Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is Kamala Harris’ running mate. He’s feisty and aggressive, and he was picked because he wouldn’t overshadow the vice president. Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro was projected to be the vice president pick, but Harris’ visit to Minnesota in March changed everything—the two clicked visiting a Planned Parenthood center. Yet, there seems to be a media fear that Walz isn’t blue-collar enough, almost a tacit acknowledgment that the man is a total leftist despite going on a few hunting trips.
The three words being used to describe Walz are “folksy,” “centrist,” and “moderate,” and it’s all fugazi. You truly need to have disdain for the voters to try and sell a narrative that reads something like ‘despite his radical record, Walz reads as a moderate.’ ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos touted “folksy” Walz. At the same time, Mike Barnicle drooled over Walz, saying, “Watching the VP yesterday, it was mesmerizing in the sense I’ve never seen a rally like that either on TV or in person.”
"He reads moderate" despite the past record and rhetoric.
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) August 7, 2024
This gaslighting is incredible. https://t.co/Jk8aPDt2cm
"He may have a very progressive governing record, but he reads moderate and he talks like a regular person rather than a politician, which will play well in rural areas."
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) August 7, 2024
— @SykesCharlie on Gov. Tim Walz pic.twitter.com/UYnaBmLsGo
ABC's 'Good Morning America' excitedly promotes "folksy" Tim Walz, calling it "meteroric" "rise" for a man who's "anything but conventional" and can "reach...rural conservative voters"
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) August 7, 2024
Selina Wang touted his military service (but not that he quit so he wouldn't have to go to… pic.twitter.com/G0b65kUBvI
🔥 FOX NEWS’ TRACE GALLAGHER: “The Fox News Common Sense Department certainly was not surprised to see the liberal media give the Harris-Walz ticket a rousing welcome, complete with the requisite fawning, falsehoods and fabrications.”
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) August 7, 2024
“The Los Angeles Times got the ball rolling… pic.twitter.com/7vmOqO9Var
.@mikebarnicle: “Watching the VP yesterday, it was mesmerizing in the sense I’ve never seen a rally like that either on TV or in person. And watching it, you could just sense the power in the hall — & it was the power of joy, the power of laughter, the power of hope for the… pic.twitter.com/H7WYCPKBYr
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 7, 2024
The National Review’s Rich Lowry tweeted, “Tim Walz is an MSNBC anchor’s idea of a folksy politician who can appeal to Middle America.” And it was prophetic given what Molly Jong-Fast, who said JD Vance only wants white kids in America despite having three biracial children, touted about Walz today:
MSNBC’s @mollyjongfast on @Tim_Walz: “He ice fishes, he’s a hunter. He does butter carving … he’s a really a sort of — you know, he — he is a rural person. And, you know, he went to college on the GI Bill. He was the highest ranking enlisted man. You know, this is a person who… pic.twitter.com/Rk2Xi9FfhX
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 7, 2024
And then there’s Steve Kornacki from the top rope, shredding this Walz is a blue-collar guy narrative:
Kornacki savages Walz’s margins in small town MN:
— Philip Letsou (@philipletsou) August 6, 2024
"This is where Dems have lost ground and Walz, in 2022, he didn’t gain any ground.”
"The idea that he’s got this automatic appeal with these small town areas ... you don’t see it in what he actually did on the ballot.” pic.twitter.com/11m74oKUjH
Demographically, Minnesota has substantial overlap with Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All feature large white voting populations defined by massive splits along class lines — with college-educated white voters becoming more Democratic and white voters without four-year degrees becoming more Republican. The reason Minnesota hasn’t attained battleground status like the three others is that it has a higher share of the college-educated, Democratic-friendly cohort.
Walz won his 2022 re-election bid 52%-44% over his Republican foe. That’s virtually the same as the 52%-45% margin Joe Biden carried the state by in 2020.
Walz put up those numbers in a worse year for Democrats, to be sure. But did he attain that 52% with a different coalition from Biden’s — one less skewed toward the well-educated Twin Cities area, with broader support in the small cities and towns of Greater Minnesota? If he did, it would buttress the notion that he has a strong and unique connection with the exact type of voter Democrats have been shedding in those three key battleground states.
[…]
What’s striking, if anything, is how different the Walz and Biden numbers are from Obama’s. When Obama won his two elections, he joined strong metro-area support with respectable showings (and sometimes better) among small-town and blue-collar voters. A primary feature of American politics since Obama has been the virtual disappearance of that kind of demographic and geographic balance from the Democratic coalition.
In his ’22 campaign, Walz didn’t restore that old balance. His coalition, instead, looked just like what has become the standard post-Obama coalition for Democrats. He rolled up massive margins in metro areas and took a beating practically everywhere else.
None of this is to say the Harris-Walz ticket won’t be able to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. It very well may. But to boost the ticket in those states beyond what has become the Democratic Party norm, Walz will need to break through Trump-era polarization in the kinds of places he wasn’t able to do it in 2022.
His job isn't to activate blue collar voters
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) August 6, 2024
It's to activate affluent white suburban liberals who like feeling he *could* appeal to blue collar voters https://t.co/fo3Mb8giwP
Biden-Harris, Harris-Walz—it’s the same extreme ticket, but without dementia and degeneracy from a particular family that resides in Delaware.
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