Former Obama adviser David Axelrod said the choice of Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate has transformed the presidential race to the detriment of former President Donald Trump.
In a roundtable appearance on CNN’s The Source, Axelrod praised the performance of Harris and Walz in their first joint campaign appearance.
“Such an interesting transformation has happened,” he said. “Suddenly, Donald Trump feels like the embattled incumbent. I mean, that’s the way he’s behaving. And they are presenting themselves as the turn-the-page candidates. And that’s the field that we got tonight.”
He added that Walz specifically “delivered some heavy blows” against Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) but with “that kind of gentle humor that actually lands well.”
Walz made fun of Vance during his and Harris’s Tuesday rally by alluding to a crude sexual joke about the Ohio Republican, which was based on a doctored page from his memoirs.
Axelrod suggested that Trump was being knocked off balance by the change in the Democratic ticket.
“And I have to say, Trump is getting — he’s unsettled by this change in the environment. You can see it in his tweets and so on,” he said. “And there is a kind of grinding quality to the Trump campaign right now that plays very badly against what you saw tonight, which was very joyful and positive. And there was this feeling of possibility.”
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On Sunday, Axelrod warned that Democrats were experiencing “irrational exuberance” over Harris and that Trump still held the upper hand.
“It’s absolutely Trump’s race to lose right now,” Axelrod said on CNN Newsroom. “He is ahead. And he is ahead in most of the battleground states. They’re close. They can be won by either candidate.”
