The left loves Tim Walz. Can he unite the Democrats?

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has been picked as Kamala Harris’s running mate — and the American left couldn’t be happier. This is not because Walz himself is an ideological leftist. While he certainly has progressive credibility — in 2023, he passed a series of left-liberal reforms dubbed the “Minnesota Miracle” — he’s also taken more centrist positions on a whole slate of issues, including hot-button ones like crime. The left’s romance with Walz is deeply entwined with hostility to his chief rival for a spot on the ticket: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Harris’s decision on Shapiro, who has a history of hostility with the party’s pro-Palestinian faction, had become seen as a bellwether for whether she’d be meaningfully different from Biden on Gaza. Walz looked like the most progressive available anti-Shapiro, and so emerged as the left’s preferred alternative. Walz’s elevation earns the left a big victory. Yet because Walz himself isn’t of the left, the pick seems intended to serve a unifying purpose: a candidate who appeals to all different stripes of Democrats for different reasons. The fact that Democrats across the political spectrum seem thrilled by the pick — with effusive support coming from people ranging from Sen. Joe Manchin (WV) to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) — seems to validate the theory. It’s important to be clear: The VP selection matters way less for elections than people think. It’s much more important to select a potential president than an optimal running mate. But you can see why Harris sees picking Walz as smart politics. It allows her to simultaneously hand the left a win without necessarily tacking left — potentially keeping her coalition united even as she works to win over the general election’s decisive centrists. Is Tim Walz a progressive or moderate? Yes. Record-wise, it might seem like there are two Tim Walzes: the progressive governor beloved by the American left, and the centrist member of Congress who predated him. Yet in actuality, the two men are easier to reconcile than you might think. The Minnesota Miracle reforms, enacted in a single legislative session, read like a progressive wishlist. They include paid family leave, free school meals, marijuana legalization, a 100 percent clean energy mandate by 2040, and a slew of protections for organized labor. But I use the word “progressive” and not its cousin “leftist” deliberately. The Minnesota Miracle policies are all squarely within the Democratic mainstream: none betray an ideological commitment to the party’s socialist or otherwise radical wings. In fact, Walz has clashed with the left in the past. As governor of the state where George Floyd was murdered, he faced significant pressure to sign on to defunding police. Yet he rejected the idea, instead signing a slate of police reforms that kept police funding static in 2020 and sending $300 million to local public safety offices in 2023. Walz has become the left’s factional choice not because he’s one of them, but because he was the best they could plausibly hope for. The left-wing case for Walz can be hard to disentangle from the left-wing case against Shapiro — someone the left detested for offensive comments about Palestinians he made in college and hardline hostility to campus pro-Palestinian protestors. But Walz’s position on Israel-Palestine is hardly left-wing. The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg has put together a list of Walz’s positions and actions that basically reflect the traditional pro-Israel consensus. Walz’s position on how to end the current Gaza war is virtually identical to Shapiro’s. The most important difference is less Middle East policy than domestic: Shapiro has been far harsher on pro-Palestine campus protests than Walz has. So while Walz is the left’s chosen candidate, he is not a candidate of the left. He’s a mainstream Democrat with a record containing elements that both progressives and moderates can like. When appeasing the left is good politics The best political case against Walz is that Minnesota is not really a battleground. If Harris had chosen Pennsylvania’s Shapiro instead, she would have been maximizing her odds of winning the most important state in the Electoral College. But the idea that vice presidents deliver their swing states is at best overstated — and most likely probably wrong. My colleague Eric Levitz recently did a deep dive into the political science research on the subject, and the weight of the evidence strongly suggests that vice presidents don’t really have much of an effect on the ultimate presidential outcome. By contrast, there’s at least some reason to believe that Walz’s unique ability to appeal to all factions of the Democratic Party might help Harris down the stretch. The strongest Trump attack on Harris, at least to date, is that she’s too far to the left. Scored by one (dubious) metric as the most liberal member of the Senate in 2019, she has drawn Republican flak for previous positions ranging from Medicare-for-all to banning fracking to decriminalizing border crossing. In response, Harris has tacked to the center: repudiating many of her past unpopular positions in favor of more moderate stances that align better with mainstream public opinion. The message that Republicans are “weird” is designed to play up the notion that she represents the vast American middle while Trump is the true extremist. Walz helps make this message more credible. A very ordinary-seeming Midwestern white guy, he literally invented the “weird” attack on Trump and J.D. Vance. While he’s recently played up his progressive accomplishments, he’s also demonstrated the ability to take centrist positions when it’s politically convenient. He has a talent for winning over people with displays of empathy, including speaking about Trump supporters as relatives and neighbors. In his Walz endorsement, Sen. Manchin says, “I can think of no one better than Governor Walz to help bring our country closer together and bring balance back to the Democratic Party.” Moreover, his celebrity status on the left gives Harris crucial running room to keep up the strategic centrism. By handing her left flank a victory, she’s theoretically built major credibility that she can spend to defray a left-wing revolt over some of her more centrist stances. From Harris’s perspective, the Walz pick is an exercise in coalition management. It helps her keep the Democratic base united and energized while continuing her new moderate outreach to general election swing voters. If she’s right, the choice might end up mattering more in Pennsylvania — and elsewhere — than attaching herself to Shapiro’s brand.

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The left loves Tim Walz. Can he unite the Democrats?