Tipsheet

The Media Keep Touting This Power That Tim Walz DOES NOT Have

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  August 07, 2024 1:45 PM

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.” 

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: 

And then there’s Steve Kornacki from the top rope, shredding this Walz is a blue-collar guy narrative: 

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. 

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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