PITTSBURGH — Vice President Kamala Harris’s pick of Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), the two-term governor of Minnesota, was a shot across the bow that this election cycle is going to be a get-out-the-base election rather than the coalition builder Democrats would have enjoyed if she had chosen Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) as her running mate.
Mike Mikus, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist, said this race will look very similar to the election cycle we saw with former President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection race rather than his 2008 race. In 2008, Obama ran an aspirational race with a message of “Hope and Change” that attracted a sizable amount of working-class “New Deal Democrats” to his coalition; in 2012, he shed those voters in favor of delivering the new base of Democrats called the ascendant coalition that had a heavy focus on minorities, suburban college-educated women, and young people.
As a result of that pitch to the leftward party “base,” Obama became the first president since Franklin Roosevelt to lose voters in his reelection while still winning overall — but as a unique candidate, he was able to pull that base election off.
The next Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton in 2016, was not successful with that shift left. The former first lady, who was less likable and trusted than Obama, fell short because many of those legacy New Deal Democrats had now folded long-term into the Republican Party. Joe Biden was able to bring just enough of them back in 2020, in large part because of the pandemic, but polling leading up to this cycle before the president dropped out of the running in July showed these voters’ disappointment in his left-wing governance.
As a result, these voters were going back to former President Donald Trump in this year’s election cycle.
Harris is further left than Biden, and if the press ever interviews her, or gives her the same scrutiny they gave her before she was named the Democratic nominee, voters will be able to see her positions on the economy, energy, the border, and crime are demonstratively left of Biden’s policies.
Walz, who served six terms in Congress with a left-wing record, has governed for two terms in Minnesota as a proudly progressive governor.
Chris Borick, Muhlenberg College political science professor, said when you are one of a couple of hundred members in the House, you are there to represent your district. “However, when you are the executive of a state, you can be more true to your political beliefs,” he said.
Borick nonetheless said that because of Walz’s Will Rogers-like folksiness, people might believe he is a centrist.
“In politics, it is often about what you project with your style and not always what your policies have been,” he said.
Paul Sracic, political scientist and fellow at the Hudson Institute, said the Walz pick reminds him of Republican Mitt Romney choosing Paul Ryan in 2012: “It emphasizes policies your opponents are most likely to attack.”
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A Shapiro pick would have brought competence to the ticket, Sracic said. Not so with Harris’s choice.
“Walz had the biggest COVID spending case in the country, he has had a lack of oversight by his Department of Education — the list goes on and on,” he said, adding if there are violent protests in Chicago, “The GOP will have been handed the two weakest law and order candidates.”