walz on stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Aug. 21, 2024._ in Chicago, Aug. 21, 2024.
