Yeah, We Know: Tim Walz Isn’t Romney Or Manchin. He’s A Democrat With Popular Ideas!
Relax, Never Trumpers!
When Vice President Kamala Harris announced that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was her running mate, everybody rejoiced like dancers from The Wiz. However, the response from anti-Trump conservatives was mostly subdued. The Bulwark crew, especially Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, was worried that 1980s TV sitcom dad Walz would turn off moderates. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough lamented, “It seems that progressives love Walz; he is a progressive.”
“There wouldn’t be a lot of ideological balance there between Kamala Harris and Governor Walz,” he went on. “You would have two people viewed as progressives inside the Democratic Party instead of an ideological mix like you might have with [Pennsylvania Gov. Josh] Shapiro. Is this the whole idea that they’re going to excite the base and this is gonna be a base election? They don’t care what moderates in Pennsylvania or other states think?”
According to Pennsylvania’s 2020 exit polls, 40 percent of voters were Democrats (Joe Biden carried them by 92 percent), 41 percent were Republicans (Donald Trump carried them by 91 percent), and 19 percent were self-identified independents (Biden carried that group by 52 percent). We can probably agree that the independents were decisive: In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton among independents 48 to 41 percent. However, she also did much worse than Biden among Democrats, only carrying the much larger group by 87 percent to Trump’s 11 percent.
Obviously, the Harris campaign cares about moderate voters because she nominated a moderate. Although former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy claimed Walz was the “Bernie Sanders of Congress,” that’s actually Bernie Sanders. Yes, McCarthy, who’s not that bright, probably meant the House and not the Senate, in which case he’s still lying: That’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Right-wing attack ads hitting swing-state Democrats regularly feature spooky images of AOC and Ilhan Omar. They don’t include the photo of Tim Walz hugging a piglet.
It’s OK that progressives like Walz
Walz is a mainstream liberal Democrat, and we shouldn’t accept retroactive gaslighting from center-right commentators who suggest he was an early Squad member. Walz wasn’t even a member of the House Progressive Caucus! However, as governor, he signed bills providing free college tuition, a child tax credit, universal free school lunch, and abortion rights.
Scarborough insists that the Democratic ticket offer an “ideological mix,” which is frustrating considering that Republicans have never done this. George H.W. Bush was considered a moderate when Ronald Reagan put him on the ticket in 1980, but Bush quickly embraced Reagan’s far-right positions, especially on abortion. John McCain and Mitt Romney shifted right to win their primaries and still chose hardline conservative running mates.
Trump picked creepy weirdo JD Vance not MSNBC-friendly Republicans like Tim Scott or Nikki Haley (neither of whom are moderate ideologically). That alone should justify a base-driven election. Besides, the top of the GOP ticket is an adjudicated rapist and a convicted felon, who’s also the oldest presidential nominee in history (including all the non-criminal candidates). No truly “moderate” voter would consider Walz the radical on the ballot.
Anti-Trump conservatives preferred Shapiro, who is hardly Joe Manchin to Walz’s Bernie Sanders. The Bulwark’s Tim Miller wondered if the Left had “bullied” Harris into not choosing Shapiro, but that theory has zero supporting evidence. It seems as if Shapiro wasn’t entirely comfortable in the number two position, an issue that Sen. John Fetterman had raised (and Fetterman is not a progressive, at least right now.) His position on school vouchers was a concern, and although he easily defeated election-denying Doug Mastriano in 2022, Mastriano nonetheless attacked him in ways that would’ve come up in the general election: Mastriano argued that Shapiro had “disdain for people like us,” because he “grew up in a privileged neighborhood, attended one of the most privileged schools in the nation as a young man — not college, I’m talking about as a kid.” Mastriano added that Shapiro sends his “four kids to the same privileged, exclusive, elite school, $30-40,000 per pupil.” (That school is Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy in Bryn Mawr, which is why it’s not that credible when Republicans accuse Democrats of rampant antisemitism.)
When Clinton picked Sen. Tim Kaine from Virginia as her running mate, that was hailed as a “move to the center,” but Kaine didn’t help her win independents in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin. She even lost independents in Virginia.
Many Clinton supporters still blame her loss on progressives not showing up or voting third party. Look, voting for Jill Stein should come with a souvenir dunce cap, but that doesn’t mean we should listen to the center-right pundits who suggested putting Mitt Romney or Nikki Haley on the ticket. It’s a base-suppressing move that was sure to fail. Harris/Walz is the true “unity” ticket because it unifies the entire Democratic Party.
I think the issue anti-Trump conservatives have with Walz isn’t that he’s progressive but that progressives actually like him. David Roberts observed on social media that for “lots of DC types, ‘moderate’ has just come to mean ‘pokes the left in the eye.’ If the left isn’t mad, it can’t be moderate, can’t appeal to swing voters. It’s so stupid.”
So far, the Harris/Walz ticket is giving 2008/2012 energy — a stark change from the bleak situation just a few weeks ago, as well as during 2016 when Clinton surrogates dismissed concerns about low Democratic voter enthusiasm.
“Big crowds mean nothing,” former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said in May 2016. “You don’t get extra points for an enthusiastic vote versus a moderately enthusiastic vote.”
Rendell was wrong, of course. This crowd waiting to see Harris and Walz in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on Wednesday definitely means something. Scarborough’s been out of politics for a while, so maybe he’s forgotten that it’s good when a candidate “excites the base.”
Democratic policies are popular
Longwell said she was “really in the [Sen. Mark] Kelly, [Kentucky Gov. Andy] Beshear, Shapiro, [Michigan Gov. Gretchen] Whitmer, Pete [Buttigieg] vibes. And I’ll tell you, because every single one of them, has at some time had to win Republican votes.”
Buttigieg does a great job on Fox News, but I don’t think he presents as more “moderate” than Walz. Restricted country club Tudor Dixon crushed Whitmer among Republicans in 2022, but Big Gretch decisively won moderates and independents. Kelly had issues with labor, which could’ve hurt the ticket in the Rust Belt.
I respect Longwell’s opinion, and I think she’s genuinely concerned about Trump winning. However, it does bother me whenever anti-Trump conservatives act as if Democrats haven’t won an election prior to 2020. They keep insisting that Democrats moderate their positions and become Republican-lite to defeat the MAGA personality cult, but Democrats have won the popular vote in every presidential election of my adult life aside from 2004 (way to break the streak, John Kerry!). Bill Clinton beat Bush and Bob Dole. Barack Obama handily defeated John McCain and Mitt Romney. Democrats lost in 2016 because we didn’t have our house in order, and while we welcome anti-Trump Republicans into our house, that’s not an invitation to change our views on public schools, abortion rights, and trans people.
When Kyrsten Sinema abandoned the Democratic Party in 2022, Charlie Sykes wrote an “I told you so, liberals!” piece for The Bulwark, suggesting that Democrats shouldn’t have been so rude as to demand that Sinema behave like a Democrat. Anti-Trump Republicans adored Sinema, and if she only read The Bulwark, she might’ve thought her political career was in good shape. Unfortunately, she alienated the very people she needed to win elections.
Open-minded, pro-democracy Republicans should feel comfortable supporting Harris and Walz, neither of whom are rapists or felons. Harris and Walz are gracious leaders who’ll treat all voters with consideration, but I hope they continue centering all Democrats, as well. It’s a winning strategy.
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Great column, Stephen. I hope you don't think that's just me sucking up, because you've written many good ones. But this finale says it all:
"Open-minded, pro-democracy Republicans should feel comfortable supporting Harris and Walz, neither of whom are rapists or felons. Harris and Walz are gracious leaders who’ll treat all voters with consideration, but I hope they continue centering all Democrats, as well. It’s a winning strategy."
It's long past time for Dems to stop taking advice from ANYONE in the GOP, never-trumpers or not. Every time that Dems water down their message to attempt to appeal to the so-called, imaginary group of "moderate Republicans", it hurts them with their core supporters. The majority of the country supports the Democrats platform, and they should stand strong for it, keep showing how it helps everyone to thrive, and protects more people from the cruelty and stupidity of the greedy and vicious right wing. People are hungry for normality to return to national politics, and this team can do it.
that pic of Walz and the piglet will never not be adorable