| Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of Tim Walz: neither have most Americans. An NPR/PBS/Marist poll published yesterday found that 71% of voters didn’t know who he is. Until a few weeks ago, he had barely broken through in the national political discourse. But as a surrogate for the Harris campaign during a Donald Trump campaign swing through his home state of Minnesota, he captured national attention with his forceful attacks on the former president – and his straightforward refrain went viral: “These guys are just weird.” There are questions over whether Walz will be Harris’ most effective possible advocate in the swing states that will decide the election. But there is little doubt that Democrats are excited. “Progressives like him,” Chris Michael said. “He maintains the unity and the enthusiasm around the Harris campaign. They are going to believe they can ride ‘weird’ all the way to the White House.” Who is Tim Walz? Walz has the kind of biography that American political dreams are made of. Born and raised in rural Nebraska, he was a school teacher and football coach when he decided to enter politics in 2006, winning an upset victory in a Republican-held congressional seat with a campaign largely staffed by his former students. He served in the army national guard for 24 years, and he is a gun owner who shifted firmly to the left on gun control during his political career. In the cold calculus of American politics, it probably also helps that he is a white man. At a raucous rally introducing him to voters in Pennsylvania last night, Kamala Harris ran through those elements of his biography, referring to him as Coach Walz and noting that he was voted most inspiring teacher in his students’ yearbook and acted as faculty advisor to the school’s gay-straight alliance. Walz, for his part, was extremely sunny: thanking Harris for “bringing back the joy”, chucking in a risque joke about JD Vance’s alleged interest in couches (look it up if you dare), and declaring: “We’ve got 91 days. My God, that’s easy. We’ll sleep when we’re dead.” Helen Sullivan has five key takeaways from the event. He won the Minnesota governorship in 2018, and again in 2022. While his overall record is ultimately more moderate than progressive enthusiasm for his candidacy might suggest, he used his success to legislate on a series of major Democratic priorities: abortion protections, gun control, universal school meals, and the legalisation of marijuana. “Minnesota is showing the country you don’t win elections to bank political capital,” he said in 2023. “You win elections to burn political capital and improve lives.” For more on his backstory and political career, see Rachel Leingang’s excellent profile. Underpinning Walz’s success is his ability to marry his politics to a smalltown regular-dad vibe that helps ward off any Republican claims of extremism. (It’s hard to watch this video of him teasing his daughter about her vegetarianism and being tricked into going on an intense theme park ride, for example, and come away believing that he’s a radical socialist threat to the fabric of America.) “He has a kind of jovial, plainspoken folksiness while still being very articulate,” Chris said. “He’s been quite practical in the way he thinks about policies that make people’s lives better.” Why is the ‘weird’ thing important? Like all of the most effective political catchphrases, Walz’s attack line, which has been picked up by many other Democrats, is simple enough – but it has a disarming, lighthearted quality. It highlights the extremity of the Trump-Vance agenda without deploying the warnings about the threat to the future of democracy that are credible enough, but may be too abstract or grandiose to connect with swing voters. One effective variation, for example, has been to ask people if they can imagine Trump “coming home after a day of work and picking up a Frisbee and throwing it. And his dog catches it, and the dog runs over, and he gives him a good belly rub because he’s a good boy.” “The Democrats have been searching for a way to take that message out in a simple, clear way that isn’t full of fear and doubt,” Chris said. “It’s an effective way to talk about politics in the way voters talk about it themselves.” How will the Republicans attack him? The initial attacks on Walz yesterday were predictable enough – the Trump campaign called him a “dangerously liberal extremist”, and the Republican House majority whip, Tom Emmer, called him an “empty suit”. “They are calling him a radical leftist, as well as an extremely boring choice,” Chris said. US media reports suggest that the main plan is to focus on the idea of him as “dangerously liberal”, just as Trump says Harris is. One possible risk of Walz’s “weird’ line is that it can be painted as akin to Hillary Clinton’s infamous reference to Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” – an insult to the voters who are considering supporting the Republican ticket. “He has been asked about that, and said that he’s not talking about the voters, he’s talking about the candidates,” Chris said. “They will probably tar him with the snobbish elite coastal liberal label. But it’s hard to do that when you hear him talk – it’s not obvious that it works with him in the way it did with Clinton.” Who else came close? | 