The joyful Minnesota governor is a valuable spokesperson for Harris whose background and personality can help the Democratic ticket undermine Trump’s efforts to woo America’s men.
Tim Walz’s first official speech on the Democratic ticket displayed all the reasons that Kamala Harris has been lauded for picking the Minnesota governor as her running mate. Personally, I think one outshines all the rest.
Walz’s military background and his work as a high school teacher and football coach, along with his palpable joy and open expressions of compassion for people in need, offer America a vision of what manhood can look like — he’s a “joyful warrior” offering a vision in contrast with what’s being offered by Donald Trump’s bravado-driven campaign.
And he’s clearly willing to challenge Team Trump on that front. He displayed that even before he received the call to join Harris’ campaign, using public appearances to refer to Trump and his allies as “bullies” who are truly weak at heart and by mocking the GOP ticket for “running for He-Man Women Haters Club or something.”
this is my analysis of the running candidates right now, but Kamala is the urbanite minority runner, walz is the rural white runner. Kamala has lots of experience in urban environments and dealing with large companies and corpos, walz has a lot of experience supporting individuals and families and has many years in rural Midwestern politics.
kamala is more visibly younger, walz is visibly older, but they’re both essentially 60. Kamala picks up the votes of the younger millenials and gen z’s while walz picks up the votes of the gen x and boomer populations who resonate with his values.
Kamala should represent basically every large population center, cali, new york, probably not chicago, but they’ll probably vote for her anyway, etc…
Walz is basically courting the entire midwestern vote by being midwestern, as well as rural, more moderate/center leaning voters.
This is quite literally the avengers team of the democratic party right now. I don’t think you could have made a better team.
Idk I’m a zennial and Walz hits right in the Midwest of it all. I’d be voting for Kamala for sure and I’m excited for a female president, especially one that isn’t Hillary, but to my young urban Midwestern tendencies walz feels like a guy who’d brag about how cheap his couch was before making a quip about it not being cheap enough to fuck Vance. He feels more Ohioan than Vance for certain.
yeah i can see that, but the midwestern pride for me hits a little too strongly for me to care what he’s like other than “vaguely midwestern” lol
I’m from Appalachia and he appeals to me on an emotional level. My dad was barely in the picture, and this guy seems like the dad I always wished I had.
The funny thing that was mentioned above is he will appeal to more centrist people, and I think that’s true even though his politics seem to be actually left of Kamala.
And the greatest living politician in national office endorsed him before he was picked.
I agree with everything you’ve said, the optics and the “feels” are at an all time high.
That said, a lot of reporting is saying that the choice of VP doesn’t have a significant impact on election day.
IDK how that can really be true though. For the next several months Walz will be shaping the public’s opinion of Kamala. Obviously on election day people will vote for Kamala or Trump, but Walz can convince people to vote for Kamala.
Usually true that they don’t have much of an impact. But there are outliers. At one time in my youth there were two Republicans that I respected. Colin Powell and John McCain. I lost that respect for Powell when he went on TV and lied to get us into Iraq war 2.
But to the point, I lost my respect for John McCain when he took Sarah Palin as his running mate. We’ll never know but it very well could have cost him the election.
yeah historically that’s the case, but trump also literally picked a candidate willing to overthrow democracy as well. I think it matters more this time, because historically VP picks are almost always swing state candidates, because they generally have a lot of pull in either direction. In this case, it breaks that norm, and i think as long as it influences voters enough now, and they continue campaigning together up until the election, it should help to energize voters quite a bit.
Walz is a really good public speaker, and so is kamala, having them play off of each other is only going to further improve things IMO.