Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz is a magnet for internet comparisons, memes, and cliches: He’s the Midwestern dad you always wanted, he’s Friday Night Lights’ Coach Taylor, he’s a fount of avuncular normal-guy aphorisms (as discussed on the most recent episode of Lever Time).
But to me, Tim Walz is an archetype I first encountered 20 years ago at an eerily similar political fork in Democrats’ road. His vice presidential nomination this week once again offers a glimmer of hope for a new path — even amid warning signs that the party will take the old path.
In 2004, I helped elect that era’s version of Tim Walz to the governorship of deep-red Montana. Save for the military service, Brian Schweitzer was all the adjectives now used to describe Walz — small-town, blunt, plain-spoken, pragmatic. In an election year where Democrats got destroyed up and down the ballot, Schweitzer pulled off his seemingly impossible victory by being decidedly populist and normal (read: not weird).
As I suggested in The American Prospect and The Washington Monthly after the 2004 election, Schweitzer’s cultural signaling gave him wide room to campaign on economic populism — which he brought into the governor’s office.
At the time, I thought Schweitzer could be the beginning of a new era of revived prairie populism that had been championed by Democrats like Byron Dorgan, Dave Obey, Andy Jacobs, Cecil Andrus, and Paul Wellstone. But that’s not how things turned out.
Schweitzer ended up being an anomaly. His politics clashed with the ascendant Obama-branded neoliberalism of the post-Bush era, and his Montana success proved to be more like a last gasp of prairie populism rather than a revival of it. Obama-ism’s mix of identity politics, corporatism, and good vibes won out — and the party became more urban, more coastal, and less populist, while losing lots of elections in the heartland.
Fast forward two decades, and Walz cuts a similar profile as Schweitzer once did — and now on a bigger stage. In the election cycle after Schweitzer’s first victory, Walz ran for Congress mixing cultural signaling as a gun-owning hunter with economic populism to win a Republican-leaning district. Later as governor, he and the Democratic-controlled legislature enacted the “Minnesota Miracle” — a laudable record of lite social democracy. As Walz described it in Wellstone-esque terms: “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”
Unlike many of his peers, Walz seems to understand the perils of Democrats’ technocratic politics and obsession with making everything complex and annoying. When the New York Times’ Ezra Klein recently asked the Minnesota governor why he rejected Democrats’ obsession with means testing and made a school breakfast and lunch program universal, Walz reprised one of the best answers I’ve ever heard: he suggested that means testing creates cultural boundaries between haves and have nots, buries people in paperwork, and “ends up then becoming very cumbersome or becomes inoperable.”
Walz concluded that same interview by declaring that if Democrats win in 2024, their first policy priority should be giving all Americans paid family and medical leave — a wildly popular idea, even among Republicans. Amen to that.
All of this from Walz is encouraging — as is him being rewarded with the VP nomination. The excitement around his elevation has led some pundits to infer Kamala Harris will be the populist president Obama refused to be, and some media outlets to insist that Walz proves that Democrats will champion a “care economy” (a fancy new term for the very old idea of a more robust social safety net).
But while I’d like to think that’s an inevitability, the rhetoric seems like wishcasting — or at least premature.
Why? Because Walz is the running mate of Kamala Harris, who has a squishy record on economic issues, has declined to outline a clear economic vision, and has surrounded herself with her party’s corporate-friendly crowd.
Harris has so far run a solid electoral campaign as a capable generic Democrat — but the donor class seems to see an opportunity. Some Democratic billionaires feel emboldened to demand her retreat from the most successful populist politics of the Biden administration. Indeed, reporting in the business press shows that corporate titans see Walz’s nomination merely as a rhetorical and aesthetic sop to the party’s base — but not a signal of Harris’s commitment to adopting Walzonomics or even the strongest parts of the Biden-Harris economic agenda.
Maryland’s Democratic Gov. Wes Moore said as much out loud, using a CNBC appearance to insinuate that Harris may break with that agenda in order to better serve “our large industries.”
“Was (Moore) speaking on Harris’s behalf? Does he know something that Harris has declined to share with the public herself?” wondered The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang. “(Harris) has not explained… why she has changed her mind on fracking, which she once said should be banned, and has wobbled on Medicare for All, which she once supported; or what she plans to do with Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission… The press, it seems, will have to persist in the thankless task of demanding answers, even if we risk disrupting the good times.”
The risk goes beyond just messing with the vibes — for smaller media outlets like The Lever, daring to ask about Harris’s policy agenda risks financial punishment from the “big chunk of the public (that) no longer believes journalism is about seeking truth or holding power to account,” as The Atlantic writer (and recent Lever Time guest) Tyler Austin Harper put it. “Instead they see the media as a kind of jack-in-the-box that is supposed to pop up and say ‘Trump is bad!’ over and over… like a kid who wants to be read the same bedtime story over every night and throws a fit if you pull a different book off the shelf.”
Because Harris has not outlined a clear legislative agenda, I don’t know where she will end up on policy. She has a history of airing compelling populist economic rhetoric — some of which she’s now echoing on the campaign — but also a history of retreating or soft-pedaling in the face of pressure. Our team at The Lever is certainly doing our part to try to find out what her actual agenda will be (while also aggressively covering the Trump-Vance ticket), but I’m not sure anyone will ever get clear answers in a political environment where even asking questions is equated with disloyalty.
That said, I am sure that my feelings this week of déjà vu aren’t delusions or doomerism. Watching so many observers projecting so much onto Walz’s nomination reminds me of 2004, when I thought Schweitzer’s victory could be a sign of a left-of-center populist future to come — but then it became more like a last blast from a populist past as neoliberalism took over.
In this new era, I’d love to assume Walz’s admirable prairie populism will become mainstream Democratic politics — and perhaps it will. Maybe the first thing a Harris-Walz administration does is act on Walz’s own stated top priority and push for a national paid family leave bill.
But I’m not in my idealistic 20s anymore — I’m in my realistic 40s, which means I can remember what happened the last time I dared to hope for such outcomes. I’m now old enough to know the old fool-me-once lesson — and know there will only be real policy change if enough people demand it, rather than assume everything will happen just because the vibes happen to be positive right now.
2024 may be the ultimate vibes election, and sure: Good vibes are good. But good policy would be a lot better. Just listen to the Minnesota coach-turned-governor’s plain-spoken talk about school lunches or paid sick leave — I’m guessing he’d agree.
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