Tim Walz took the stage on Day 3 of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, to accept the nomination to run for vice-president. He told the crowd about his upbringing in the Midwest as he rallied support for his running mate, Kamala Harris.Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Taking his star turn on the Democratic National Convention stage Wednesday night, Tim Walz didn’t speak so much to the entire United States as he did to only two, maybe three, states.
Mr. Walz – Governor of Minnesota, the most famous high-school linebacker coach in American history, regular guy in a barn coat and a camo cap, syrupy raconteur of dad jokes, member of the Army National Guard, accomplished practitioner of the art of changing an automobile tire – tried on his new identity as the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee with an acceptance speech principally designed to make him acceptable to voters in a vital group of Midwestern states: Michigan, Wisconsin and, if you consider that the area around Pittsburgh has a vaguely Midwestern vibe, Pennsylvania, too.
All told, that represents less than a tenth of the population of the United States. But those three states represent 16 per cent of the Electoral College votes required to win the White House and thus are, along with three or four other states, the Democrats’ biggest targets in the effort to propel Kamala Harris to victory over Donald Trump in November.
Surrounded by members of the Mankato West High School football team from the days when Mr. Walz was an assistant coach – few of them as fit as they were in 1999 – the Governor spoke of growing up in a Nebraska town of 400, graduating from high school with 23 classmates. He spoke of “the belief that a single person can make a real difference for their neighbours” and referred to the “sort of medical debt that nearly sank my family.”
In a speech stuffed with down-home rhetoric, he repeated the word “neighbour,” with its resonance in Midwestern communities. He warned that Mr. Trump’s return would result in “jacking up the costs on the middle class,” saying the former president has “an agenda nobody asked for – an agenda that serves nobody but the richest and the most extreme amongst us … an agenda that does nothing for our neighbours in need.”
Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz led fellow Democrats in a political pep rally on Aug. 21, vowing that he and presidential running mate Kamala Harris would triumph over Republican Donald Trump in November's U.S. election.
Reuters
He silenced the audience telling of the heartbreak of waiting for the success of fertility treatments to start his family. He talked about Republican efforts on social issues, saying, “We’ve got a golden rule: ‘Mind your own damn business.’” And, asserting that he was a hunter, he said he was a better marksman than most of the Republicans in Congress. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service maintains 50 refuges open to hunting in the Midwest region.
Earlier vice-presidential candidates have had different remits: to attract younger people to a ticket headed by an older standard bearer (Republicans Dan Quayle in 1988 and 1992, Sarah Palin in 2008, Paul Ryan in 2012); to display a future-oriented profile (Democrat Al Gore in 1992 and 1996), to soften an ideological profile (Democrat Joseph Lieberman in 2000, Republican Mike Pence in 2016), even to provide path-breaking diversity (Democrats Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, Mr. Lieberman).
But since governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts selected senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas in 1988, only one other nominee has chosen a running mate that targeted a single region of the country, Democratic senator John Kerry’s selection of senator John Edwards of North Carolina in 2004. The assignments for both Mr. Bentsen and Mr. Edwards were to court, or at least to reassure, Southern voters. Both failed to breach the Republicans’ Dixie stronghold.
Mr. Walz’s Minnesota is indisputably a Midwestern state, but it has a far different character than Michigan and Pennsylvania and even from its neighbouring Wisconsin, with which it shares a tradition of protest and reform. The very name of the party that sent him to the state Capitol in St. Paul as governor (the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, often shortened to simply DFL) is indicative of the essence of one of the mainstreams of Minnesota politics, the emphasis of what the official party history calls an alliance of “farmers, worker and progressive citizens” who formed a “unique coalition” that upended decades of Republican rule in a state where the GOP prevailed in all but one of the presidential elections (1912) in the nearly two-thirds of a century stretching between 1860 and 1928.
Mr. Walz finds himself in the unusual and highly awkward position of emphasizing his liberal bona fides even as he displays a moderate profile – a struggle that matches the political task of the party standard bearer, Ms. Harris. That encourages the sort of criticism that both members of the Democratic ticket already have faced.
On the one hand, there is in the Walz case the social-media comment that former president Barack Obama distributed when he said to his liberal allies last year, “If you need a reminder that elections have consequences, check out what’s happening in Minnesota.”
On the other, there is this view from Scott Johnson, a co-founder of Power Line, a conservative commentary site with strong Minnesota roots. “Walz was thrilled to declare himself all-powerful by declaring an emergency that allowed him to close businesses and tell people to stay home during COVID,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview. “He had the worst qualities of a lying dictator for 15 months. There was no limit to the craziness that he didn’t hesitate to support.”
A larger question is whether, in a sprawling, diverse country, the population of any group of states – the three “Midwestern” Democratic states account for 28 million people, almost three-quarters of the population of the entire country of Canada – has a single culture.
“Walz simply being from a rural, Midwestern area is not a cure-all for the Democrats,” said Nicholas Jacobs, a Colby College political scientist who has studied the politics of rural areas in the United States. “Just because he sounds a certain way and dresses a certain way doesn’t mean he is guaranteed midwesterners’ loyalty. It’s a start, not an assurance. We treat certain segments of the electorate simplistically, and the rural electorate is one of them.
Prof. Jacobs points out that the single political figure since 1800 who performs best among rural voters is someone who “doesn’t even pretend to be from a rural area.” That is Mr. Trump. He carried all three states in 2016 that Mr. Walz’s selection is intended to win.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that John Kerry selected John Edwards as his running mate in 2008. The year was 2004. This version has been updated.