Our most recent book is Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Less than 48 hours after Biden's withdrawal, Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee. She just chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. It is the first time since 1980 that a Democratic nominee has chosen a Midwesterner.
While Shapiro and Cooper had the most impressive electoral records — and Kelly has won a swing state twice in four years — Walz has some attributes to point to.
He won the governorship by 12 points in 2018 in a good election for Democrats, two years after then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won the state by just 1.5 points. And in his 2022 reelection race, with Democrats facing tougher winds, he matched Biden’s seven-point victory from two years earlier.
Walz did better in the rural areas of the state in his 2018 race, while he relied more on the Twin Cities and areas around Duluth, Fargo-Moorhead and Rochester in 2022. He still carried some counties he had represented in southern Minnesota.
But perhaps the more optimistic case for Walz is how he did before that — in his campaigns for Congress.
He was first elected in 2006 in a southern Minnesota district that then-Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry had lost by four points, carrying the district by six. By 2016, Walz narrowly won reelection even as Trump was carrying the district by 15 points.
Harris has at the very least picked a running mate with a better electoral record than Trump’s running mate. Vance won his Senate seat in 2022, but he underperformed every other major statewide Republican in Ohio — often by a lot. Walz, by contrast, has generally overperformed his party’s expected share of the vote.
For now, Walz is little known on the national stage. A Marist College poll released Tuesday morning showed 17 percent of registered voters viewed him favorably, 13 percent viewed him unfavorably, and 70 percent offered no opinion.
Notable tidbits about Walz’s selection
- There are a few other ways in which Walz stands out as a VP pick:
- He would be just the fourth governor to ascend to that role since the Great Depression.
- He’s the first Democratic VP pick since 1964 who didn’t go to law school.
- It’s the second consecutive Democratic ticket (after Biden-Harris in 2020) to not feature anyone with an Ivy League degree — which hadn’t happened since 1984. (Walz attended little-known Chadron State College in Nebraska and got his master’s degree from Minnesota State University at Mankato. Harris attended Howard University and got her law degree from the University of California College of Law.) Trump and Vance are both Ivy League-educated.
- Were Walz to be elected, Minnesota will have provided three of the 13 most recent vice presidents — after Hubert Humphrey and Mondale.
