How Tim Walz Went From Obscure Governor to Harris’s V.P. Pick

[Music] from New York Times opinion this is the Ezra Klein [Music] show it is Tuesday August 6 we just found out that Tim Walls the governor of Minnesota who we just did a show with a week ago you can find it just back there in the archives is going to be kamla Harris's choice for vice president and so we now know what the shape of the races we have Donald Trump and JD Vance on one side and we have KLA Harris and Tim Walls on the other and we've been covering this closely enough and talking about walls enough that it felt like it would be good to just have a conversation about how this looks so I'm joined as I am so often uh in the cycle by our great senior editor CLA Gordon CLA hi Ezra so I've seen walls described as a Unity pick but he isn't exactly a moderate and Minnesota isn't exactly a swing state so would you describe this as a safe choice or a bold choice I would describe walls as clearly a bold choice so my friend Nate silver who I have been aligned with on most questions over the course of this campaign has been making this argument that chapiro would have been the Bold choice and shapir would have been the Bold choice because there's a little bit of friction with the left potentially on Israel maybe on some other questions but look Shapiro has a 60% plus approval rating in Pennsylvania so far as any state in the country is likely to decide the election Pennsylvania has the best shot at it and so forget what the left is saying pick the guy who's going to give you the best shot at winning the state you most need to win I would say in that analysis Shapiro is a safe choice I don't think that there would have been static from the left in a way that would have been meaningful for the Harris campaign Democrats were quite United Shapiro's actual positions on Israel are not very different from kamla Harris's not very different from frankly any of the other vice presidential possibilities Waltz emerges as a media phenomenon he is not an unknown figure he's the head of the Democratic governor Association he's the governor of Minnesota which is not a swing state though it is worth noting that in internal Democratic polling after Biden's collapse Minnesota had become competitive but it's probably not with Harris under any of the vice presidential possibilities you know Boris Wisconsin There's an argument that somebody like walls will be appealing in in Midwestern states I don't expect there to be a significant effect like that but walls gives this interview on Morning Joe where he says that uh Trump and Vance are weird they're the kind of people who ruin Thanksgiving and in a minute he functionally upends all Democratic messaging the Harris campaign begins to sound like him walls goes on a media tour he's on CNN a bunch MSNBC a bunch he does an hour interview on the as GL show which I will say by the way I have interviewed a lot of politicians I don't know how many by now I try to avoid doing it because politicians are terrible to interview and walls is one of the five best politicians I've ever interviewed because he actually thinks aloud he is responding to you in the moment in a genuine conversational way you can always tell with politicians this buffering happening in their heads you ask a question and this program fires up really fast says what are all the ways I could answer this wrong and what is my message here supposed to actually be and walls you could feel the conversation actually happening it was like talking to a a normal person which is one reason he's so effective on TV but walls begins giving these interviews he breaks through the media he breaks through the attentional field is what I would say Shapiro becomes the candidate who is most likely to help you win Pennsylvania walls becomes the vice presidential candidate most likely to help you win the day-to-day fight for attention and message and enthusiasm and Harris picks walls which I'm sure there are a lot lot of reasons she did so but it is a pick about making the ticket most appealing nationally and trying to continue generating a momentum and energy that she has been generating to the surprise of many Democrats in a moment she became the presumptive nominee and that is a riskier play but it is a bigger play it is a bet on the intangibles of the Harris ticket not the tangible possibilities of Pennsylvania so the comparison that you see around to uh Tim Kane Hillary Clinton's 2016 pick because they have similar affable dad Vibes you don't think that's a fair comparison I think that comparison is insane and I don't understand the people like I've seen people who know a thing about politics making that comparison and it has made me question their judgment at fundamental level I like Tim Kane Tim Kane is a good man I've covered Tim Kane for a long time nobody can remember a thing Tim Kane has ever said in public he is just not a memorable media figure the theory of a candidate like Tim kanaine was the theory of a good governing partner Hillary Clinton was very confident she was going to win the election she really liked Tim Kane she felt that Tim Kane in election where she was trying to appear reassuring against the very unre assuring Donald Trump Tim Kane helped her do that but she wasn't looking at Cain to win her any states she wasn't looking at Kan to be a kind of messenger she could not be she liked him it was a perfectly good pick for a perfectly good way of thinking about the vice president which is who Do You Think Can best do the job if you die but what walls is again is a media phenomenon he also has a great record as a governor we can talk about some of that he could be a very significant governing partner in his ability to to help Harris with particularly house Democrats where he served for some time and actually knows them and has a good sense of how the house works you can imagine that as one of the things in her head Tim Walls is a candidate who knows the house and he knows Governors and those are two places that Harris does not herself have any kind of deep experience but that is not what vaulted walls from being an obscure Governor to becoming her vice president what vaulted walls from being an obscure Governor to her vice president was walls broke through the cacophony of not just the campaign but the post Harris Moment The Run of every charismatic white male Democrat who thought he could be a possible vice presidential pick for Harris that's Budaj jedge that's Roy Cooper that's Shapiro you could just run this list down that's Mark Kelly he broke through past all of them reshaped the whole way people were talking about the race developed a rabid online fan base in a matter of days there's a certain segment of liberal leaning pundits or campaign strategists who act like attention is not a thing who act like that whole mediating layer between what a candidate says and how they get heard doesn't exist and that the only thing that really matters are there sort of demographic characteristics the state they are from the kinds of policy positions they take but that's not true at all to compare to Tim kanaine is just miss the entire field on which Harris is currently thinking about playing which is a field by the way that Joe Biden seated to Donald Trump which is a field of attention Joe Biden's theory in 2020 and then again in 2024 was it the election should be about Donald Trump in 20 When Donald Trump was the unpopular incumbent president that was a theory that benefited Joe Biden hugely Donald Trump wanted the election to be about Donald Trump Joe Biden wanted to be about Donald Trump the election was about Donald Trump and Donald Trump lost in 2024 when Biden's communication skills had deteriorated and he was the unpopular incumbent president making the election about Donald Trump which was always the theory of the Biden campaign was failing in part it wasn't working because Biden's age had made the election too much about Biden's own competence but also people had become somewhat nostalgic I think wrongly but nevertheless for Donald Trump's economy for a time before the war in Gaza a time before the war in Ukraine and Trump's existence was not repelling people in the way that strategy required him to do Harris from the second she became the clear nominee some intangible energy emerged around her to the extent that Republicans were so shocked by this Vibe shift they've called it a sop they pretend it's concocted but no Democrat expected it either the whole KLA is brat the whole world of being coconut pilled Harris has completely shouldered Trump out of his typical position of dominating the media dominating social media dominating cable news it has become harder and harder for Trump to get a word in edgewise the main ways that Trump ADV Vance are breaking through are when they say outrageous unpopular things which by the way was predictable it is what Donald Trump always does when he can't break through into the media he gets crazier and crazier until people begin to report on him again which is an excellent strategy for the Harris campaign but so they have begun dominating attentionally and they have picked a vice presidential candidate who is able to help help them do that a vice presidential candidate with a very very clear capability to dominate in the media now whether or not that works all the way through I don't know but that is the theory here that was not the Tim Kane Theory so just to underline this you think weird won this for walls I don't think there's any doubt and do you think weird is more than just a moment do you think that's a sustainable message a successful long-term message in this election I think they could overdo it if you go to the conversation I had with walls we talked a lot about that and I both think the weird messaging is very powerful and walls is able to do it from a grounded place that other Democrats can't when he actually delivers that line the first time not the first time he has ever delivered it but where it broke through in the cycle he talks about being from a small town of 400 he talks about there being no private schools in that town he talks about the way in which JD Vance's effort to weaponize the resentment of rural Midwestern Appalachian whites is inauthentic that that is not what people in small towns are like that that people don't like that politics has become like this they don't want politics tearing their Thanksgiving dinner table apart other Democrats picking up the weird thing they can take it into a bit of a schoolyard Place fine so they have to be careful with that and I think walls talks in that that interview uh quite perceptively about how to be careful with it but I do think he picks up there and that the Democrats have now understood this vulnerability in Trump advance in an important way and I would say it's actually a different vulnerability in the two of them Donald Trump is weird in a very particular way he's a person who you might ask how will you make Social Security solvent and he might answer by lying about how many people were at his inauguration speech when he became president he's a narcissist his mind goes down very strange Pathways uh I I talked to somebody who worked with him where the guy was telling me what it's like to brief Donald Trump and he said you just spend the whole hour chasing squirrels you tell him something and he just goes wherever he goes JD Vance he's not weird he's off-putting is the way I would put it and the particular problem with Vance is he's too online behind Donald Trump where Donald Trump had a very authentic to Donald Trump form of weirdness but it was a Showman's weirdness it was a Barnum and Bailey weirdness behind him emerged this very dark online set of subcultures I would call it the sort of extended Maga online Cinematic Universe but it has white supremacists in it it has very weird forms of natalists in it PR natalists in it it has people who just are obsessed with uh race and immigration it has Neo reactionaries if you dig in to where the intellectual world that is following behind Donald Trump has gone and we've I've done a lot of this reading it's bizarre and JD Vance his conversion went through this online world what is weird about JD Vance is what is weird about somebody who spends too much time watching Neo reactionary YouTube videos and then participating in the comment sections and that is why Vance has this completely unusual particularly for a Vice Presidential nominee tendency to take a perfectly popular policy idea or insight about the world and present it in the most unpopular offputting possible way so when he comes out and says that childless people should pay a higher tax rate than people with children because we want to disincentivize bad things and it's incentivize good things in some way he is describing the child tax credit which is a very popular policy supported by among other people KLA Harris supported by among other people Tim Walls not supported importantly by many congressional Republicans but you would never describe that policy in terms of punishing people without children you describe that policy in terms of helping people with children when Vance is out there saying that people without children are more often deranged and sociopathic on Twitter these things are natural in the world he was in where you were vying to show that you are most on the train he has described himself in in this language it is very common out there as an anti-regime politician when you begin talking to those people like Patrick Denine and these post- liberals they talk a lot about the regime right the sort of networked group of Institutions media government business Etc that dominates All American and in this world you have to show you're actually on board and the way you show it and if you go to the Tucker Carlson interview where JD Vance makes his comment about childless cat ladies it's actually worth hearing the way Tucker Carlson opens that interview so there are two kinds of people who run for office and one category is really big one category is really small the big category is people who just want to get to office because they want to prove something for their absent or alcoholic fathers or fill some empty space inside or have power over you that's almost everybody then there's a small category people run for office because they really believe something and they've got something to say they really mean it you almost never see these people one of is JD Vance he didn't need to run for office but he is he's running for Senate in Ohio and since the second he announced places like The Daily Beast and the Washington Post and the Atlantic the axis of Protectors of the ruling class have gone crazy they hate him they really hate him and that's how you know he means it this is how you know JD Vance is serious by inviting that kind of attack and a probium he is proving to these people that he is for Real the politicians in the mogle world who are for real are the ones who everybody else hates Vance is promoted to Donald Trump by the very online people around Donald Trump Donald Trump Jr Steve Bannon Elon Musk is reportedly was was pushing for JD Vance Elon Musk is terminally online and that is what I think walls picked up on and now what Democrats are picking up on which is that there's something unsettling about where these folks have gone and Trump picked a vice president who amplifies that rather than someone who like Doug burgum who calms it down but Trump in 2016 said a lot of things that the media thought was off-putting and it turned out he could win a presidential election saying those things a lot of that stuff that seemed to out of right-wing talk radio world is it possible this is just the next the next wave next gen of this kind of rhetoric Donald Trump can absolutely win this election and nobody should have any Illusions about that this is at best a tossup if you look at the polling right now Harris has gained a lot from where Joe Biden was she's ahead of Trump narrowly National polling it depends on what polls you're looking at of battleground States and we don't have a lot of highquality battleground State poll polling since Joe Biden stepped aside but she's much more competitive there but it is very competitive it's like tied in Pennsylvania tied in Wisconsin tied in Michigan the thing that is different is she might have brought Georgia Arizona Nevada back into a winnable place for Democrats so I think she's expanded the map but she hasn't made Trump an underdog in the midwest so the idea that that Trump can't win that's wrong but the things that Donald Trump has been good at are not the things that make him offputting in the media I don't believe so Donald Trump correctly identifies certain things that that people are very upset about including immigration and that had been suppressed in both Republican and Democratic Party politics in 2016 so Donald Trump creates a cleavage in terms of what the election is about in 2016 that favored Republicans in 2012 the Obama Romney cleavage was over the economy in 2016 the central cleavage was over immigration I think the smart run for Donald Trump in 2024 which at times it seemed like he was leaning into was almost as a kind of stability candidate remember how much you liked the Donald Trump economy before all this inflation remember how the the world seemed more peaceful maybe that was because Donald Trump was such a loose cannon that people were afraid to do anything that they made him angry right that was the argument Trump was making for a while and that argument was Breaking Through People felt there was a lot of disorder under Joe Biden they also felt that Joe Biden was too old to be in charge of it right they didn't trust that he could handle a world that had gone a little nuts in the way prices seemed to be going nuts in the way that Russia had invaded Ukraine what was happening Gaza was a catastrophe and the more Trump Falls away from that the more he's not making the argument about inflation but is making the argument that it's not possible to be both black and indianamerican at the same time the more he is out there giving voice to his resentments the more he is out there saying the election has been and will be stolen Trump was campaigning in Georgia and he opened up in Georgia by attacking Kemp the popular Republican governor of Georgia for not doing enough to steal the election on his behalf in in 2020 that is not the Donald Trump that wins elections and what seems to be happening right now is as he feels more backed into a corner and is having more trouble breaking through he is lashing out from that space of resentment pay attention to me he's running a more high-risk set of plays and as of yet I don't think they're working out great for him in some ways the single best thing that KLA Harris has done for Democrats is to knock Trump off the campaign he was run running and knock him back into the resentful cramped conspiratorial version of himself that is now emerging because this guy who is Raging at Kemp this guy who is going to the National Association of black journalists and saying that nobody knew kamla Harris was black I will say by the way as a Californian who was aware of kamla Harris in California politics it was known actually people were aware of that this guy does not strike people as excellent on inflation laser focused on the economic and pocketbook problems they have to solve this is not effective campaigning right now from Donald Trump and Vance is not helping well I'd love to wrap by just talking about uh waltz's potential vulnerabilities particularly with race becoming more Salient in the campaign and one that's come up I think the most is how he responded to the protests and the riots after George Floyd's murder do you think that's going to be a risk in a point of attack or maybe even reminding bringing 2020 back into the electorates memory could potentially be a plus for Democrats do you want to say what the attack is he hesitated in calling the National Guard to respond to the riots in Minneapolis so it's interesting to me because the attack on the left on walz was that he did call in the National Guard and there are places it didn't I think it is going to be hard for Trump to make the election about the George Floyd riots it's also not for nothing a period in which Donald Trump was the President right it reminds people of a period of disorder and Chaos under Donald Trump bringing people back to 2020 when Trump was mishandling the pandemic and there is a huge racial Reckoning is not bringing people back to the part of the the Trump presidency that I think Trump should want to remind people of I don't want to tell you that walls doesn't have possible uh vulnerabilities every politician does I think they're not likely to go after his vulnerabilities they're likely to go after KLA Harris's vulnerabilities uh so I I don't think walls has said or done things that are offensive or unusual enough for them to become major dimensions of of the campaign and I think the question is does he help fortify Harris so that leads you to what are Harris's vulnerabilities I think the case are going to make up on Harris is one that she is responsible or at least can be blamed for things people do not like about the Biden Administration inflation and high prices and high levels of border crossings although those have gone substantially down in the last couple of months so that is going to be a series of attacks they run I don't really think walls helps her on that in particular but maybe and then there's a you the thing that Democrats have often worried about with Harris which is just to be blunt about it that a liberal black woman from San Francisco is not a good candidate profile to win Wisconsin Michigan and Pennsylvania and there what walls is on the ticket to do is balance out the perceptions of Harris they're going to have walls functionally going door too offering to check the oil in your car in those states that is the the vibe of wals that is what they have picked with him I actually think in a weird way Shapiro would have been worse for Harris on this level that chapiro and Harris are both lawyers they both have a sort of Obama era politics vibe to them very smart very educated seem like they could have been on the same law review in in law school seem like they could have worked for the same firm and if you're worried about the way in which the the Democratic party has become a more educated Coalition that it seems to give off a college voter Vibe and has begun winning college voters and losing non-college voters even though Shapiro does very well in Pennsylvania but remember Shapiro ran against a truly deranged candidate in Pennsylvania so I don't know how much we should look at that election for governor as a sort of comp with people who ran against stronger candidates in in their races but even though she as well in in Pennsylvania when you look at them and you listen to them they sort of have the same energy which if what you're trying to do is balance out that dimension of Harris and send a signal to voters who don't see in her and in the sort of online fervor around her something that looks like them or feels like them walls might be helpful from that perspective walls is a not a a former high-flying lawyer but a former High School football coach and longtime uh you know Army reservist again from everything we know from vice presidential past that probably is not going to matter that much uh people vote for the top of the ticket not the bottom of the ticket but to the extent that there are attacks that I think the Harris campaign is thinking about she has these past liberal positions she is associated with the unpopular parts of the Biden Administration and she is a candidate who reflects the increasing Highly Educated Democratic Coalition as opposed to the sort of older more working-class democratic Coalition I think walls is there to help with the last of those and he doesn't make the first two worse did Harris just pick a younger Biden as her VP her version of the kid from Scranton it looks like that to me and it doesn't um I do think it is easy to forget that what Biden was there to do in 2008 was add foreign policy experience that was a foreign policy election first and foremost at least until the financial crisis hit and it became an economic election and Biden had a confidence and an ease talking about foreign policy that if you were worried that Obama's position on Iraq was really helpful among Democratic primary voters but just as a younger less tested candidate that there were some voters who might think this is not the guy I want to use a Hillary Clinton uh ad answering the 3:00 a.m. phone call by was there to help with that he was there for other reasons too you know Joe from Scranton that kind of thing but first and foremost that was a foreign policy election at that time and Joe Biden was a balancing pick for an anti-war ticket and I think to the extent walls is there to balance he is balancing other things for Harris he's not really a foreign policy figure he's not a longtime you know member of the Senate he's a Midwestern governor who again broke through because there's a straight talking plainness to the way he is able to attack the Trump Vance ticket and the way he's able to present who Democrats are and who occupies the space of normaly in American life that reshaped the way Democrats were talking in the election Biden you know for all that he was known as a both a blustery but very effective ordor Biden was never able to do that he did not break through in the OA campaign he was there to to make Obama seem more seasoned um walls is there to help Harris dominate the messaging of this campaign and help push Trump and Vance into a space that Democrats want them to occupy which is a space of abnormaly a space of something's off with these guys you can't trust them they're not going to bring stability they're going to bring eccentricity and chaos and Democrats become very much the party of normaly the the problem Joe Biden begun to represent for them is that in his age and in the way he presented he didn't Comfort people it seemed like a risk to choose Joe Biden Harrison walls are they want to be the non-risky ticket and walls is there to make Vance and make Trump look weird not just by saying it but by existing as a kind of icon of what normaly looks like in American life well I was just waiting for you to say weird again so I think that's a good moment to wrap thank you so much Ezra thank you [Music] Claire this episode of the EST kin show is produced by our senior editor CLA Gordon factchecking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker our senior engineer is Jeff geld with additional mixing by almond sahota the show's production team also includes Annie Galvin Michelle Harris Roland who Elias isth and christien Lynn original music by Isaac Jones audience strategy by Christina Samy lski and Shannon Busta the executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is an ster and special thanks to Sonia Herrero