Democrats are resigned to the fact that the only victory available to them is a narrow one.
The practiced political art of false bravado is on full display today as Kamala Harris’s boosters in Democratic politics and the press insist on the boldness of the vice president’s choice of a running mate. But the elevation of Minnesota governor Tim Walz to the presidential ticket is a statement more about the Harris campaign’s weakness than about its strengths.
Take, for example, what Democratic political professionals believe Walz brings to the table. “He’s a firewall candidate,” one Democratic strategist told Politico. “The one constituency that was hanging a little tougher with Biden was older, white and blue-collar voters in those blue wall states,” another agreed. “I think that’s the potential Walz has to bring those votes to the table.”
In other words, the Harris campaign assumes that Walz has prohibitive appeal in the three crucial Rust Belt states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — that the Democratic presidential nominee has lost precisely once this century. The campaign’s sense that Walz helps shore up the bulwarks in the Democratic Party’s last line of defense is an admission that the party believes the 2024 race is still a base election. If there is a grand reordering of the political landscape in store, Republicans will be its engineers. Democrats are resigned to the fact that the only victory available to them is a narrow one — the same thinking that prevailed when Biden was the party’s likely nominee.
Beyond Walz’s presumed capacity to shore up the party’s faltering lines in the Midwest, it is also believed that the governor’s popularity among progressives in positions of authority mollifies the more rabid far-left elements in the streets. As Nate Silver wrote, the value proposition here was to “avoid news cycles about a disappointed left and Democrats’ internal squabbling over the War in Gaza.”
This tacitly concedes the GOP’s claim that Democrats are unduly beholden to a radical faction within the party that is overrepresented in the press, on college campuses, and in online forums. This is terrain Republicans are eager to attack. Walz’s selection may foreclose on taking the campaign to the GOP’s turf, forcing them to commit finite resources to what should be safe states and triangulating their issues in the effort to pick off erstwhile Republican voters at the margins.
In much the same way Donald Trump’s running mate doubled down on the qualities already represented in Trump, Harris’s veep pick suggests that her campaign will not seek to remake the electoral map. As such, it is still playing the same defense Joe Biden spent much of the year playing until it became obvious to all that he had already lost.