We’ve never seen a running mate quite like Tim Walz before

Conventional wisdom is that vice-presidents don't really matter, writes Mary Dejevsky. But this one might...

Walz is funny, a good orator and was the first to call Trump ‘weird’ (AP)

At an exuberant public rally in Philadelphia, just a few hours after being formally recognised as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, US vice-president Kamala Harris introduced her chosen running mate and the candidate to take her place as vice-president in the event of her election victory in November.

He is Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota – a staunchly Democratic state in the US heartland, “flyover” country par excellence – who has an exemplary all-American profile: former National Guard, former schoolteacher, former school football coach, and a family man married to a schoolteacher.

In choosing Walz, who at 60 is a near-contemporary, Harris, 59, spurned the widely voiced common wisdom that she should select someone from a swing state, who could potentially bring crucial electoral college votes with him in the event of a close race. The favourites here were Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral college delegates, and Mark Kelly, a Democratic senator from Arizona.

At least some of her calculation emerged loud and clear from the first Harris-Walz rally on Tuesday evening, where he had to stand rather awkwardly on the podium as she delivered a half-hour eulogy.

First, he ticks many of the boxes she does not. He is from a modest, provincial and rural background, having grown up on a farm in Nebraska – both Harris’s parents were academics in California. He has served in the military. He is a family man – Trump and Vance between them had already pinpointed Harris’s childlessness and complicated romantic history as an electoral weakness (which in conservative America it could well be). He is a better orator than she is, allowing himself a dash of humour. Most obviously, he is a white male, who will “balance” a ticket headed by a mixed-race woman.

The nomination of Harris, who made her legal and political career in California, de facto excluded several people who would have been promising candidates in another year. Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan (an important swing state) may have been a good choice, but would have meant an all-female ticket. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, would also have been in the frame, but an all-California ticket was hardly going to appeal across the length and breadth of the US.

And if the US is not ready for an all-female ticket, it probably is not ready for one headed by a mixed-race woman and a gay man. Pete Buttigieg, transport secretary in the current administration, ran in the presidential primaries four years ago and was a much-lauded mayor of South Bend, Indiana. As a gay man, his nomination – either for president or vice-president – could be envisaged in today’s United States, but not this year. Once Harris was heading the ticket, the near-certainty was that a white straight man would accompany her – and so one has.

There are other considerations that may have given Walz the edge over the other contenders to be Harris’s running mate. One is the sharpness of the rhetoric he has used against Donald Trump, as the Republican nominee, and his running mate, JD Vance.

In what had seemed almost a throwaway line, he had described both of them as “weird”, a term that enjoyed instant resonance in popular discourse and social media, and looks set to stick. Walz’s early life means that Vance – from a highly dysfunctional background – does not have the monopoly on modest beginnings and the undoubted appeal of such stories to American voters, as, in modern times, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama could attest. He also has a solidity, in terms of his career and reputation, that makes for a heightened contrast with Trump.

At least as relevant, though, could be Walz’s record in Minnesota, where he has governed as an unashamed liberal and progressive – providing free school breakfasts and lunches for all children, defending a woman’s “right to choose”, following the Supreme Court decision to rescind abortion as a federal constitutional right, and guaranteeing wide health insurance provision. In this, his first public appearance as vice-presidential nominee, he also spoke of his and his wife’s experience of IVF.

Much of this is diametrically opposed to Vance’s mix of hard-scrabble self-reliance and Roman Catholic conservatism, and clearly chimes with Harris’s own liberal views – albeit they are thought too liberal by some to make many inroads into the Republican vote, though this remains to be seen.

What is shaping up to be quite a sharp ideological divergence, however, means not only that US voters could face a very clear choice in November, but – as could be glimpsed at this first rally – that this could become a  campaign in which the way Minnesota is governed is held up as a template for the direction in which a Harris-Walz White House would try to steer the United States.

It should also be noted that Minnesota is a bit more interesting than just another straight-down-the-line Democrat-voting state. While it has voted Democrat in federal elections for decades, it also has an independent streak, having elected Jesse “the body” Ventura, a former navy commando and professional wrestler, as state governor in 1999 under the flag of the US Reform Party (he is now a Green). His tenure proved more difficult than he may have hoped, and he declined to seek re-election, turning to TV presenting instead.

The choice of Tim Walz to be the vice-presidential nominee, and the prospect of Minnesota under his leadership featuring as something  of a model of Democratic governance, could in part give the lie to a dismissive claim that is wheeled out before every US election at the stage when running mates are being selected. This is that the choice of vice-presidential candidate really does not affect the outcome of a US election; it is all about who will become president, no one else. This time around, such views have already been voiced by Trump – and, with a nice self-deprecating touch, by his intended vice-president, JD Vance.

Sometimes, though – it seems to me – the choice of running mate does matter, and this may be one of them. In fact, it could be argued that Kamala Harris is living proof that running mates and vice-presidents matter during the campaign. There is probably no way that she would have won the nomination, had she not effectively inherited it from Joe Biden when his own candidacy became a liability and the Democratic Party needed a new nominee, fast.

Yes, it was totally immaterial who Hillary Clinton chose as her running mate – the eminently forgettable Tim Kaine – because she was so much the dominant candidate. But Bill Clinton’s – surprise – choice of Al Gore, rather than an older party sage, gave the ticket a youthful, optimistic feel that surely helped deprive George Bush – and his singularly unimpressive vice-president, Dan Quayle – of a second term.

And while Mike Pence may not have helped or hindered Donald Trump’s election in 2016, he certainly made a difference when he defied Trump to confirm his 2020 defeat. Today, it could be argued that Trump’s campaign has been weakened by the premature choice of running mate for a contest – against Biden – that is not now taking place.

How much, or even whether, Tim Walz will strengthen Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign will only transpire as they criss-cross the US in the 90 or so days that remain before the vote on 5 November. Can they match the appeal of Trump-Vance in the depressed heartland? Can they sustain the energy and optimism of their Philadelphia debut through the party convention and beyond? Their slogan, for public chanting, is “No going back”. We shall see.