Vance went after the Minnesota governor at a Philadelphia rally over his ties to China and for blurring the line between citizens and non-citizens.
Philadelphia, Pa. —After a rough couple of weeks, J. D. Vance was in need of a reset.
Vance may have gotten just that Tuesday morning when news broke that Vice President Kamala Harris selected 60-year-old Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to serve as her 2024 running mate over his fellow Democratic V.P. finalist Josh Shapiro, the popular 51-year-old Jewish governor of must-win Pennsylvania.
A few hours before Harris and Walz were scheduled to hold their first rally together Tuesday evening here in Philadelphia, Pa., a confident Vance ripped into Kamala Harris’s record and criticized her for not taking questions from the press and limiting her remarks to scripted teleprompter remarks. After handing the podium to several Philadelphians whose family members have been personally affected by drug addiction and crime during the Biden-Harris administration, Vance leaned into his personal backstory growing up in Appalachia as the son of an addict.
“Everywhere she goes, chaos and uncertainty follow,” Vance told an enthusiastic crowd here Tuesday afternoon. “It is families like many of those who stand behind me today who have suffered the most and now, for the past two weeks, Kamala Harris has been saying that she wants a promotion.”
Republican reactions to the Walz pick suggest GOP lawmakers were as puzzled by Harris’s decision as they were thrilled that she didn’t go with Shapiro, who has a much more moderate record in Pennsylvania — a state that is crucial to her path to 270 electoral votes. Walz’s personal rapport with Harris was apparently a major deciding factor in the vetting process, multiple news outlets reported on Tuesday, as did his knack for holding onto a rural House seat in Congress.
But Walz’s record as a chief executive has been extremely liberal. As governor of Minnesota, he’s signed legislation to make abortion legal through nine months in pregnancy, drastically expand minors’ access to gender-transition services, and give illegal immigrants driver’s licenses. And as National Review’s Jim Geraghty reported in these pages last week, Walz’s tenure has been racked with controversy and “large-scale fraud scandals.”
Not to mention his botched response to the violent riots in Minneapolis the summer of 2020. “You think the black business leaders in Minneapolis are grateful, the working class business leaders are grateful that Tim Walz allowed rioters to burn down their businesses?” Vance said here in South Philadelphia Tuesday afternoon.
Asked about the Walz pick ahead of the rally, Vance tied the Minnesota governor’s lax response to the George Floyd riots to the progressive criminal-justice positions Harris staked out during her Democratic primary run in 2020.
“They make an interesting tag team because Tim Walz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, and the few that got caught, Kamala Harris helped bail them out of jail,” Vance told reporters.
Vance also went after the Minnesota governor over his ties to China — Walz taught English in China in his twenties and has praised Chinese infrastructure investment — and called out Walz for blurring the line between citizens and non-citizens.
“She selected Tim Walz, a guy who wants to ship more manufacturing jobs to China, who wants to give illegal aliens driver’s licenses, and he wants to make the fentanyl crisis that we just heard about so much worse because he refuses to do his job,” Vance said.
In a race where momentum seems to keep shifting back and forth between both tickets, Harris’s decision to go with Walz also offered a much-needed news distraction for a GOP ticket that has been dogged by negative headlines in recent days over Vance’s years-old “childless cat ladies” swipe and Trump’s remark last week that Harris has only recently “turned black.”
That list of relieved Republicans includes Vance’s boss, who wrote “THANK YOU!” in a Truth Social post Tuesday in response to the pick. Even before Harris announced her decision, Vance was making the case in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt that sidestepping Shapiro would signal she’s kowtowing to the antisemitic wing of the progressive left that is uneasy with the Pennsylvania governor’s pro-Israel politics.
That line of attack is making the rounds in Trump world. “Hamas Harris” has “bent the knee” to the most antisemitic, anti-Israel voices in the Democratic Party, said one source familiar with the Trump campaign’s line of attack told National Review Tuesday morning. Harris and Walz “walk in lockstep as open-border, anti police, soft on violent crime policies,” this person said. “They cheerlead the Bidenomics that are destroying retirement accounts and making American families’ lives unaffordable. They share a weakness for global policy that has brought every corner of the world chaos and war.”
“Instead of picking the candidate with charisma and a moderate record, Kamala caved to the Hamas caucus and picked a charisma black hole with a long record of supporting extreme liberal policies and a history of being close to China,” added another source close to the Trump campaign. “Walz is Tim Kaine all over again, he adds nothing to the ticket.”
Before Vance kicked off his remarks, voters gathered in the 2300 Arena in South Philadelphia complained to NR about Harris’s record. Rodney Edney, a school bus driver and black voter from Philadelphia, told National Review that “not one person in my family supports Kamala Harris.” He insists there’s a widespread apathy for the new presumptive Democratic nominee in his family and local black community. “They’re either going to vote for Trump or they’re not going to vote at all.” Is he a registered Republican? “Not yet.”
Added native Philadelphian and registered Democrat Sean Heany: “Everyone I know is in a union, we are all Democrats,” and they’re all voting for Trump, he said, citing concerns with inflation, chaos overseas, and drug addiction. That last concern is personal for Heany, who currently has a cousin in rehab. “People are dying in our streets that come from good families.”