The Progressive Populism of Tim Walz

Kamala Harris set up a virtual primary for the Democrats who wanted to join the party’s 2024 ticket as her vice-presidential running mate. She offered them all—governors and senators, progressives and centrists, East Coasters and Midwesterners, Southerners and Westerners—an opportunity to secure the nomination. And they all gave it their best.

So how did Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, arguably the least well-known and least politically connected of the finalists, come from the back of the field to win Harris’ confidence?

Democratic Party insiders and the political pundits who listen to them are struggling to figure out what just happened. But there is nothing complicated about the Walz surge.

“Their idea of freedom is to be in your exam room, your bedroom. You know, banning books, we’re banning hunger. These are Democratic policies.”

What Walz recognized—to a far greater extent than more centrist and cautious VP prospects such as Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro—was that Democrats wanted to add a happy warrior on the ticket with Harris, whose replacement of President Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee has given the Democrat’s 2024 prospects a significant boost in morale and in the polls.

Walz had no problem fitting the bill. His record and political instincts positioned him as a candidate who is capable of winning where Democrats need to prevail in the race against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance.

As a Democrat who had won six races in a rural, Republican-leaning congressional district in southern Minnesota and then two terms as the governor of a politically competitive Midwestern state, Walz knew exactly how to rally the party base and to reach out to the progressive-leaning independents who must be mobilized to defeat the Republican right.

Where other Democratic candidates and party strategists had struggled for years to figure out how to characterize Trump and the MAGA cabal that has taken over the Grand Old Party, Walz got to the point in his first interviews as a VP contender. “You know there's something wrong with people when they talk about freedom: freedom to be in your bedroom, freedom to be in your exam room, freedom to tell your kids what they can read,” Walz told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “That stuff is weird.”

The “weird” line went viral, as Democrats from across the ideological spectrum embraced what turned out to be a highly effective critique of Trump and Vance.

But there was much more to Walz’s appeal.

In a remarkable series of cable TV appearances in late July, at a point when the former teacher and National Guard master sergeant was still in the back of the pack of Democratic vice-presidential prospects, Walz made an argument for Harris and the party that was rooted in the rural values of regions where Democrats have struggled to compete in recent years.

“I grew up in a small town of 400 people. I have said I had 24 kids in my class—12 were cousins—graduating. That’s small-town America,” began Walz in one of his first MSNBC appearances during the VP race, turning the tables on Trump and Vance. “I said the thing that most irritates me and baffles me... is a failed real-estate guy from New York City that knows nothing about small towns and a guy who wrote a book that denigrates my neighbors and tells them that this is some type of cultural thing. I think the real message here is that the reason that rural America is struggling more—[with challenges such as the] outsourcing of jobs—is because of Republican policies and people like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist who cares nothing about those institutions there.”

Then he dug into the issues that actually matter to the rural regions, small towns, and small cities where Democrats need to do better—areas where, if the party can hold its own in the way that it did when Barack Obama was its nominee in 2008 and 2012, it will win nearly every swing state. And, perhaps, a few states that weren’t thought to be competitive.

“If you’re in a town of 400, there are two institutions that are the most important to your town. That is the public school and a hospital or a clinic, if you have it,” Walz said to MSNBC. “Both of those things are being gutted by the Republicans. They’ve been telling us for six-and-a-half years they have a plan on healthcare, and that means taking away Medicare and Medicaid and reducing [Affordable Care Act] access. And they talk about privatizing public schools.”

Rejecting the tired, and massively disproven, Republican talking point that says the private sector will invariably do a better job than the public sector, Walz mocked the GOP line that says, “Oh, we’re gonna privatize this and take the money out of our public schools.” Then he said, “Let me be very clear: When you talk about private education, that means you gut the public schools, you send [public money] to people [who are] already sending their kids to those schools, and you got it. So I think the condemnation of these people [is that] they don’t know middle America. They don’t know who we are.”

That is a progressive populist message that’s rooted in the rhetoric of Democrats such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who won rural Americans, and of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, who won enough rural, small town, and small city votes to tip the balance to their party in the elections of 1976, 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012.

It also reflects the record of a congressman from rural Minnesota who continuously won volatile elections from 2006 to 2016, and of the Democratic governor of a frequent battleground state who won big in 2018 and 2022.

Recalling his congressional wins, Walz now says, “I represented a district that Trump won by 18 points, but that got tougher and tougher.” But, instead of giving up, Walz says, “I think we need to take this populist message—the economy, the freedoms—[and say that]: These guys aren’t for freedoms. Their idea of freedom is to be in your exam room, your bedroom. You know, banning books, we’re banning hunger. These are Democratic policies. And I think the people in Missouri, [and] I would argue, the people in Montana, doing those types of things make a big difference. What is Donald Trump offering? You go to these rallies, he’s talking about Hannibal Lecter.”

And that, as Tim Walz put it, is weird.