Tim Walz Is the Biden That Harris Needs—Same Vibes, Same Base

Kamala Harris has chosen. She has picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate and in so doing she has both set the terms for the 2024 presidential election and she has confounded legions of pundits who still do not understand elections roughly 250 years into our history as a democracy.

What is more, not only has Harris made the best possible choice among the excellent options from which she was choosing to run and eventually serve alongside her, she did it confidently and from strength. She did not choose a candidate to placate critics, she chose one to further energize the broad national coalition that is lining up to support her vision of America.

Meet Tim Walz, Harris’ VP Pick Who First Called Trump WeirdMINNESOTA NICE

Josh Fiallo, Mini Racker, Mary Ann Akers, Brett Bachman

The creation of the Harris-Walz ticket makes starkly clearly the choice Americans will face this November. It presents two career public servants versus to men who have dedicated their lives primarily to serving themselves. (Don’t forget, Donald Trump in 2020 had the least public service experience of any presidential candidate in U.S. history—zero and J.D. Vance has the least public service experience, a year and a half in the Senate, of any vice presidential candidate in U.S. history.) Harris has served the public in every job she has had during the past 34 years and so too has Walz.

Harris and Walz offer a positive vision for the future and a kind of upbeat energy that evokes and often surpasses that of Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, and John F. Kennedy. Sources inside the Harris camp noted that more than any of the other candidates under consideration for the VP job, Walz passed the “vibe test.”

He both got along well with Harris—which is perhaps the most crucial consideration of all in such a vetting process—and he captured as she has the exuberance, joy and even humor that has elevated the Harris campaign to date. He’s a funny guy as countless social media clips and appearances have illustrated and notably, he is the guy who took a Harris comment and turned it into an effective campaign message when he rightly framed Trump and Vance as “weird.”

In other words, by picking Walz, Harris has made this election a clear choice between the Smarm Brothers, two of the slimiest, lyingest candidates with the most extreme and twisted records in American politics (one who changes his name and persona more often than your average mobster in witness protection and the other one who is actually a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist) and two actual, normal, likeable American humans.

Don’t underestimate that fact. It won’t show up in a ton of chin-stroking political commentaries but elections are about how candidates make you feel not about your reasoned reactions to their policies. And in this case one message is going to make people feel good and the other is going to tap into their anger, bitterness and the darkest most hateful impulses they have. And truly, that’s not an exaggeration.

While the Trump campaign has already tried to portray Walz as a “dangerously liberal extremist,” good luck with that messaging. Walz is the highest ranking retired enlisted soldier ever to serve in the U.S. Congress. He served nearly a quarter century in the Army National Guard.

He served as the ranking member of the Veterans Affairs Committee in the House and achieved vastly more for veterans than Trump did during his entire presidency. He is a hunter and an outdoorsman. He was a football coach who led his team to a state championship, and he has been one of the most under-appreciated but vital sorts of American hero: a teacher.

He has governed from the mainstream throughout his career and his views far more closely dovetail with the majority of Americans on issue after issue—from protecting reproductive freedom to defending voting rights, from providing lower cost health care to offering meals to needy kids in school, from protecting the climate to introducing common sense gun laws—than do those of the fascist-loving, democracy-hating extremists on the GOP ticket.

Are you going to tell the farmers you understand them better than Walz, Don? Is that something you learned in the 4-H Club back in Forest Hills, Queens?

The GOP has tried in the hours since the Walz announcement to suggest he was somehow selected as a sop to critics of the pro-Israel stance of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. The problem is Walz’s record is strongly pro-Israel and that in fact, recently, Shapiro has offered much stronger criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu than did Walz.

Walz already has the support of multiple Jewish groups and Jewish leaders. Moreover, of course, Harris’ record on Israel’s right to defend itself and in seeking long term peace and stability in the Middle East is vastly superior to that of Trump. Yes, it is humane and balanced and recognizes the human rights of innocents on both sides of the conflict but that is what decency will do, a trait unknown and never seen in Trump.

Since the Walz selection, pundits of different stripes have sought to analyze it to death (she picked a good guy who happened to be the best guy for the job…how hard is that to see?) and in so doing they have revealed their slavish service to conventional wisdom is every bit as potent as is their disregard of historical facts.

To choose just one example, some have said the “obvious” choice for Harris was Shapiro because he was governor of a critical “blue wall” state. But, um, vice presidents are almost never chosen primarily to deliver the electoral votes of their home states. You can go back more than 30 years and arguably the only one who meets that description is Tim Kaine of Virginia. All the rest were either from states that were already in the bag for the person at the top of the ticket or they were electorally insignificant. (I did the math here.)

In other words, Harris stayed true to herself and the spirit of her career in public service, to that of the Biden-Harris administration, and of her nascent but already potent campaign. She chose a man with a great record that would, like hers, appeal to the vast majority of Americans, one who will be a star on the stump, in the media and in a debate and most importantly, one who will be a great vice president.

At the same time, she could not have picked a choice that would make the distinctions between the Democratic and the Republican tickets more clear or show the Democrats in a better comparative light to the profound threat posed by Trump, Vance, Project 2025 and the MAGA movement.

In short, Walz is in many ways the Joe Biden Kamala Harris needed on the ticket. Same vibes. Same base. Legit blue-collar roots. Solid governing record. With the addition of his teaching, coaching, military record…heck, he even speaks some Mandarin Chinese…he’s kind of a Swiss Army Knife candidate. He does it all, checks all the boxes.

Harris is so far playing an impressive hand—from the circumstances around the announcement of her candidacy, to her swift unification of the party, and her unprecedented mobilization of volunteers and donors. She has made a clear enunciation of her platform of defending our freedoms and empowering America and Americans for a better future, and performed impressively on the campaign trail to date. Likewise, the Walz choice is pitch perfect, and seems certain to send the Democrats into their national convention in Chicago with momentum at their back and a November victory clearly in sight.