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On that draft podcast, I was told, don't worry, you're going to get your draft pick. Nobody is going to want to pick Tim Walsh.
Hello and welcome to this vice presidential reaction edition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. I'm Galen Druk and Vice President Harris just announced Tuesday morning that she's chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. A choice that, like so much of what has happened in politics this summer, was not on anyone's radar until it was.
Walls is a second term governor, before which he represented Minnesota's first congressional district for 12 years in Congress. He was previously in the Army National Guard and was a social studies teacher and a football coach. We'll get into a bit more of who he is, both in terms of biography and ideology. And we're also going to talk about why Harris made this choice and how it shapes the race or her messaging, if at
And here with me to do all of that is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hello, Jeffrey. Hey, Galen. Seeing you again so soon. So soon. And also with us is politics reporter Brittany Shepard. Brittany, welcome and take a victory lap for us. Listen, it feels correct to be right. So I just want to stand on that. I'd like to figure out what the Midwestern nice version is for I told you so.
So two things. As someone who's paid his dues in the Midwest, I think I might say... It's not like bless y'all's heart or something like that. It's too Southern. I think it might be...
Something more along the lines of all for funny, which means, oh, my God, isn't that so funny? As if to say, oh, isn't it so funny that I just happened to be right? And all for funny is particularly like Minnesotan, Wisconsin. Like, it's not the whole Midwest. Maybe the Dakotas a little bit. But yeah, all for funny. All for funny. All for funny that Walls was chosen.
Number two, this got caught from the podcast when we did the draft, but I did end up agreeing with you that he brings some of the Tammy Baldwin of it all, which is he checks some boxes for the progressives, but also he has some cross appeal in the same way that Tammy Baldwin picks up voters who would not vote for Biden or probably would not vote for Harris, but would vote.
send her back to the Senate. So I think there's like, there's some overlap there. But most importantly, you were right. That's my favorite three-word sentence in the English language. Now we have to get Nathaniel on to do the same thing, but we can settle that next podcast. Okay. But more importantly, why were you right? I think it's
I think it taps into what you were just saying that a pick for Walls is seen as a base multiplier and an expander, right? He can speak to progressives who are skeptical, those progressives who called Kamala a cop. If you remember those Coppola memes that were going everywhere, both last cycle and this cycle. But he also appeals to the kind of Democrat or independent
who also just might be uncomfortable for whatever their reason with a woman, with a non-white person on top of the ticket. He's a veteran. He owns a gun. He had an A NRA rating. And for people who that scares, after that Vegas shooting, he took all of his money from the NRA and donated it to charity. You know, he kind of answers, feeds the left and to the right and is seen a little bit, at least from Harris's camp, as a balance, as a ticket completer for those who are skittish on all sides.
His last tweet from his personal non-governor official account before any of the stuff to do with vice president was a picture of wild turkeys in his backyard and him saying, for the past few years, I've not seen a turkey while hunting. Today, they mock me. So he's an interesting pick. Minnesota, Midwest, he's a guy who hunts, apparently. But at the same time, he also has a very progressive record as governor of Minnesota.
I wonder if Walls sort of fit the cleanest definition for Harris of do no harm, which is like the traditional first rule of picking a VP. Pick somebody who's not going to upset a significant portion of your party's coalition, which potentially Shapiro had issues because of the divides within the Democratic Party over the conflict in Gaza and Israel. Yeah.
And so if she had picked Shapiro, maybe that would have maybe relitigated that more and caused issues on her left flank just as she's sort of re-energizing the Democratic Party and seemingly pulling people in. In that sense, maybe Wall's best fit. He's from an important part of the country politically. No, he's not from Wisconsin or Michigan, but he's from not far away in Minnesota.
Look, I think for Democrats with any talk about like voters, white voters without a four year college degree, it's not so much about picking somebody who can make inroads. It's about having a ticket that's not going to lose more ground. So I think for them that maybe Walls sort of speaks to that, like he can cover a lot of different different angles. Somebody said on this podcast within the past couple of months that this is a
a vibes election. I don't know that I'm fully convinced of that. I do think that the policy matters, and I think that on policy, Harris has a lot of disadvantages compared to Trump. I mean, you see it in the polling, just Trump is more trusted on a whole host of things ranging from the economy to immigration to foreign policy.
But on the vibes, it seems like there is some upshot for Harris. And this seems like it may not balance the policy, but it balances the vibes. So you have a Bay Area prosecutor who's a woman of color at the top of the ticket and always sort of very professional looking, buttoned up, etc.
et cetera. She picks somebody whose video touting the Harris campaign is him in his backyard with a gray t-shirt on looking disheveled in the same place that he had just taken a picture of like turkeys walking across his lawn. And he, in the bio that they sent out,
of Wall's, the Harris campaign. It's all, you know, he owns a gun. He was in the Army National Guard. He was a social studies teacher, a football coach, et cetera, et cetera. They're not saying what the progressives are reading into.
He enacted policies to secure abortion protections, provide free meals for school children, allow recreational marijuana, and set renewable energy goals. That was the New York Times' subtitle or deck on their piece about his issue position. So yeah, I mean, he has like a pretty progressive record. They're not saying Tim Walz, who approved giving driver's license to immigrants who are in the country illegally, for example. They're trying to lean into the vibes of...
Oh, he's an everyman, whatever. And he did represent a conservative district in Minnesota for a long time. And so you could kind of slice it a couple different ways. But on policy, I don't know. It's complicated because then it gets into what's what's left right in an environment where populism seems to be the ascendant pitch for both parties. And on populism, he seems to check boxes that Harris can't.
And on that vibes thing, I do want to like take stock here that at one point, the Democratic Party really loved Joe Biden, right? It wasn't like they hated him the other this entire time. And they just kind of they only saw him as the only option. Like you remember last cycle, there were a lot of candidates on the floor. Once South Carolina came, it changed the game. That Grandpa Joe quality is kind of transferred to Tim Walz in an Uncle Tim as opposed to Grandpa Joe. He
He can tap into that, well, Joe Biden is really good on the rope line. He'll take your phone number. He'll call you. Tim Walz occupies that lane. If you're thinking very cynically, just politically, like central casting, I need to get somebody who taps into that same energy where people liked Joe Biden. They saw him as a cipher for whatever. They felt comfortable around him. They think that he was somebody who wasn't so pedigreed, right? Walz occupies that. Yeah, and to that point, he's going to be the first—
Democrat on a Democratic presidential ticket who doesn't have a law degree since Jimmy Carter, who was a U.S. Naval Academy grad. So you're going back to 1980 when he was running for reelection. So, yeah. So Walls is kind of – he's different.
And maybe to your point, continuing the trend, well, that just started last cycle for Democrats of having no Ivy League education on the ballot, whereas, interestingly enough, both Trump and Vance have Ivy League degrees. Probably Walls helps Harris challenge Democrats.
the Trump-Vance ticket on populism, because as much as Harris tried to sort of shape her positions in 2019, 2020 to more align with like a Sanders vision of the Democratic Party, she is not a populist, or at least didn't have a history before then of being a populist.
And Walls does. And so maybe that's where the vibes balancing comes, even if the policy doesn't. Sorry, I'm laughing at a tweet. I can't confirm this, but I wish I could. But someone was like, if I heard correctly on TV, Amy Klobuchar just said her mother-in-law gave the Walls family a chicken parmesan bake when their son was born. Absolutely violent levels of Midwestern. We can cut that, but I just thought that was amazing. Well, that dovetails perfectly for my populism comment. Yeah.
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What time is it?
It's harvest time. Join Sarah Jessica Parker in the ultimate challenge of Solitaire Grand Harvest. Experience the thrill of strategic play as you navigate through exciting levels and reap the rewards of your skills. Are you prepared to crack the cards and harvest your way to victory? Okay, now let's crack the cards. Enjoy a head start with 10,000 free coins. Download Solitaire Grand Harvest now and harvest the rewards. It's free, available for download on Google Play and the App Store.
What are we seeing from Republicans at this point about the now completed Democratic ticket? Well, Republicans are saying what Democrats are not. They're saying that he's massively progressive. They are emphasizing his record. Ben Shapiro on X is saying that Walls is a, quote, massive gift.
to Republicans. They're calling him a radical leftist from a non-swing state. Nikki Haley saying that Democrats' picking walls is doubling down on the progressive movement, quote, a win for open borders, socialism and Iran. That's from Nikki Haley. Vivek Ramaswamy saying it's also a massive gift. I think you're going to hear this refrain again and again and again, you know, from Trump himself. I'm sure he'll be, you know, making similar comments. We're seeing it from the MAGA war rooms.
They're going to try to paint him not just as progressive, but more left than Harris, that he is base expanding in a way that will isolate folks in the Sun Belt and the Rust Belt. And I'll be curious to see how J.D. Vance kind of takes walls on himself. Yeah, to give you a taste of that from...
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. His statement on The Choice this morning was, "Under Vice President Kamala Harris's failed leadership, the southern border has been opened wide, life is unaffordable for working families, and wars have erupted around the world due to America's weakness on the world stage. As America's most liberal senator, she sought to ban fracking, abolish ICE, pass the Green New Deal, provide benefits for illegal immigrants, and slash funding for police departments."
I look forward to highlighting the vast differences, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, yeah, when you lean into the policy, that's what you get. When you lean into the vibes, you get chicken parm, pheasant hunting, T-shirts on Maine as governor of Minnesota and the likes. And we will find out, I guess, whether this is a vibes election or a policy election. Jeffrey, what do we know, empirically speaking, about Walz's record?
It was interesting. So Walls has this progressive record for the most part as governor in Minnesota. If you know anything about sort of the legislative elections in Minnesota, like the state level, things have been very narrow in terms of Democrats voting.
sort of holding on to power and having a trifecta there to pass things. And he has signed off on a lot of legislation that has been passed in this narrow, competitive state Senate in particular. So he has a progressive record as a governor, and you're seeing Republicans pointing to some of that stuff. We're also seeing Republicans pointing to
his time as governor during sort of the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, pointing to saying like there was riots and trying to connect disorder to walls. And I think sort of the idea that, look, Trump and Vance represent law and order and a Harris walls ticket just, you know, once again represents disorder. Well, what they were saying was he didn't call in the National Guard soon enough once there were riots in the Twin Cities and all
And also connecting that to Harris and saying that she supports these bail funds for people who are involved in some of the lawlessness. Right. So you have this part of him as governor. But it's true when he was in the House, he had a pretty moderate voting record. He represented a district that George W. Bush carried by four points in both 2000 and 2004 votes.
So it was a slightly red-leaning seat that Walls won and narrowly held onto for a while until he ran for governor in 2018. To your point about sort of vibes versus policy, he has had some appeal on redder-leaning turf, but at the same time does have, as governor, as a statewide executive, a record that would seemingly speak more to progressives. So again, if you're thinking about maybe Harris hoping that she can sort of get –
A wide appeal from her VP pick, Walls might fit that. We'll have to see how these attacks Republicans are making, sort of. Do they stick? Do they not stick? Electorally speaking, has he actually been able to overperform with the kinds of non-college educated white voters that Democrats have bled in the blue wall states? Again, if you look back at his House career, but that was a little bit ago now, I think the answer would be yes.
at least in the sense that he was winning in a red-leading seat that was very white. In his 2018 governor's performance, granted it was a blue wave midterm, he did perform somewhat better in counties that had a larger population of white voters without a four-year college degree.
He slid a bit in his 2022 reelection bid, but granted that was actually a more Republican-leaning cycle even if it ended up not being as Republican-leaning as Republicans had hoped obviously. But he won by about eight points statewide versus 12 in 2018, and you saw him lose some ground in places that –
I think Democrats would hope to have held on to more and even stronger in the Twin Cities, part of sort of the urban areas and denser suburban areas moving Democratic and more rural areas moving more Republican. So again, this is sort of the point that I don't think walls can absolutely stem the tide on just larger things that are happening. But does he have at least a little bit of appeal in a way to sort of keep Democrats from losing more ground? Yeah.
And I do want to interrupt, guys. Biden's statement on walls just came in about a couple of minutes ago. And I think this will be a pretty strong preview of how Harris might be framing why she picked walls when they have their event later today in Philly. Can I just read a little bit?
Please do. This is from Biden's Twitter. He writes, quote, I've known Tim Walz for nearly two decades, first during his time in Congress and as governor. A husband and father. He's been a school teacher and a high school football coach. That nod to that bio you were talking about, Galen Moore, from Biden's statement here.
He served for 24 years in the Army National Guard and became the highest-ranking enlisted soldier to ever serve in Congress. As governor, he has been a strong, principled, and effective leader, and this is his pitch for the ticket. The Harris-Walls ticket will be a powerful voice for working people and America's great middle class.
They'll be the strongest defenders of our personal freedoms and our democracy, and they will ensure that America continues to lead the world and play its role as the indispensable nation, a time for all Democrats and indeed all Americans committed to freedom, democracy, and American leadership in the world to rally behind this ticket.
What's interesting about that statement to me, and I'm curious what you guys think, is what he doesn't talk about, you know, talking about immigration, which is a huge vulnerability, the economy, and really emphasizing that Walls is an everyman and will defend the middle class as their economic argument. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think we've seen this even in some of the advertisements I've seen from pro-Harris, like super PACs on TV recently. It's sort of like, you know, opens what they're saying, like, I will, you know, fight for working families, the middle class.
The challenge for Democrats, of course, has been that the current attitudes about the economy are fairly negative, even if the top line numbers have not always seemed bad. In fact, at times have seemed decent to good. But nonetheless, I think it's going to be one of the great challenges for the Harris campaign and now the Harris-Walls campaign to make progress.
the case that they can be strong stewards of the economy. Because as Galen has said, Trump does have a bit of an advantage on some of the key issues that we know are most on voters' minds, whether it's the economy, immigration. Even if immigration tends to be one that Republicans are much more likely to cite as a major issue, nonetheless, there are a lot of independents who are worried about it.
and even some Democrats. You're hearing this message of like freedom, which we've seen really the Harris campaign, you know, sort of embraces one of their main pitches. And that, I guess, puts, you know, things like abortion and democracy more forward. But it's still it still speaks to like the challenge that they're going to have because of issues like the economy in particular. I think we should close on an important note as well, which is, does this matter? Yeah.
It's hard. I mean, these questions are always hard to answer because I think electorally, and you guys have the numbers, I think the sense is that the VP pick doesn't really move the needle tremendously when it comes to
But I think it matters. And if we want to talk about vibes, keeping the good vibes going on the Democratic side, there seems to be quite a love affair around Harris right now. And they cannot keep that ball in the air for 100 days. It's just unsustainable. Things are going to be happening. She still has to do her job as vice president. Anything that happens, she has to do it.
into the administration can make that love notch turned down. Tim Walz, it's a whole new breath of a fresh new cycle. People are being introduced to him for the first time. Many reporters didn't even really know who he was a couple of weeks ago. Now the American populace gets to learn about him. I'm sure you're gonna be seeing tons of videos from influencers. I'm scrolling TikTok this morning, not on company time, I'm sure.
Every like third video was about Democrats saying he needs to she needs to pick walls. She needs to pick walls. Right. So now those people are satisfied not to over intellectualize the Internet part of this election. But it's a free few news cycles for them. I'm sure he's going to be on one of these telethon Zoom calls. They already did white dudes for Harris, maybe white hunters for Harris, Democrat gun owners for Harris, men who don't like to wear ties for Harris. Who knows what they'll do?
But they can now use him as a communicator or surrogate. You thought you saw him on cable a lot last two weeks? You got a big storm coming, honey. He's going to be on blanketing cable, right? Like he is now the guy, the dude for them. And that matters.
I'm sitting here chuckling at the idea that there could be like a Hunters for Harris bumper sticker, which would certainly run against type on so many things. But it's an interesting, it's like, I guess someone might make it out there. Well, that's the whole game in winning competitive games.
elections, you have to frustrate people's partisan perceptions of you, because the fact of the matter is Democrats are unpopular and Republicans are unpopular. And if you want to win a competitive national election, you have to identify kind of as neither. You have to be able to shirk the negative stereotypes of both sides of the aisle and appeal to Americans as an American, as a hunter, as somebody who doesn't fit in a box or whatever.
in an environment where both candidates are really unpopular, maybe it doesn't matter. It's a race to the bottom. But for most of the past 50 years of electoral history, it's about frustrating people's perceptions of your partisanship so that you can come off as something more than just a Democrat or a Republican, because people don't like Democrats and they don't like Republicans.
So when it comes to thinking about the vice presidential pick and how much it matters electorally, I think the general political science research on this is it might have a slight effect in the home state of the candidate. A regional effect is kind of harder to, I think, pin down. So if you think about a state like Minnesota, if
If Harris is losing Minnesota, she's losing the election. You know, it's not it's not the key swing state or one of the key swing states in the way of Pennsylvania, where Josh Shapiro is from, of course, or Michigan or Wisconsin or thinking about the Sunbelt states like Nevada, Arizona and Georgia. However, Minnesota is still a relatively competitive state in the grand scheme of things. It's sort of in that outlying. You know, it's sort of maybe more like a Virginia where it's blue leaning, but it's still like
Still competitive. Republicans have won there statewide. Hillary Clinton carried it by less than two points in 2016. I don't want to steal Galen's thunder on this, but, you know, is Walls maybe a Tammy Baldwin-esque figure who has won?
Pretty impressively statewide and is up for reelection again here in 2024 and is leading in the polls in Wisconsin, probably will run ahead of the Democratic presidential ticket, has a progressive reputation, but yet has managed to do well, continue to do well in places where.
I think there was concern for Democrats that they would be losing ground in northern Wisconsin, in places that were historically very labor-friendly. You have mining and other activities going on. There's a chance that Walls is getting in touch with that, potentially anyway, as sort of a progressive who doesn't give off those vibes. It'll be interesting to see.
So it's one of those things where it's not easy to see it mattering a great deal in the data, but you never have counterfactuals in these situations. So you don't really know how much a VP changes things at the end of the day. Final word on all of this. Choosing Walls meant not choosing some of the other people out there. Some of the other people who seemed to be, you know, shoe-ins like Shapiro or strong contenders like Kelly or
even Whitmer or Buttigieg or Andy Beshear. Why not them? I think a lot of it comes down to interpersonal relationships for Harris. I mean, she went through this experience herself, right? She knows what it's like, how important it is to have a simpatico relationship, not just with the president, but with his office, with his staff.
East exec and the West Wing kind of all have to be on the same team. And that's not always the case for every single president and vice presidential match. So I think she knew how much is riding on the line for her and the reporting coming out of Harris world is that she just really, really, really liked her conversations with Wallace. You could see him as a governing partner. Partner, I think, is really important.
in a way that she probably wasn't able to see with a litany of other people. And I will say Josh Shapiro was the favorite by many accounts. If you look at like those little betting markets, Shapiro was leading pretty much all up until last evening. And you have to wonder, you know, what were those conversations like? To Brittany's point, I think it's you don't want a VP pick who's going to upstage the presidential pick.
And Shapiro clearly has a lot of potential as a national candidate, might have had his eyes on the presidency, of course, in a way that does he potentially does his ambitions sort of cause him to upstage Harris? And then there's obviously the sort of keeping the Democratic Party together. And there's one of the issues splitting it these days is the conflict in Israel and Gaza and Iran.
Maybe Shapiro's views on that could have reopened that more than the Harris campaign would want. So I think it's sort of those factors that probably went in because here at the end of the day, like Shapiro is from the most important state probably electorally speaking. And so from like a pure electoral standpoint, like he was probably the best pick. But again, VPs don't necessarily have that big of an impact. But if you're talking about a half point or a point in Pennsylvania, that might have been worth it. But again,
That gets into the personal relationships and also the party coalition management. And I think that's maybe where Walls won out.
Yeah, and I mean, that coalitional management part is maybe where you hear some of the attacks from the right about Shapiro losing out because of anti-Semitism on the left, which I don't think it's an attack specifically against Harris, who's married to a Jewish man, but an attack on sort of Democrats more broadly, who
because Shapiro's positions on the conflict in the Middle East were not all that different from anybody else's who was in the running, or frankly, even all that different from Harris's. You can slice it whatever way you want to see it. Ultimately, this is now the ticket.
And hey, Galen, Minnesota now is like the only state sort of in the last 60 years with multiple picks by Dems for vice president. So you had Hubert Humphrey in 1964, who was a senator. Walter Mondale, who was also a senator in 1976.
and then served as vice president under Jimmy Carter. And now you have Governor Tim Walz. So, you know, maybe it's just that for Democrats, Minnesota, you know, they go together like tater tot hot dish and loot fisk, you know? So, yeah. How long have you been keeping that in your pocket? I've been holding it the entire episode. I've been like, I've been ready to go with that. I was like, oh man, I got this. Let's do this. Truly no better note to end on. So with that, thank you, Jeffrey and Brittany.
Anytime. Thank you, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or a review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. ♪
