Donald Trump’s campaign can’t figure out what to do about Tim Walz.
The progressive governor from Minnesota chosen by Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris as her running mate is a walking rebuke to Trump’s sidekick, the shape-shifting, sometimes populist J.D. Vance.
A former venture capitalist who once compared Trump to Hitler, Vance now says he and Trump are running to save the working class. But Walz turns their campaign into a joke. Part of the reason his takedowns are so successful is the contrast between Vance’s phoniness and Walz’s undeniable authenticity.
A former public school teacher and football coach who grew up in a small town, Walz has built powerful personal relationships with community members, such as the former student who introduced him at the Democratic National Convention in August, recalling the time Walz pushed his car out of a snowbank. Viral videos of Walz explaining how to clean leaves out of your gutter or replace the lightbulb in your car’s headlight continually burnish his Midwestern charm. Walz proves that, contrary to Republican stereotype, progressive politics are not the exclusive province of smarty-pants coastal elites.
Even better than his authentic, regular-guy style is the way Walz is reacquainting the country with the generous, neighborly values of the Midwest that, although eclipsed by the rise of Trump, are nonetheless a deep, healthy current in American politics.
In a speech in early September at Laborfest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Walz summed up Trump’s promises to give tax cuts to the super-rich, do away with the Affordable Care Act, and shred worker protections, then remarked, “You tell me who in Wisconsin is sitting around saying, ‘Damn, I wish they’d give billionaires tax cuts and screw me over. Damn, I wish they’d take my health care away. I wish they’d underfund my public school. I wish they would make my job more difficult and more dangerous. And then, at the end of the day, I wish they’d make me work till I’m seventy-five years old.’ No one’s saying that! No one’s asking for that agenda. What they’re asking for is to be treated fairly, with dignity.”
There is something profoundly satisfying about Walz’s response to Trump, Vance, and the entire racist and misogynistic campaign. President Joe Biden darkly warned—with good reason—that Trump poses an existential threat to democracy. Meanwhile, Biden was sinking in the polls. Walz caught fire by calling Trump and Vance “weird.”
Sure, they’re a threat, Walz noted in an informal speech that went viral on social media, but “don’t give them the power,” he said. “The fascists depend on fear . . . . But we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”
Walz exposes the fraudulence of Trump and Vance’s rightwing populism. Both campaigns promise to help working-class people. But Trump and Vance, while weakening unions and supporting a system of wealth inequality that benefits the rich, mainly offer white, working-class voters the pleasure of causing other people pain. Targeting immigrants, women, and trans children, and promising the return of white, male supremacy enforced by state-sanctioned bullying—none of this actually makes anyone’s life better. To some, it does have a certain appeal. But racism, misogyny, and sadism are not the main motivators for a majority of voters in this large, diverse country.
Still, white, working-class resentment is real. Across the Midwest, where family farm bankruptcies are epidemic and factories have shut down and moved overseas, there is a strong sense of abandonment by political elites. Global trade deals backed by both Republican and Democratic administrations have contributed to job loss and the “get big or get out” trend in agriculture. When Trump and Vance talk about “the forgotten men and women of America,” it resonates with people who know from experience that global capitalism is a bad deal for a whole lot of people who don’t seem to count when corporations and politicians cut deals.
That sentiment is what drove rural voters in Wisconsin to help put Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders over the top in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.
Ahead of his thirteen-point win in the state, Sanders “hammered away at Hillary Clinton’s past support for free-trade deals,” Politico at the time, “including at a stop in Janesville on Monday. At that gathering, he decried the moving of the oldest General Motors plant in the country to Mexico eight years ago, resulting in the loss of jobs for 2,800 workers. Sanders has also brought up her Wall Street ties on multiple occasions.”
Walz reclaims some of that populist energy, and like Sanders, he marries it to an expansive vision of racial justice and gender equality that calls on the 99 percent to see ourselves as all in the same big boat.
And unlike Sanders, Walz is never dour. “You run a campaign based on fear, like them, you’re going to run into a little trouble when you run into a campaign that’s based on joy,” Walz told a cheering crowd in Milwaukee, while the Democratic National Convention (DNC) was taking place in Chicago. The whole stunt—traveling from the DNC to Milwaukee for a second, simultaneous rally at the Fiserv Forum, the very site where Republicans had recently held their own convention—was a gleeful poke at the crowd-size-obsessed Republican candidate.
Walz emphasized the Midwestern values he said Minnesotans and Wisconsinites hold in common: “We are cousins out here,” he observed. “Even if we would not make the same choice as our neighbors, we respect them because we live by that golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”
That vision of what Midwestern values are all about is a welcome antidote to the divisive bitterness of the Trump campaign. That’s part of the joy of Walz. Another part is the tidal wave of relief among Democrats who saw the writing on the wall after Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June and were holding their breath for a month until Biden finally bowed out.
While American fascism has been on the rise, peaking with the coordinated attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Harris-Walz campaign’s message of joy reminds voters that they do have a choice. After all, the conditions created by the Biden Administration are not exactly the kind that create the desperation and nihilism that leads people to willingly give themselves over to a repressive, authoritarian regime. The pandemic has receded, inflation is down, employment and job creation are up, and wages have risen significantly for the lowest-paid workers. Unions, as Harris, Walz, and Biden are fond of telling us, are getting stronger and are more popular than they have been in decades. If joy is an option, bitterness and hate suddenly look a lot less attractive.
That’s not to say a Harris-Walz Administration would usher in utopia. During the DNC, while Walz took the stage to deliver his ode to joy, outside the convention center, uncommitted delegates held a series of press conferences to bring the increasingly horrific situation in Gaza to the attention of Democrats. At a press conference near a playground outside the security fence around the United Center, Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor and member of Doctors Without Borders, testified about witnessing “children having their limbs amputated at record rates.” As she spoke, several uncommitted delegates standing behind her began to weep.
That mood did not mesh well with the celebratory atmosphere inside the convention hall. Nor did the Uncommitted National Movement succeed in getting a Palestinian speaker on stage, nor a commitment from the Harris campaign to immediately stop supplying the U.S. weapons that Israel is using in a war that is killing tens of thousands of noncombatants.
There was incremental progress, including the first official DNC panel on Palestinian rights and a line in Harris’s prime-time speech stating that the United States must help to bring about peace so that the “Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”
Yet, witnessing the crowd chanting “USA! USA!” and hearing Harris promise to maintain “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” I couldn’t help but think that utopia is still a long way off.
Compared with the bloodthirsty speeches at the Republican National Convention, though, with its delegates waving placards demanding “Mass Deportation Now” and its fantasy of a return to white, male rule, the friendly, joyful, can-do spirit of Harris and Walz looks pretty darn good.