Washington Wednesday: Kamala Harris chooses her running mate

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 7th of August, 2024. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Paul Butler.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Washington Wednesday.

After President Joe Biden was forced out of the race and Vice President Kamala Harris secured enough support to become the presumptive nominee, the burning question was who would join her as running mate. A list of senators and governors in moderate and battleground states included names like Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. But in the end, it was Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

BUTLER: Here now with more on what Walz brings to the campaign is WORLD’s Washington Bureau reporter, Carolina Lumetta.

CAROLINA LUMETTA: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz does not look like your typical running mate on a left-wing presidential ticket. He’s known for his love of Diet Mountain Dew, signing a free school lunch bill, and, in true Midwestern dad fashion, posting videos of fixing cars and attending the state fair with his teenage daughter. Yesterday, he was introduced to the world as the 2024 Democratic vice presidential candidate.

TIM WALZ: Hi, this is Tim. …

KAMALA HARRIS: Listen, I want you to do this with me. Let’s do this together. Would you be my running mate, and let’s get this thing on the road?

WALZ: I would be honored, Madam Vice President. The joy that you’re bringing back to the country, the enthusiasm that’s out there - it would be a privilege to take this with you across the country.

LUMETTA: Walz is new to presidential campaigning but not new to the political scene. After 24 years as a high school teacher, football coach, and a non-commissioned officer in the Army National Guard, Walz flipped a southern Minnesota congressional district blue and held onto it from 2007 to 2019. Then he tackled another hard race: keeping the governor’s seat blue while party support started to slip during Trump’s administration. He recently gained national attention after making a comment on MSNBC about the Republican ticket of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.

WALZ: Well, it's true. These guys are just weird. They’re running for he-man women’s club haters or something. That’s not what people are interested in.

Other Democrats went on to repeat the phrase…and frame the new Harris campaign around it.

HARRIS: And by the way, don’t you find some of their stuff to be just plain weird?

By now, Donald Trump has tried to turn the insult around.

TRUMP: “Well, they're the weird ones. And if you've ever seen her with the laugh and everything else, that's a weird deal going on there. They're the weird ones.

So Walz has gained a reputation for his communication abilities, and that launched him into the veepstakes. But what is his record as a leader?

CHRISTOPHER DEVINE: He’s shifted some by the way since he left Congress. He did vote more as a moderate there.

Christopher Devine is an associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton. He recently co-authored a book on the role of vice presidents. While Walz served in the House, he frequently voted with Republicans and was rated one of the most moderate members.

But Walz’s governorship has trended more liberal. For example, Walz is a staunch abortion advocate with a 100 percent rating from Planned Parenthood. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he mandated lockdowns, indoor masking, and even a hotline for reporting people who didn’t follow the rules. Also in 2020, Walz waited three days to deploy the National Guard to respond to rioters after the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. He was criticized for allowing the city to burn … and admitted his handling of the situation was “an abject failure.” Nevertheless, Devine says Walz’s midwestern persona may obscure his liberal record in the eyes of voters.

DEVINE: It's what voters see in that person. And if they see in Tim Walz, Hey, here's a guy who comes from rural America, literally came from a small town in Nebraska originally, and someone who dresses the part of being kind of, you know, down to earth and not very formal, and that could be the kind of thing that makes people say, you know, I hear his voting record’s liberal or what he's done as governor, but you know, he seems pretty mainstream to me.

Harris also hopes to win over another demographic that is reluctant to come out to vote…Generation Z.

SOHALI VADDULA: She's a lot more energetic and a lot more people relate to her. Like she's a child of immigrants. She’s fairly young—she’s definitely younger than Joe Biden and Trump.

Sohali Vaddula is a rising sophomore at Brown University and the communications director for College Democrats of America. She’s part of the Gen-Z demographic that the Harris campaign hopes to win over at the ballot box.

VADDULA: And us as college Democrats, we want to see things like student loan debt cancellation and the stuff that you get for climate change and how she stands for things like legalizing weed. There are a lot of different things that think young people just resonate with.

Vaddula says mobilization efforts were more difficult with Biden at the top of the ticket. But now, she sees a shift in the campaign message that she can get behind:

VADDULA: I think the best thing we're going to utilize is not giving people kind of like an alternative to Trump, but rather telling them what they're voting for. Instead of saying like, this is what you're voting against, we're going to tell them, or we're going to give them something to vote for.

That includes removing protections for unborn babies and gender-confused children, and hedging on support for Israel in its war against Hamas. A new CBS poll found that Trump and Harris are now tied across several battleground states where Biden was losing. This includes Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada.

Devine says the Trump team has struggled to respond to both Harris and Walz:

DEVINE: Frankly, the Trump team has done such a bad job of carrying a simple, consistent message on who Kamala Harris is so far. They've had two weeks to define her. But we see Donald Trump getting distracted and bringing up, you know, all these other issues, the ridiculous statement that Kamala Harris somehow turned black. They can't get distracted on Harris or on Walz. And if they blow the opportunity by meandering over here or there, someone's going to define Tim Walz, but it's going to be the Harris campaign.

For her part, Harris is adapting Biden’s campaign message. Here’s Devine again.

DEVINE: When Joe Biden was still in the race, he seemed to be focusing a lot more on the threat to democracy issue. That was probably the main way that he was framing the campaign. And again, it's hard to judge how effective that was because his age was always limiting how far he could go with any given message. But Kamala Harris, while not ditching that entirely, seems to be shifting more to this simple message of freedom, as she's put it. And of course, like any good campaign message, that could mean many different things. For a lot of people, that's going to mean abortion. From the pro-choice side, it could mean a range of other things as well.

LUMETTA: Al Cross is a veteran journalism teacher and campaign commentator from Kentucky. He said Biden’s decision to drop out helped switch the momentum from Trump to Harris. Much of the excitement might fade in coming weeks, what political scientists call “the honeymoon phase,” but this election cycle is less predictable than most.

CROSS: There was such a rebound effect from Biden's departure. There was great relief among not just Democrats, but I think a lot of persuadable voters that they no longer had to choose between Biden and Trump. And while they may not have decided they're going to vote for Harris, they're certainly open to that possibility, and that is one reason that you can say her campaign has momentum.

After last night’s rally, Harris and Walz are now on a seven-state campaign blitz to many of those battleground states now in play. As of this week, a virtual roll call has given Harris 99 percent of the delegates needed to win the nomination at the Democratic National Convention later this month.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Carolina Lumetta.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.