What’s coming is a tougher general-election campaign.
Early reports indicate that Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota governor Tim Walz to join her on the presidential ticket in November. Walz’s selection represents a rare moment in which America’s progressives and Republicans are experiencing the same range of emotions.
If Harris had backed Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro for the role, both the far left and the Republican right would be beset with existential anxiety; progressives over their rejection by their party’s presumptive presidential nominee and Republicans over Harris’s effort to make their jobs that much harder. Both sides of the political spectrum are breathing a sigh of relief this morning, but Republicans have more reason for it: Walz exposes the Democratic Party’s fatal weakness for disorder and lawlessness.
Walz himself called his state’s response to the outbreak of urban violence in the summer of 2020 an “abject failure,” and deservedly so. In one of the after-action reports on the inaction that allowed the protests that erupted after the killing of George Floyd to spiral out of control, Walz was faulted not just for inaction that cast his own state into chaos — he was also attacked for consigning much of the Western world to chaos and riot.
The External Review of the State’s Response to Civil Unrest found that Walz’s immediate concerns as the violence spread were more ideological than practical. He sought to balance his belief that the presence of armed police in minority neighborhoods did more to exacerbate tensions than calm them. He was late to respond to Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey’s request for National Guard units, insisting that the request needed to be “official” and in writing. By the time they were deployed, it was too late. As the External Review observed, “Civil unrest, including violence and destructive behavior, started within 24 hours at the scene and in other parts of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, in the state of Minnesota, around the U.S., and internationally.” Walz’s inaction came with costs.
Today, Democrats face myriad political problems, and their party’s refusal to confront the violent, menacing, utterly unsympathetic demonstrations that have erupted across the country in opposition to Israel’s right to defend itself is just one of them. But Shapiro’s pick would have gone a long way toward neutralizing it. He took a hardline approach to the protests. In limiting the ability of state employees to engage in those demonstrations, criticizing University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill’s tolerance for them, and equating some of the more malevolent protesters with the “KKK,” Shapiro’s refusal to countenance lawlessness would have helped Democrats evade the charge that their party makes anarchy into a virtue when the anarchists are their own. But Kamala Harris passed on this opportunity.
“If it’s not Josh Shapiro,” GOP vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance said in the moments before Harris’s vice-presidential selection became known, “they will have not picked Shapiro frankly out of antisemitism in their own caucus and in their own party.” By failing to confront the protests directly and without adulterating their condemnations with appeals to the false plague of “islamophobia,” Democrats made the box in which they find themselves. The far left brought them to this dance, and they’re gonna stick with them — come what may. And what’s coming is a tougher general-election campaign.