The Minnesota governor may have been good in theory, but in practice, he represents a lost opportunity for the Democratic ticket.
The Minnesota governor may have been good in theory, but in practice, he represents a lost opportunity for the Democratic ticket.
Y ou know you do it.
As soon as someone new follows you on a social-media platform, you start clicking on that person’s minuscule profile picture to enlarge it. At first, the person is a barely perceptible blob — maybe you can make out the sex or hair color — but as you keep clicking, facial features come into focus. Occasionally, it’s not even a real person but a picture from a movie or a Russian bot.
Oftentimes, if you initially thought your new contact was good-looking, enlargement ruins the dream. (In college, my friends referred to these people as “good from afar, but far from good.”)
Similarly, political campaigns have only a blurry vision of the type of voter they attract. Modern tools can help them micro-target waiters or dentists or falconers or whomever, but that takes time, money, and volunteers to pull off.
That doesn’t, however, keep political pundits from waxing rhapsodic about whole groups of voters about which they literally know nothing. For instance, in the past few days, we have heard East Coast–based talking heads drone on and on about how newly minted vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz will resonate with “Midwestern voters” because of his background growing up on a farm, his time as a football coach, and his past employment as a schoolteacher.
But what is a “Midwestern voter”? And what does this barely perceptible blob want?
Undoubtedly, when the political cognoscenti discuss such a voter, they are thinking of a working-class white male. Maybe he’s an auto mechanic, maybe he works on a farm. He likes sports, maybe even played a little ball in high school. He doesn’t have student loans because he either never went to college or he went to a tech school that didn’t break the bank. He doesn’t follow politics a lot, but he likes the way Donald Trump “tells it like it is.”
Reaching this kind of voter is so important, presidential candidates bet their entire campaigns on picking a running mate who doesn’t need DuoLingo to be able to talk to these people. They crave someone who speaks to “rural” voters in their rudimentary language. And this is why the current Minnesota governor is on the Democratic ticket.
But, of course, this perception of Rust Belt voters is largely nonsense. Take one of the big prizes of the 2024 election, Wisconsin — my home state. It is a state with plenty of these stereotypical voters, but they make up only a small slice of the voter cake. Within a couple hours’ drive, you can visit the crunchy, educated progressives in Madison, the blue-collar liberals and African-American and Hispanic communities in Milwaukee, the conservative soccer moms in the counties around Milwaukee, the religious conservatives around Green Bay, the medical professionals in Marshfield, the student activists in places like Eau Claire and LaCrosse, and the farmers in the southwest corner of the state.
This wildly diverse amalgam of voters causes the state to lurch back and forth politically. If it were a state full of white, working-class men, would Republicans have lost every presidential election between 1984 and 2016? Would Barack Obama have smoked John McCain by 14 percentage points in 2008, then drubbed Mitt Romney by seven points in 2012? (And that was with Wisconsin native son Paul Ryan on the Republican ticket.)
Would this utopia for Caucasian plumbers and auto mechanics have elected the first lesbian U.S. senator in American history back in 2012? That year, Representative Tammy Baldwin actually beat Tommy Thompson, perhaps the most popular politician ever to hold office in the state. (In a sign of the state of modern politics, the mild-mannered Baldwin is now running an ad featuring a farmer who says her opponent “pisses me off” and wonders “what the hell’s wrong with this guy.” The Trumpification of both parties continues apace.)
So what does Tim Walz offer a diverse state that just happens to be next to his own? Virtually nothing.
For one, vice-presidential candidates rarely make any difference, especially ones stapled onto a ticket with three months left to go before the election. A big chunk of Wisconsin residents probably think former wrestler and current nutball Jesse Ventura is still Minnesota’s governor. (It doesn’t help that Walz is a big Vikings fan, which most Green Bay Packers fans see as an indication of questionable judgment and suspect morality.)
But it also makes no sense that Harris would add Walz to her ticket to drag it even further to the left. Remember, Wisconsin is a 50–50 state politically, and rather than moving to the center, Harris picked a governor who may be even more progressive than she is. Everyone wondered whether Harris was going to “balance” her ticket, and she certainly did that: Now socialists and progressives live together in harmony on the Democratic ticket, while moderates have been cast adrift.
And when it comes to governing, Walz is extreme. The libertarian Cato Institute (disclosure: my other employer) gave Walz a grade of F on its Governors’ Report Card, pointing out Walz’s nearly insatiable desire for more taxing and spending. For instance, when he took office, he proposed nearly $2 billion more in spending and $1.6 billion more in taxes, with the remainder being made up by an existing budget surplus. Fortunately, year after year, the Minnesota legislature has had the discipline to rein in Walz’s huge proposed tax increases.
The “aw, shucks” Midwestern persona is typically linked to traditional values, but Walz has a habit of siding with recent, fashionable social movements. He signed a bill making Minnesota a “sanctuary state” for transgender youth who considered themselves “refugees,” guaranteeing them access to “gender transition” surgery if they travel from another state for the procedure. Polling shows the public is still uneasy with the idea of children undergoing permanently altering sex-reassignment surgery. In a recent YouGov survey, the public opposed the use of puberty blockers in youth by a two-to-one margin.
Further, there is this idea among coastal political observers that somehow Democrats are going to ride the abortion issue to the presidency. In 2023, Walz signed a bill guaranteeing a right to an abortion all the way through the ninth month; the chattering classes think this is where Wisconsin is politically, citing a state supreme court election from 2023 in which a liberal judge beat a conservative former justice after effectively promising to overturn the state’s abortion ban.
But in reality, abortion had almost nothing to do with that election — the same conservative former justice had run before Roe v. Wade was overturned and lost by an identical margin. Republican senator Ron Johnson was reelected in 2022, and Trump has led in the polls in Wisconsin all year. Politics in Wisconsin effectively look exactly as they did before Roe was nixed.
Oh, and there’s the matter of Walz sitting on his hands while Minneapolis burned during the George Floyd riots in 2020. Wisconsin had its own urban violence in Kenosha following the shooting of Jacob Blake that same year, and it seems unlikely that voters are going to take kindly to a governor who dithered while lawlessness took over.
Nonetheless, Democrats are counting on Walz’s “folksiness” to overcome his record as governor. But even that seems to be a chimera. In his introduction speech on Tuesday, Walz attacked J. D. Vance, which is a normal thing to do; but he did so by saying he would be willing to debate the senator if he’ll “get off the couch” — a lame reference to a fake story that Vance had received some sectional healing from a piece of furniture. (It was far funnier when people on the internet began calling Vance “Vladimir Futon.”)
Walz further tried to paint Vance as a fraud for attending an Ivy League school. “Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, J. D. studied at Yale,” said Walz, forgetting that Vance actually graduated from Ohio State University, then joined the military, before attending Yale Law School. There are plenty of problems with Vance, but his personal story is nothing but inspirational (which is why his recent voyage to the more deranged corners of the Republican Party is so disappointing).
Walz also said Vance turned his back on the Rust Belt, where he grew up, by writing a book “trashing that community” after he left. But this is a completely false representation of Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy. If anything, the book is an extremely sympathetic portrayal of people stuck in a cycle of drugs and violence. Walz may be playing the role of salt-of-the-earth Midwesterner, but this is Ivy League–level dishonesty.
Certainly Democrats are hoping Walz’s stump hackery covers for his own ideological extremism. A video quickly surfaced of Walz defending heavy-handed government action, saying “one man’s socialism is another man’s neighborliness.”
This isn’t folksiness — this is dark stuff. In fact, neighborliness, which involves people minding their own business so others can live free — and sharing a friendly “Good morning!” or a cup of sugar or feeding the fish while you’re away — is the exact opposite of socialism, which imposes thoughts and actions on others. Walz thinks they are two sides of the same coin. In fact, they are different coins altogether.
How will all this play in Wisconsin and Michigan? Probably not well. Walz doesn’t give Kamala Harris anything she didn’t already have. In fact, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki immediately burst the Democrats’ bubble when he pointed out Walz’s weakness among rural voters in his own state. As it turns out, Walz loses rural voters at a rate similar to that of both Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton during their presidential campaigns.
For the next three months, Democrats will be trying to hug “working-class” voters like Pepé Le Pew as those voters try to wriggle away from them. Tim Walz may have been good in theory, but in practice, he represents a lost opportunity. Put another way, the Minnesota governor may have been good from afar, but he is certainly far from good.