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Does Tim Walz's Vote History Help the Ticket?

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  August 07, 2024 11:30 AM

On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris made her running mate announcement official by selecting Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) over Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA), the latter considered more moderate and pragmatic. It's a bit early to gauge what the polls say about Walz, though released ones indicate an overwhelming majority of voters don't know enough about him to have an opinion. That being said, Walz is a fellow far-left radical, so it's worth wondering if the more voters hear about him, the less popular the ticket will become. As a two-term governor, there's also Walz's own vote history to look at.

Walz was first elected governor in 2018, with 53.8 percent of the vote (1,393,096 votes) to Republican Jeff Johnson's 42.4 percent. In 2022, he won with 52.3 percent of the vote (1,312,349 votes) to Republican Scott Jensen's 44.6 percent. 

This point was noted by MSNBC's Steve Kornacki, which Matt included when discussing how Walz's abortion obsession is what helped him look so attractive to Harris. Kornacki specifically highlighted the numbers in Minnesota districts that swung for Donald Trump. 

Minnesota's Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar also performed better in her 2018 Senate race, with Kornacki highlighting the "striking contrast."

And it's not just in Minnesota, which looks to be less of a swing state compared to Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Speaking about the other states, Kornacki noted Walz's 2022 gubernatorial results "don't suggest he provides an obvious boost with the blue-collar voters Dems have been shedding" there. 

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Kornacki put posts on Tuesday morning, right when the pick was announced, reposting his thread on Monday before the Walz's pick was official and when it still looked like it would be Shapiro.

On Tuesday night, Kornacki also posted an article summarizing the results, with the rather blunt headline, "Tim Walz's election results don't show a clear blue-collar boost."

As he puts it:

One of the Democrats’ chief challenges in those states is in blue-collar and small-town areas, where the party once ran competitively (or at least respectably) before the floor fell out amid and after Donald Trump’s emergence in 2016. The thinking is that Walz’s story and style will be relatable and reassuring to some of those voters, blunting at least part of the Trump GOP’s newfound dominance.

There’s a catch, though: Walz wasn’t able to do that himself in his last campaign.

Kornacki also goes on to address a supposed benefit that Walz brings to the ticket (emphasis added):

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.

That's where the counties mentioned in the threads above come into play:

One way to measure that is by looking at county-level results. Forty-nine of Minnesota’s 87 counties might be considered “Trump surge” counties; that is, Republicans ran at least 20 points better there under Trump in 2016 and 2020 than they had in the 2012 election, when Mitt Romney was the GOP nominee. Those counties are all part of Greater Minnesota, many are rural, and virtually all are overwhelmingly white. The share of white adults without four-year degrees in those counties 72% to 85%.

Demographically, those counties almost perfectly fit the mold of the swaths of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania where Democrats have lost the most ground in the Trump era. They were also, before Trump, politically competitive, and some even voted for Barack Obama in 2012. In other words, these are the first counties you’d look at to assess whether Walz has unique appeal where his party has experienced its most dramatic Trump-era slide.

While the differences between President Joe Biden and Walz were "negligible," there were differences between former President Barack Obama and Walz/Biden. This is what the Harris-Walz ticket needs for a win, it looks like (emphasis added):

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. 

As a parting thought, Kornacki made clear that the Harris-Walz ticket could still win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, which are considered to have more of a battleground status. "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," he concluded. 

Kornacki's article also speaks to that battleground status, or lack thereof, for Minnesota. "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," he noted. The North Star State has voted for the Democratic candidate every year since 1972, though Trump came close in 2016 and is looking to put the state in play again.

Walz himself admitted "this is always going to be a hard race, and "that it’s going to be close," as he did back in late June on "The Hill Sunday." This was before he joined the ticket, though, and even before Biden withdrew from the race.

The mainstream media, predictably, has presented Walz in a way that doesn't quite fit the far-left, radical record that he actually has. We're instead told how he's a "centrist" or "folksy." Many in the mainstream and leftist media have leaned into how he insults Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-OH) for being "weird," all while still claiming there's a "charm" to him and that he fits the nice label as a Minnesotan. 

In contrast, Shapiro handily won his 2022 gubernatorial election against Republican Doug Mastriano, 56.5 percent of the vote to 41.7 percent. 

While there's been plenty of chatter about how Shapiro was skipped over because he's Jewish, he's also not quite the moderate on all the issues. During Tuesday night's rally in Philadelphia, Shapiro made this clear when talking about sexually explicit books being made available to children in the name of "freedom." There were also concerns about a sexual harassment case coverup and how he didn't have the best of interviews with Harris to know if he wanted to leave the governorship or serve as number two.