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As Kamala Harris consolidated Democratic support to replace the addled Joe Biden atop her party's presidential ticket, speculation quickly fell on who would be her vice presidential pick. Boasting what legacy media described as a "deep bench" of potential candidates, the choice among Democrats quickly dwindled to three middle-aged white men of apparently moderate bearing: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly.
Shapiro and Kelly both hail from vital swing states that Biden narrowly won in 2020 and offered to boost Harris' chances in the electoral college. Shapiro, a popular governor even among Pennsylvania Republicans, also offered some appeal for the Jewish vote, which has trended increasingly red since Hamas' horrific October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and in light of Harris' expressed sympathies for Palestinians.
Kelly is a former Navy aviator and astronaut who talks tough on border security and gun control (his wife, former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, is a victim of gun violence, severely wounded by a would-be assassin in 2012). These stances could have drawn moderates toward Harris' bid in Arizona and perhaps nationally.
Either Shapiro or Kelly could conceivably have tipped the election in Harris' favor, but on Monday the presumptive Democratic nominee announced that Walz would be her running mate. Walz had been something of a dark horse—71 percent of Americans say they had never heard of him before, as opposed to about half who knew of Shapiro and Kelly.
The Minnesota governor did make an impassioned audition for the nomination in national media, but his only claim to fame is having started a juvenile social media campaign to brand Republicans as "weird"—unlike his own party, which believes men can get pregnant and until just three weeks ago was telling the world Biden is mentally as sharp as a tack.
While GOP nominee and former president Donald J. Trump had begun to make some headway in Minnesota in the waning days of Biden's aborted reelection campaign, Walz's state is reliably Democratic, having gone Republican only once since 1956. His two predecessors as Minnesota vice presidents, Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, both went down to landslide defeats in their own presidential bids after having served as unimpressive one-term vice presidents.
Although Walz, 60, is only six months older than Harris, he hardly embodies the youth and energy she desperately wishes to covey to escape Biden's geriatric aura. Indeed, Walz's heavy build, puffy jowls, pronounced wrinkles, and receding white hairline make him look more like somebody's Trump-voting grandfather than the running mate of a biracial California woman meant to represent the future of the Democratic Party.
Adding to the mismatched image, Walz has a strong record favoring gun rights. He hosts an annual gubernatorial turkey shoot and even boasted that he could outperform Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance in a pheasant hunt. On closer inspection, his administration, though decidedly below the national radar, has been scandal-ridden. Its dismal record includes a $250 million COVID-19 fraud that FBI Director Christopher Wray called "an egregious plot to steal public funds meant to care for children." A state audit concluded that Minnesota's education authorities had simply ignored evidence of wrongdoing.
So why did the uninspiring Walz get the nod? Almost totally unknown on the national level, he is unlikely to pose any challenge to Harris in office, whereas either Shapiro or Kelly could potentially stake out independent positions to blunt or outflank Harris' radical-Left politics. Walz's blue-collar mien and gun politics notwithstanding, he poses no challenge to Democratic shibboleths on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, the only issues on which Harris has even tried to establish policies of her own.
Perhaps most damning of all, Walz, unlike Shapiro—who was reportedly Harris' second choice—is not Jewish in a contest where Muslim votes in swing states may matter. Witness the keen attention Democrats and their media allies devoted to Shapiro's college argument that Palestinians are incapable of living in peace and his apparently false claim to have volunteered in the Israel Defense Forces as a student. Then look at Shapiro's sheepish attempts to distance himself from both claims as they added up to count against his selection for the ticket. While antisemitism has a disgracefully welcome home in today's Democratic Party, Harris' oversensitivity to the Palestinian cause may have caused her to pick a running mate who will do more harm than good.
Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. The views expressed are the author's own.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
