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THE LEFT LOVES TIM WALZ. CAN HE UNITE THE DEMOCRATS?
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Zack Beauchamp
August 6, 2024
Vox
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_ As a non-leftist beloved by the left, Walz is ideally suited to
expand Harris’s appeal across the ideological spectrum. _
Kamala Harris is welcomed by Minn. Gov. Tim Walz before she delivers
remarks at a campaign event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin on Wednesday., AP
Photo
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has been picked as Kamala Harris’s
running mate — and the American left couldn’t be happier.
This is not because Walz himself is an ideological leftist. While he
certainly has progressive credibility — in 2023, he passed a series
of left-liberal reforms dubbed the “Minnesota Miracle
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— he’s also taken more centrist positions on a whole slate of
issues, including hot-button ones like crime.
The left’s romance with Walz is deeply entwined with hostility to
his chief rival for a spot on the ticket: Pennsylvania Governor Josh
Shapiro. Harris’s decision on Shapiro, who has a history of
hostility
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the party’s pro-Palestinian faction, had become seen as a bellwether
for whether she’d be meaningfully different from Biden on Gaza. Walz
looked like the most progressive available anti-Shapiro, and so
emerged as the left’s preferred alternative.
Walz’s elevation earns the left a big victory. Yet because Walz
himself isn’t _of_ the left, the pick seems intended to serve a
unifying purpose: a candidate who appeals to all different stripes of
Democrats for different reasons. The fact that Democrats across the
political spectrum
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thrilled by the pick — with effusive support coming from people
ranging from Sen. Joe Manchin
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to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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validate the theory.
It’s important to be clear: The VP selection matters way less for
elections than people think
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It’s much more important to select a potential president than an
optimal running mate.
But you can see why Harris sees picking Walz as smart politics. It
allows her to simultaneously hand the left a win without necessarily
tacking left — potentially keeping her coalition united even as she
works to win over the general election’s decisive centrists.
Is Tim Walz a progressive or moderate? Yes.
Record-wise, it might seem like there are two Tim Walzes:
the progressive governor
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the American left, and the centrist member of Congress
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him. Yet in actuality, the two men are easier to reconcile than you
might think.
The Minnesota Miracle reforms, enacted in a single legislative
session, read like a progressive wishlist. They include paid family
leave, free school meals, marijuana legalization, a 100 percent clean
energy mandate by 2040, and a slew of protections for organized labor.
But I use the word “progressive” and not its cousin “leftist”
deliberately. The Minnesota Miracle policies are all squarely within
the Democratic mainstream: none betray an ideological commitment to
the party’s socialist or otherwise radical wings.
In fact, Walz has clashed with the left
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the past.
As governor of the state where George Floyd was murdered, he faced
significant pressure to sign on to defunding police. Yet he rejected
the idea, instead signing a slate of police reforms
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kept police funding static in 2020 and sending $300 million to local
public safety offices
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2023.
Walz has become the left’s factional choice not because he’s one
of them, but because he was the best they could plausibly hope for.
The left-wing case for Walz can be hard to disentangle from the
left-wing case against Shapiro — someone the left detested
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comments
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Palestinians he made in college and hardline hostility to campus
pro-Palestinian protestors.
But Walz’s position on Israel-Palestine is hardly left-wing. The
Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg has put together a list
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positions and actions
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basically reflect the traditional pro-Israel consensus. Walz’s
position on how to end the current Gaza war is virtually identical to
Shapiro’s [[link removed]].
The most important difference is less Middle East policy than
domestic: Shapiro has been far harsher on pro-Palestine campus
protests than Walz has.
So while Walz is the left’s chosen candidate, he is not a
candidate _of_ the left. He’s a mainstream Democrat with a record
containing elements that both progressives and moderates can like.
When appeasing the left is good politics
The best political case against Walz is that Minnesota is not really a
battleground. If Harris had chosen Pennsylvania’s Shapiro instead,
she would have been maximizing her odds of winning the most important
state in the Electoral College.
But the idea that vice presidents deliver their swing states is at
best overstated — and most likely probably wrong. My colleague Eric
Levitz recently did a deep dive
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the political science research on the subject, and the weight of the
evidence strongly suggests that vice presidents don’t really have
much of an effect on the ultimate presidential outcome.
By contrast, there’s at least some reason to believe that Walz’s
unique ability to appeal to all factions of the Democratic Party might
help Harris down the stretch.
The strongest Trump attack on Harris, at least to date, is that
she’s too far to the left. Scored by one (dubious
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metric as the most liberal member of the Senate in 2019, she has drawn
Republican flak for previous positions ranging from Medicare-for-all
to banning fracking to decriminalizing border crossing.
In response, Harris has tacked to the center: repudiating many of her
past unpopular positions in favor of more moderate stances that align
better with mainstream public opinion. The message that Republicans
are “weird” is designed to play up the notion that she represents
the vast American middle while Trump is the true extremist.
Walz helps make this message more credible.
A very ordinary-seeming Midwestern white guy, he literally invented
the “weird” attack
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Trump and J.D. Vance. While he’s recently played up his progressive
accomplishments, he’s also demonstrated the ability to take centrist
positions when it’s politically convenient. He has a talent for
winning over people with displays of empathy, including speaking about
Trump supporters as relatives and neighbors
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In his Walz endorsement, Sen. Manchin says, “I can think of no one
better than Governor Walz to help bring our country closer together
and bring balance back to the Democratic Party.”
Moreover, his celebrity status on the left gives Harris crucial
running room to keep up the strategic centrism. By handing her left
flank a victory, she’s theoretically built major credibility that
she can spend to defray a left-wing revolt over some of her more
centrist stances.
From Harris’s perspective, the Walz pick is an exercise in coalition
management. It helps her keep the Democratic base united and energized
while continuing her new moderate outreach to general election swing
voters. If she’s right, the choice might end up mattering more in
Pennsylvania — and elsewhere — than attaching herself to
Shapiro’s brand.
_Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers
challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad, right-wing
populism, and the world of ideas._
* Tim Walz
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