National Review senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty, on today’s edition of The Editors, said Kamala Harris’s pick of Minnesota governor Tim Walz for VP “was smart.”
“I think it balances the ticket as far as the personas involved,” Dougherty said. “I think political personas matter. . . . He’s very progressive, but he doesn’t come off as an ivory-tower species, I don’t think. He comes across as very normal, relatable. I think this shows that they actually take J. D. Vance seriously, even though they’re pretending to have destroyed him already.”
Walz, Dougherty noted, isn’t a “coastal elite” and comes from a small-town background. “He has the small-town thing,” and “he ran on making Minnesota the best place to raise children. And . . . he made permanent the expanded child tax credit that people had under Covid, and he didn’t put a cap on it. So if you have ten children, you can get all of that tax credit.”
When it comes to pitting him against Vance, Dougherty thinks Democrats “want to push J. D. Vance into being just on the culture war . . . just talking about books in libraries and abortion. They’re going to accuse him of wanting to ban birth control and stuff like that.”
“Walz,” Dougherty said, “is experienced in winning in . . . a deep red district. I think he’s sensitive to how Republicans hear things. So I think he’s a tough matchup for J. D.”
“I don’t know if he totally changes the map in any serious way, but I think he’s good. He’s a good balance for Kamala.”
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