Handing The Mic To Trey Beck August 15, 2024August 14, 2024 Trump had years to think about his V.P. pick yet chose someone terrible. Kamala had just a few days and, Trey Beck concurs, hit it out of the ballpark: A lot’s already been said about Tim Walz as the VP pick. I’ll try to limit myself to points of disagreement with at least some commenters. The Walz pick was a feat of political alchemy by the Harris campaign. The left is exulting that Harris went with the “liberal” option: a white, 60-year-old farm-raised National Guardsman from the Great Plains who (God bless him) tore down the goalposts when his Huskers beat the Sooners, who had an A rating from the NRA for his entire tenure in the U.S. House, who wins Congressional marksmanship competitions, and who had one of the most conservative voting records in the Democratic House caucus. Is he liberal because . . . he’s not Josh Shapiro or Mark Kelly? Make no mistake, Tim Walz is a moderate Democrat, and the best kind: a modest and modest-living public servant who wants to make things better for his constituents. Many of the bills Gov. Walz has signed into law are “partisan” only because Republicans who used to be unfussed by stuff like automatic voter registration or free school meals now balk at them. He is a Democrat who can be respected by independents and centrist Republicans while lighting a fire under the progressive base. It’s been noted by others, AOC included, that if both AOC and Manchin are effusive about your selection, you’ve threaded a tiny needle indeed. How has Walz (and by implication Harris) achieved this? Walz is a more talented politician than he’s given credit for. More than one analyst has argued that Walz basically performs at replacement level for a Dem in Minnesota, a blue state. I disagree. First, Minnesota is not a blue state. Republicans project real strength there, having held one or both chambers of the state legislature for much of the past two decades (and with fair maps, unlike in neighboring Wisconsin). Al Franken won his 2008 Senate race by 312 votes. Minnesota voters also have a rich tradition of colorful independents, most visibly in their shocking 1998 selection of pro-wrestler-turned-governor Jesse Ventura as governor. (In a reversal, Republican governors like DeSantis, Noem, and Abbott have turned into pro wrestlers.) Walz is 7-0 in this purple Big Ten state. He won his House seat—and kept it four more times—in a district that had been Republican for all but four years since 1892. Only one of these races, against establishment challenger Jim Hagedorn, was close. I believe some of the unmistakable disappointment that greeted the initial Walz news was that his political record was compared against that of pre-announcement favorite Josh Shapiro. I get it. Shapiro is an effective and popular governor in the pivotal state of Pennsylvania. I have written about the incredible work he did as Pennsylvania’s attorney general, going after decades of hidden sexual abuse in the Catholic Church at considerable political risk. Shapiro is awesome. Shapiro won his 2022 governor’s race by almost 15%, versus Walz’s 9% in the same year. But this is sort of an unfair comparison. Shapiro’s opponent was Doug Mastriano, arguably* the worst gubernatorial candidate for an otherwise winnable governor seat in modern American history. (*Maine’s Gov. LePage may have a claim.) Mastriano made my 2022 list of “people who should not hold office” because he’s a lunatic. (So did LePage, for the very same reason.) He demanded Republicans disregard the 2020 election results “in Jesus’ name” and helped organize and participate in Jan. 6. He proposed we arm teachers after the Uvalde shooting. He has been photographed in a Confederate military uniform, and he called the separation of church and state a “myth.” Mastriano didn’t really campaign (preferring to fast and pray), was massively outspent by Shapiro, and declined any media engagements other than with fringe right outlets. This was never going to be a competitive race, even in our polarized times. On the other hand, Walz ran against a serious candidate, Scott Jensen, a Republican state legislator who drew fire from his party’s right flank by voting in favor of a state ban on “conversion therapy.” (Jensen’s own daughter, who is gay, was influential in his politically courageous denunciation of Republican hate towards vulnerable LGBTQ young people.) Walz raised and spent more than Jensen, but by a factor of two, not 16. It seems safe to assume that had Walz and Shapiro just swapped opponents, Shapiro would have won by less and Walz by more. So, despite running for re-election in a politically competitive state against a respectably funded moderate Republican with a record of bipartisan accommodation, Walz won by about 8%. Pretty good. It seems as if voters see in Walz whatever features they find most attractive. Is he a card-carrying union guy and defender of the minimum wage? Obama-style technocrat closing loopholes exploited by construction firms? Big government liberal expanding early childhood education and paid family leave? Salt of the earth former teacher who married another teacher named, adorably, Gwen Whipple? Bighearted football coach who both won a state championship and was the faculty adviser for a newly formed gay/straight student alliance? Avid hunter who defends the Second Amendment while keeping guns away from dangerous people? The dad with the flair for hokey theatrics all the kids jockey to carpool with? Yes. Plenty of people could have the same resume but fail to connect with voters. This takes skill, and gobs of charisma. Although I have supported Walz’s past gubernatorial campaigns, I have enjoyed learning his remarkable personal story along with the rest of the country. In the unlikely event you haven’t seen Walz’s first appearance with Harris, please watch it. It wasn’t just some speechwriter’s pablum when he began by saying he felt joy in campaigning with Harris. The enthusiasm is obvious and infectious. Labeling the selection of Walz “antisemitic” is as absurd as it was predictable. Trump called the Walz pick “insulting to Jewish people” since the talented Shapiro was available. Allies followed suit. But while the Trump campaign says multiple risible or offensive things a day, shame on financier and self-described former “Bill Clinton Democrat” Bill Ackman, who has become the most visible billionaire to go all in on Trump on the issue of Israel/Gaza. Ackman is no stranger to the application of different standards in areas as diffuse as academic plagiarism and antisemitism, but he still surprised me by going so far as to say the Democratic party needs to be razed and rebuilt from the ground up in part because of the Walz-over-Shapiro pick. Ackman, a Jewish American, is backing a ticket led by a guy who (picking from literally dozens of examples) lunched with the very Nick Fuentes who has said “I seek total Aryan victory” and “I am just like Hitler.” Imagine Ackman’s public response if Harvard’s new president said the things or kept the company that Trump does. There is also the glaring double standard at work. Trump does not tell us what to think of his own 100%-Gentile ticket. (Jared Kushner was right there for the nepo-plucking! Or what about Ackman?!) There was no conservative uproar that all of the six people reported to be Harris’ VP finalists were white men, despite the “diversity” political calculus being plain as day to everyone. Will Saletan has noted that the conservatives’ ugly attacks on Harris as a “DEI hire” are always unidirectional. “The ‘DEI’ rap on Harris,” Saletan writes, “isn’t about objecting to the selection of running mates based on race and sex. It’s about objecting when that selection process favors women and minorities.” Facts. And I would expect the racist and misogynistic shit-throwing to get even more intense every time Harris looks to stretch a lead. Which she definitely has the skills to do. Harris has seriously upped her game. As one of the millions of Americans who found Harris mostly invisible since her inauguration, I’ve been very surprised by how much better her campaigning chops are since her last run. Harris is positioning herself as “not Trump,” preferring (so far) to focus on her biography and values and allow voters to see her as a vessel of their own policy preferences, beyond ditching her 2020 call to ban fracking, which is both unpopular and unachievable. Her messaging choices have been smart (more on that in a second), and she no longer seems canned like she did four years ago. I don’t think the Harris of 2020 would have handled protesters this deftly. Harris has had an extraordinary start, and Walz is exactly the kind of partner she needs to reach gettable voters leery of coastal elites. The Harris/Walz “they’re weird” frame is smart. I’ve seen one academic team guest blog on Matt Yglesias’ Substack that Walz’s now viral description of J.D. Vance (and by extension the guy who picked him) as “weird” does not move the Democratic ticket towards the goal line. The reasoning is grounded in research suggesting that voters are influenced the most by new information. Since they already understand Trump’s foibles, the logic goes, attack ads are mostly useless. The way to get voters into the Harris fold is by focusing on things they don’t yet know, like what the Biden team has done on prescription drug prices and the like. These researchers found that half of swing state voters were unaware that Harris is opposed to cutting Social Security, for instance. Why not tell them this, rather than dwelling on GOP creepiness? And, sure, I absolutely buy the imperative of selling the Biden/Harris kitchen table record, running around for photo ops in front of new bridges, reminding people of $35 insulin caps, and, absolutely, reaffirming a Harris/Walz commitment to protecting Social Security. I am sure these academics are right that if you ran a bunch of ads focusing solely on “weird Trump,” you’d not be running a very good campaign. But the “weird” line of attack is valuable because it actually is new information for many voters unaware of the extent of the authoritarian threat of Trumpism. It gives a convenient handle to a set of policies, statements, legal rulings, cuts, and programs that are, in fact, super weird, even frightening, attacks on individual liberty and American social norms. They are things most Americans disagree with, but may not yet know about. Many American voters are unfamiliar with Project 2025, but those that do really don’t like it, which means a ton of room to damage Trump and his ballotmates for their ties to this dangerous plan. You obviously don’t campaign solely in opposition to “weird,” but the more Democrats are able to let voters know that Republicans are squeamish about contraception (while also making those kitchen table arguments), the more likely Harris is our next president. Also missed here is that J.D. Vance was a nationally known political commodity at his announcement. Everyone knows Trump is venal and dishonest, but they didn’t know J.D. Vance has strong opinions about childless cat ladies and has seriously argued that people with kids should get more votes. When it became more likely Biden would step aside as nominee, Democratic operatives knew that they would have to work furiously to define Harris, even though she has been the Vice President for almost four years, before her opponents did it. These past three weeks have been monumentally important in establishing the base identity of three of the four members of these two tickets. Instead of describing Harris on GOP terms, the Republican ticket has spent days whining directly and through surrogates that people are calling them weird, which of course begets even more coverage of the weird meme. At this point, some critical portion of the electorate is operating from a base assumption that Vance is, above any other feature, “just plain weird.” That’s not great for Vance, or the guy who chose him as wingman. (For the record, Trump himself is creepy AF.) Also, the other audience for the weird critique is Donald Trump himself. Being called a creepster, and at raucous and well attended Harris rallies no less, obviously drives Trump nuts. Any day Trump’s own messaging theme is “we’re not weird,” he is losing. Any day he sends unhinged posts about Biden coming back or alleges Harris has AI-generated crowds, his campaign not only loses the chance to blast Harris for lawlessness at the border, but looks, well, weird. It’s a virtuous cycle. The only mild messaging concern I have is that one organizer told me some working-class voters bristle a bit at the “we’re not going back” stump line, because some of them actually kind of do want to go back, at least to cheaper milk if not all the way to Jim Crow. But “we’re not going back” does work well with the base and on the stump, and different messages can be used with different audiences. This is also a crowd where Walz can be a trusted messenger. BONUS Donald explains why he shouldn’t be elected. (Thanks, Andrew R.) The money and support keep pouring in.