On Tuesday, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate. The party had spent the past week arguing over who would be the best possible pick. Activist voices had supported Walz or some other progressive figure, while centrists had pushed for Mark Kelly or Josh Shapiro. Harris’s choice shows that she wants to take the fight to Republicans.
Harris’s vice president will not decide the presidential race on its own. But that does not mean Walz has no role to play. Throughout the campaign, one of Walz’s jobs will be to help Harris redefine herself in the public eye and hammer home her raft of new policy positions.
Defining Kamala Harris
The top job for Kamala Harris for the next three months must be to reintroduce herself to swing voters. She has changed a number of closely held policies in the past few weeks. Harris has come out against Medicare for All and some aspects of the Green New Deal. She has made it clear that she would govern much differently as president from the way she campaigned as a candidate back in 2019. For some of her positions, she will be able to fall back on the position staked out by Joe Biden while she was his vice president. But for others, most notably Gaza and inflation, she will feel intense pressure to change the official administration line and move either to the left or the right.
Making such a shift will be difficult for the country’s swing voters. Currently, Harris is enjoying a substantial boost from sympathetic media. That boost is likely to dissipate the moment she makes a serious gaffe at a press conference or debate. Harris will need to explain her shift in policy positions. She will be confronted with her changes at every serious confrontation of the campaign process. The smallest slipup will be covered ad nauseam in conservative media and will provide an opening for mainstream media sources to push a similar narrative.
What Walz brings to the table
Walz will be able to help this process. While he is not as centrist as Shapiro or Kelly, he is also not strongly identified with the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. He has been a major proponent of the “weird” campaign that Sanders and others from the left have criticized as lacking substance. In addition to calling Republicans weird, Walz will also be skilled at making Harris’s new positions clear. The ticket will need to coalesce around a new message and set of priorities fast, and Walz will be one of the leading surrogates who will help make this change happen.
Harris will be viewed by much of the media as picking the most liberal choice she could have in the selection of Walz. But she is still picking a governor who turned his back on defunding the police and has never seriously proposed a state takeover of healthcare. Walz should be well-positioned to convince the nation that Harris is a new candidate and will be able to implement the popular policies that Democrats will hope to run on in 2024. Time will tell if the American people will follow this new message.
