Tim Walz is trying very hard to make it look like he’s not trying too hard.
“Look, a few weeks ago, I was sitting in St. Paul, minding my own damn business,” Walz said recently at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This has been a standard line of his since Kamala Harris picked the Minnesota governor to be her running mate and special envoy to the coveted “White Dudes for Harris.” These particular dudes are both the literal folksy folks in the crowd in their literal White Dudes for Harris T-shirts and the potential swing voters spread across the mythical sectors of Whitemanistan, U.S.A.
The point is, Walz likes to emphasize that he was not out there gunning for this job like some try-hard politician would. He didn’t go looking for this assignment. He was just minding his own damn business one day, puttering around at home: playing with his dog, or inspecting his gutters and picking up some new downspouts at Menards.
Something authentic like that.
But then, after President Joe Biden’s debate face-plant on June 27, and his exit from the campaign a few weeks later, Walz decided he might as well get himself out there a little more. He would shed his camouflage hat, throw on a tie, and try to fit some TV interviews into his busy schedule of changing air filters, hunting pheasants, and governing Minnesota.
And wouldn’t you know it, Walz was an instant sensation: He relentlessly touted Harris and crushed Donald Trump and dismissed certain Republicans as “weird” in a punchy procession of appearances. Next thing he knew, in early August, Harris was on the phone asking him to be her running mate, and Walz was saying, Sure, why not, he’d be happy to help—just as he would if, say, Harris were his friend down the road who needed help shoveling out her car after a blizzard.
“As I told the vice president, whatever I can offer, I will do,” Walz said in Grand Rapids, recounting Harris’s fateful “Let’s do this, buddy!” invitation. A sensation was born.
“I love this guy,” Barack Obama raved about Walz at the Democratic National Convention last month, the night before the effervescent everyman himself delivered arguably the best speech of the week. “You can tell those flannel shirts he wears don’t come from some political consultant,” Obama said. The guy was just so genuine, so pleasing, and seemingly everything the Democrats needed.
In early September, I set out to get a closer view of the pop-up populist persona—to see this happy accident in action. I wanted to get a better sense of how much of this character was real, how much was a bit, and how the whole Walz phenomenon was evolving beyond his homey debut.
During the run-up to the most important night of Walz’s campaign—his debate Tuesday with his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance—I attended several campaign rallies and smaller meet-and-greet events across four states. I talked with his friends, past and current staff members, and people I met along the way. In a few cases, his team allowed me access to Walz while he worked crowds and greeted donors, dignitaries, and volunteers in receiving lines. The campaign did not make Walz available for an interview.
Backstage in Grand Rapids, I ran into Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. Whitmer had just introduced her friend Walz at the rally, telling the crowd of about 800 that both he and Harris “understand our lives because they live lives just like ours.” She agreed to talk with me later about Walz. Like many people who know him, Whitmer described her midwestern neighbor in terms of mundane life scenarios. “If you drive by someone who’s stuck on the road,” she told me, “they might need a lift or a phone call or a tire change. I wouldn’t be able to change the tire, but I could make the phone call or give them a lift. Tim could do all three.”
When Harris picked Walz, she knew that this would be an abbreviated race, with limited time to make an impression. The campaign clearly saw Walz as embodying an archetype of American masculinity that would stand in contrast with the noisy grievance guys in the red MAGA hats and creepy venture-capitalist types like Vance, who can’t order a damn doughnut without breaking into hives. Walz is a much more approachable avatar for would-be Harris supporters, those classic rockers, tellers of dad jokes, and football-watching wearers of Taylor Swift friendship bracelets. They are content to sit at home and mind their own damn business unless called upon, in which case they’re happy to pitch in and help. How could these dudes—who ideally live in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—not relate to Tim Walz?
Several people in Walz’s crowds held signs reading coach, a reference to Walz’s former career as an assistant football coach at Mankato West High School before he ran for Congress in 2006. So what if it’s been nearly two decades since Walz has worn a whistle around his neck? The coach thing has been a key component of the regular-guy shtick, one that he does tend to lay on a bit thick.
In a video that the campaign released last week, Walz can be seen popping his head up from under the hood of the figurative turnip truck in his driveway. The vehicle is in fact his 1979 International Harvester Scout, which has served as a recurring prop in Walz’s stage set—just as Harris has deployed Walz himself as a kind of prop.
In the ad, Walz is schooling his online audience in the finer points of keeping a dirt-free carburetor. “You can always tell something about somebody’s maintenance by how clean their air filter is,” Walz said, picking up the truck’s filter and then putting it back down again (for the record, his hands are also immaculate). He is like a midwestern version of the Car Talk guys—except that Click and Clack could never pivot as seamlessly as Walz can into a discussion of, say, the evils of Project 2025.
But that’s the beauty of Walz, the Harris campaign and his allies will tell you a million different ways: He can do both. “He’s someone who can connect with people and knows what it’s like to be in their shoes,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Harris-Walz campaign chair, told me. “To be able to work on a car and talk about Project 2025 is great. But also, to know what it’s like to not have a ton of money in your checking account, and have the kind of struggles to go to the grocery store and live the life that people live.”
“THIS car video is why Tim Walz is so loved,” gushed Victor Shi, a member of the Harris-Walz youth-engagement team, while sharing the link on X. “No one else can deliver a message so authentically & get to a demographic that Democrats have struggled often to reach.”
Here’s another thing that Democrats sometimes struggle with: subtlety.
Let me pause now to remind everyone that Tim Walz is a politician. He is a former six-term congressman and two-term governor who until recently served as chair of the Democratic Governors’ Association. He can hustle, grandstand, “misspeak,” and be opportunistic, just like the rest of them. When Biden dropped out in July, Walz saw an opening. He seized it.
Walz had been thinking about what he might do when his second term as governor ended at the end of 2027. He’d kicked around the idea of running for president himself, according to people in his political circle. “But then, when it looked like Biden might drop out, things got accelerated for him,” Blois Olson, a longtime political commentator in the Twin Cities, told me.
The idea was that being mentioned as a possible running mate in 2024 would help if Walz wanted to be part of the conversation for 2028. He did not appear to be on Harris’s original shortlist. But as soon as it started looking like Biden might quit, Walz started doing as much cable TV as he could. He was an instant phenom and shot quickly into Harris’s top ranks of running-mate candidates.
“Having a good shtick is part of being a good politician,” Brendan Buck, a Republican communications strategist who was a top aide to Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan when Walz served in Congress from 2007 to 2019, told me. “Walz always struck me as a bit of a loudmouth, who was one of those guys on the Hill who maybe seems to be trying a little too hard.” This doesn’t make Walz a bad person, Buck added, or especially unique among politicians. “But it doesn’t give him special status as The Authentic One, either.”
Olson says that in his brief career as a running mate, Walz has benefited from the frenetic pace of contemporary politics: the fact that people tend to experience candidates as impressionistic blurs and pay little attention to anything that lies below the surface. Being able to cultivate a persona and ace a role can get you a long way. Olson said that Walz has unquestionably proven himself a talented political performer throughout his career. But veteran Walz watchers can also grow weary of his practiced yokel act. “Oh, he is totally full of shit,” Olson said of Walz. “And he’s also really good at being full of shit.” Olson seemed to mean this as a compliment.
In a crass sense, being “really good at being full of shit” distills a certain essence of what it means to be a good politician.
Walz is unquestionably a good politician. This has been evident in a variety of settings, beginning with cable interviews, the format that, more than anything, positioned him for this job. Back in July, he was firing off lines about Democrats fighting to preserve basic American freedoms—over their own bodies, lifestyle choices, health-care options, and whatnot—that went immediately viral. “These are weird people on the other side,” Walz said on MSNBC. “They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room.” His message: Americans should be free to mind their own damn business, and have others mind theirs.
Oddly, since Harris picked him, Walz has been largely hidden away from the national media. The campaign has been content to deploy Walz as more of a cartoon than a multidimensional character: dress Coach up in camouflage, pop in the Bob Seger eight-track, juice him up on Diet Mountain Dew, and send him onto the stage. His rallies are loud, boisterous, and well attended, usually more so than Vance’s.
Vance, in contrast, has been a constant media presence, often on friendly networks (such as Fox News). Polls show that Walz is much more popular than his Republican counterpart across the broader voting population, although Vance has received strong reviews from Republican-base voters, to whom he has become the ticket’s main message ambassador.
It’s a bit of a mystery why Walz has largely stopped doing national media, especially given how effective he was over the summer. The campaign seems to have trapped him in the same hyper-protective Bubble Wrap it has placed around Harris, and that was placed around Biden before her. This strikes me as a massive waste of Walz’s talent, but what do I know?
Perhaps this will change after Tuesday. The debate—between two midwestern populists of very different backgrounds, styles, and sensibilities—will be fascinating. Walz can detonate a line with the best, packs a lot of words and umbrage into tight sound bites, and has proved adept on TV. But how will this translate against the cool, cerebral vitriol of Vance? Will Walz’s default nonchalance survive the high stakes of the event?
What’s clear from watching Walz these past few weeks is that he can land a speech. He is honing his lines as he goes and trying out new ones that he’ll likely reprise against Vance. And he projects a particular relish on the stump when attacking his opposite number.
“We saw Senator Vance lead an audience when he said, ‘Well, they reduced interest rates this week; how terrible is that?’” Walz said last Saturday during a rally in a high-school gym in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “WHO BOOS FOR LOWER INTEREST RATES!?” Walz yelled, drawing out his disgust. He paused before dropping his punch line: “Venture capitalists, apparently.” (In fact, Vance reacted to a crowd booing a reporter’s question about the drop in rates by saying that it wasn’t enough to help struggling families.)
Walz is a winning retail politician, a prodigious hugger who laughs easily and is always passing out little pins imprinted with loons—the Minnesota state bird—to the kids he meets. At every stop he is endlessly deferential to Harris and careful to portray himself foremost as a servant to her success. He projects none of the self-important traits of certain past running mates who envisioned themselves as presidential “partners” (Biden always made a big deal out of saying he would not have accepted the No. 2 job from Obama unless he was assured that his vice presidency would be sufficiently consequential and worthy of his talents). Walz, in contrast, carries himself as a charmed political lottery winner, plucked from the prairie.
“Look, I just want to help,” I kept hearing Walz tell people. He cuts a convincing beta figure, content to play the ultimate assistant coach. Minnesota has a proud and winning tradition of vice-presidential candidates: Hubert Humphrey in the 1960s and Walter Mondale in the 1970s. (Both fared less well when they tried to run as alpha nominees—Humphrey losing to Richard Nixon in 1968, and Mondale to Ronald Reagan in 1984.)
Walz takes the stage to “Small Town,” the rollicking hayseed homage by John Mellencamp, released in 1985. The tune is fun, familiar, and apt for Walz’s rural upbringing in Butte, Nebraska, where he says there were 25 students in his high-school graduating class, 12 of them his cousins.
But for what it’s worth, every time I hear “Small Town,” I think of a previous Democratic running mate, another self-styled fighter for the little guy with a small-town rap: John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, a two-time presidential candidate, and John Kerry’s running mate in 2004. Edwards was a dazzling political performer in his own right, and he, too, used to wear out “Small Town” at his rallies. The lesson here is that shticks don’t always age well, and neither did the story of Edwards. His sweet-talking country lawyer routine—righteous champion of justice and handsome family man—would eventually vaporize in a swirl of $400-haircuts, extramarital liaisons, legal woes, a lovechild, and other tabloid unpleasantness.
Yes, Walz, like Edwards, was born in a small town (and he could breathe in a small town). But no, Walz is not John Edwards. He’s much more accomplished and less slick than Edwards ever was. These are very different political times, and just because he and Edwards have the same campaign song doesn’t mean that Tim Walz is also destined to come crumbling down.
The comparison, however, does ring with a cautionary echo. Very little in politics is truly authentic. And nothing is as simple as it seems—in a small town or on a big stage.
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