Kamala Harris’s selection of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate was, like most events of this turbulent political season, mostly unforeseeable just a few weeks ago.
Instead of bolstering her ticket with a Democrat from a crucial swing state — or even one who routinely elected Republicans up and down the ballot — seemingly at the 11th hour, Ms. Harris opted for Mr. Walz, a 60-year-old former congressman. Mr. Walz is a white Midwestern governor from a largely agrarian state. His selection holds the potential of winning back some of the rural regions and even states that are now staunchly Republican. This could make for a winning strategy in the Electoral College, which is now daunting for Democrats.
Mr. Walz will be a potent weapon Ms. Harris can readily deploy on her behalf. But he carries downsides that shouldn’t be overlooked, beginning with geography and extending to his time as governor during a period of immense upheaval for Minnesota and the country.
Mr. Walz’s strengths are clear: He spent over a decade as a public-school teacher and football coach and served in the Army National Guard; in 2006, he flipped a Republican-held House district in rural Minnesota and beat back G.O.P. opposition in several trying election cycles. He’s relatively progressive and a gun owner.
Democrats have several enormous challenges that the Harris campaign, no matter how well it might function, cannot readily solve. The selection of Mr. Walz could help remedy the problem of working-class voters who have been bleeding out of the Democratic coalition, especially since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. White voters are by far the largest segment, but there have been defections from socially conservative Black and Latinos, as well.
Two other factors work in his favor: Progressives like him, and he performs well on television. The latter may have mattered even more to Ms. Harris’s team. Mr. Walz rocketed to prominence by lashing Republicans as “weird,” which became something of a rallying cry after the criticism of JD Vance’s comment about “childless cat ladies.”
The contrasts are stark between Mr. Vance and Mr. Walz, and that’s what Democrats like. Mr. Walz is 20 years older, boasts a much deeper record in government and appears at the minimum to be much more telegenic.
Ms. Harris would be the first woman president, and only the second nonwhite one, and she seems to have determined that a politician decidedly unlike her is required for this campaign against Mr. Trump. Mr. Walz’s liberalism isn’t California-inflected. He is of a vanishing political breed: the heartland left populist.
Within the Biden administration, Ms. Harris was often sidelined on major policy initiatives. She remains, for all her time in the public eye, something of a blank slate. In some ways, this makes her choice of vice president more critical as it offers her supporters a sense of what President Harris could achieve distinct from her role as vice president.
On policy matters, in particular the Israel-Hamas war, Mr. Walz assuages, momentarily at least, the restive progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He has a deepening populist track record that could buoy Ms. Harris, signed into law a raft of pro-worker legislation, like a standards board for nursing homes, a ban on noncompete clauses and a bar on anti-union captive-audience meetings. As governor of Minnesota, he quickly codified abortion rights after the fall of Roe v. Wade, signed legislation to safeguard gay and trans rights and helped to create a state-run program to provide paid and family medical leave to workers. Other accomplishments that thrilled the left included driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, legalizing marijuana, a “red flag” gun law and universal school meals. He also signed legislation restoring voting rights to former felons.
Mr. Walz’s foreign policy views are thinly sketched, but he notably lacks Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania’s record of forcefully backing Israel and clashing with the pro-Palestinian protesters who came to the fore after the Oct. 7 attacks. When Mr. Biden was the presumptive nominee, Democrats feared mass protests at the Chicago convention later this month, and a Harris-Walz ticket could defuse some of these tensions. In the swing state of Michigan, with its disproportionately large Arab American population, Mr. Walz will at least have more of an ability to reset relations that had deteriorated under the Biden administration.
Typically, the conventional wisdom on running mates is correct: They do not matter all that much. Voters focus on the top of the ticket. But there are genuine risks to picking Mr. Walz over Mr. Shapiro. As the statistician Nate Silver recently argued, Pennsylvania might be the “tipping point” state in this election, the single factor that decides whether Mr. Trump returns to the White House. Mr. Biden barely carried the Keystone State in 2020 after Mr. Trump flipped it, also by a minuscule margin, in 2016. Foregoing Mr. Shapiro, who won the governorship by 15 points in 2022, will put that much more pressure on the Harris-Walz ticket to win potentially the party’s most vital electoral asset.
The distinct advantages of bringing on Mr. Walz are less clear. Mr. Walz’s own state has become competitive for Republicans, but Democrats haven’t lost it since Richard Nixon’s landslide in 1972. Mr. Walz wasn’t needed to rescue Minnesota, and he’s not well-known enough in the so-called blue wall Midwestern states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
No matter Mr. Walz’s advantages or disadvantages, Republicans will get to work picking apart his gubernatorial record. He was the governor of Minnesota in 2020, when George Floyd was killed and riots consumed Minneapolis. Ms. Harris’s support of criminal justice reform and fleeting embrace of the protest movement that year — she tweeted in support of a Minnesota bail fund for protesters in the state — has been fodder for the Trump camp already.
There are other policy decisions that could come back to haunt Mr. Walz on the campaign trail. Just as Republicans have assailed Ms. Harris for the migrants crossing the border and filling American cities, they could hammer Mr. Walz for giving driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, a policy that is popular in Democratic states but can be viewed critically elsewhere. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, is already criticizing Mr. Walz for granting voting rights to former felons — an initiative that conservative and moderate voters could view skeptically. Mr. Walz “is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide,” said Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign press secretary.
For now, Democrats have the momentum, with polls showing Ms. Harris on the rise and the Walz selection already exciting the base. Their convention, like the G.O.P.’s in July, is expected to be a show of unity and even euphoria.
And then, just as it did for the G.O.P. convention, reality will set in: A bitter, incredibly close election will be settled in just a few short months. Mr. Walz, for now, meaningfully fortifies Ms. Harris. And he shows just where she felt, as a political candidate, that she may have been falling short.
Ross Barkan, a novelist, is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, as well as a contributor to New York magazine and The Nation. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
