Vice President Kamala Harris is signaling her intention to move beyond the “blue wall” in her path to the presidency by picking Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as her running mate.
Harris bypassed the governors of more competitive battleground states, especially Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), when she selected Walz on Tuesday.
But the Harris campaign is hoping to put the Sunbelt back into contention rather than merely fighting former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) in the Rust Belt.
Harris held the biggest rally of her young presidential campaign in Atlanta, part of her bid to put Georgia back into play for Democrats. Arizona, North Carolina, and Nevada are no longer being left for dead or red.
The hope is that Walz can help Harris turn out white suburban voters in these battleground states. These voters were the key to President Joe Biden winning the White House in 2020. The most recent CBS News poll showed Harris still underperforming with black and Hispanic voters, though she improved on Biden’s numbers with the former voting bloc, but Trump is winning an anemic 55% of white voters nationally.
Walz will also be called upon to blunt Vance’s populist appeal, pitching economic progressivism as a solution to working-class voters’ bread-and-butter concerns. This is the role former Rep. Tim Ryan played in his surprisingly competitive Ohio Senate race against Vance in 2022. But Walz is highly vulnerable on cultural issues and may be better suited to suburban voter mobilization.
Biden was pinning virtually all his hopes on Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He was also trailing in all three states. The Sunbelt looked like it was lost to Trump even before Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate.
Since taking over the top spot on the Democratic ticket, Harris has pulled even with Trump in the battleground states. She is up by 0.2 points in the national RealClearPolitics polling average. She is trying to expand the electoral map so a loss in Pennsylvania is not fatal.
It’s risky. Walz’s record on the George Floyd riots and illegal immigration, among other issues, ties in nicely with Harris’s existing vulnerabilities. Minnesota was becoming competitive in the Biden-Trump race, but now appears less so and hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972. If Trump holds on to his leads in the swing states, Harris’s minuscule edge in the national polling averages is meaningless.
Many are already second-guessing Harris’s decision to choose Walz over Shapiro, who might have taken Pennsylvania off the table for Republicans. Shapiro is Jewish and at odds with progressives over Israel, possibly making the Harris camp fear it would merely be trading Michigan for Pennsylvania. Critics charge the vice president with catering to the Hamas sympathizers within her party’s ranks.
There have been multiple reports that Shapiro seemed too ambitious in his own right and might upstage Harris. He is still in his first term as governor and might be well-positioned to run for president himself in 2028 if Harris loses. Harris and Walz appeared to have better personal chemistry, possibly a decisive factor for a Democratic nominee who made the pick as a sitting vice president herself.
In any event, Republican strategists are relieved to be facing Walz on the Democratic ticket alongside Harris rather than Shapiro.
“It’s no surprise that San Francisco Liberal Kamala Harris wants West Coast wannabe Tim Walz as her running-mate – Walz has spent his governorship trying to reshape Minnesota in the image of the Golden State,” Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “While Walz pretends to support Americans in the Heartland, when the cameras are off, he believes that rural America is ‘mostly cows and rocks.’”
When it came to the veepstakes, both major party nominees doubled down. Trump bet that the Rust Belt voters who put him in the White House in 2016 could do so again and that Vance could reach the working class. Harris is similarly betting on the suburbanites to elect her as they did Biden, intending to use Walz to seal the deal.
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Both running mates could have their uses as governing partners in a Trump or Harris administration. But their respective tickets have to win first.
Time will tell whether Harris made a bold choice or a misstep in the tradition of Hillary Clinton’s absence from Wisconsin.
