Harris held the biggest rally of her young campaign in Philadelphia Tuesday night.
Philadelphia — In the end, both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump settled on a similar through-line in their running-mate vetting processes — finding a candidate who may be able to juice working-class voter turnout in the Blue Wall states.
That thinking undoubtedly helped Harris land on Governor Tim Walz, a Nebraska native, former public school teacher, football coach, member of Congress, and National Guard veteran now serving his second term as chief executive of Minnesota. Walz’s interpersonal connection with Harris was reportedly a major deciding factor in the vetting process, as was his knack for holding onto a purple U.S. House seat and his now-viral cable news interview last month that the GOP ticket is “weird.”
Now two weeks into her campaign as the Democrats’ presumptive 2024 nominee, Harris introduced Walz as her running mate at a rally in Philadelphia Tuesday night, telling the cheering crowd that she and Walz are “underdogs” as she continued to contrast her background as a prosecutor with her Republican opponent’s convicted felon status. Before she served as a U.S. Senator and attorney general, she was a district attorney in California, where she “took on perpetrators of all kinds,” “predators, “fraudsters,” and “cheaters.”
“So hear me when I say,” she said to almost deafening cheers from the crowd now familiar with the attack line: “I know Donald Trump’s type!”
Onstage Tuesday evening, Harris leaned into “Coach” Walz’s small-town Midwestern roots and background as military veteran, social-studies teacher, and faculty adviser to his high school’s “Gay Straight Alliance.” She burnished his credentials as a pro-minimum wage, pro-union Democrat who helped pass the Affordable Care Act in Washington and his record as governor of Minnesota, where he signed legislation making breakfast and lunch free in public schools and expanding paid family leave.
In a sop to the kind of working-class rural voters Democrats need to peel from Trump, Harris even bragged about Walz’s prowess on the shooting range, telling the crowd that he was known as the best shot on Capitol Hill, but that he nevertheless believes in “common-sense” gun control.
But his lurch to the left as governor may end up making it easy for Republicans to lampoon the Democratic presidential ticket as “dangerously liberal” and out of touch with middle-of-the-road voters. A few examples from Walz tenure? Signing legislation to make abortion a “fundamental right,” drastically expanding minors’ access to gender-transition services, giving illegal immigrants driver’s licenses, botching his state’s response to the Minneapolis riots of summer 2020, and overseeing his state agencies that have been overrun with fraud.
But Democrats? They’re thrilled. Harris’s decision to tap Walz as her right-hand man on the 2024 campaign trail was widely cheered Tuesday across all factions of the Democratic Party on Capitol Hill, including progressives like Bernie Sanders (I., Vermont) and “Squad” Representatives Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.). The Democratic Socialists of America were also pleased with the selection, writing on X that the selection “has shown the world that DSA and our allies on the left are a force that cannot be ignored.” As National Review‘s Jeff Blehar wrote in these pages earlier on Tuesday, Walz “is as progressive as the party now thinks it can get away with, without startling mainstream voters.”
The post-Joe Biden drop-out enthusiasm was palpable here inside the campaign arena before the ticket took the stage, as an enormous crowd of Harris supporters sporting light-up bracelets cheered her on to pop music, just a couple weeks before the Democratic convention kicks off later this month in Chicago.
Unlike Biden, who made democracy a central theme in his 2024 reelection campaign before dropping out of the race, the word “freedom” echoes through Harris’s every stump speech. “I have a message for Trump and other who want to turn back the clock: We are not going back!” she said, before turning the mic to Walz.
“Thank you for bringing back the joy,” Walz told Harris onstage in a stump speech that burnished his midwestern roots and pro-choice governing record. “There’s a golden rule” in Minnesota, Walz told the crowd: “mind your own damn businesses!”
Harris’s running mate announcement provided a much-needed news cycle shift for the Republican ticket, which has spent recent days struggling to to bat away headlines about J. D. Vance’s 2021 “childless cat ladies” swipe and Trump’s not-so-disciplined assertion last week that Harris — the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants — only recently “turned black.”
Walz spent a huge chunk of his speech hitting the GOP ticket on policy and vibes. Trump “doesn’t know the first thing about service,” “froze in the face of the COVID crisis,” and “drove our economy into the ground.”
He also poked fun at Vance, calling him “creepy” and making fun of him for his Yale Law degree and business background in Silicon Valley. “I gotta tell ya, I can’t wait to debate the guy!” he said, before twisting the knife and adding “that is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up” — a thinly veiled reference to a fabricated viral meme about Vance, the details of which should go unmentioned in these pages. (Harris struggled to control her laughter onstage in response to the couch quip.)
As National Review reported earlier Tuesday, Republican operatives in Trump world are over the moon that Harris didn’t end up selecting as her running mate Governor Josh Shapiro (D., Pa.), the popular pro-Israel and Jewish chief executive of one of the most crucial battleground states of the 2024 cycle. “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,” one source close to the Trump campaign told National Review Tuesday morning.
In the end, some reporting seemed to suggest that the two just didn’t jive well enough to serve on the same ticket. Yes, Shapiro’s pro-Israel politics and support for school vouchers could have proven a liability with base Democratic voters and interest groups. But as one reporter joked to NR before Harris’s Tuesday night event kicked off, there’s also a real possibility Harris was concerned Shapiro might “upstage” her on the campaign trail given his clear presidential ambitions and strong speaking skills on the stump.
Before Walz and Harris addressed the crowd, Shapiro did his best to feign enthusiasm in rapturous onstage remarks that gave Harris a post-VP pick reminder of what could have been. “I love being your governor!” the Keystone State’s chief executive told the crowd in an speech that praised Walz and Harris as close friends and capable of beating the GOP ticket in November. “She is courtroom tough. She has a big heart. And she is battle-tested and ready to go!”