3 Things We Can Read From the Tim Walz Vice-Presidential Pick | Opinion

“What does Walz get her?”

Last night, that was a rhetorical question that Democratic insiders were asking when sizing up the final choice between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as Vice President Kamala Harris’s pick for the vice presidential slot on the Democratic ticket.

Today, it’s a real question—most strategists thought picking Shapiro was a no-brainer.

The Shapiro case went something like this: Pennsylvania is make or break. It’s awfully hard to construct an electoral map where Harris wins without it. A presidential ticket runs up to two percentage points better in the vice-presidential nominee’s home state. And Shapiro was well-positioned to grab all of that since he has a 55 percent job approval rating and drew the support of 64 percent of independents and 16 percent of Republicans in his last race. Hence, Shapiro gets you Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania puts you on the doorstep of victory.

That’s…a really good case. So, for Harris to go with Walz instead, there must have been other things on her mind. Of course, we can’t know for sure, but we can read between the lines and make some pretty darn good deductions about what those are.

Deduction number one: Pennsylvania is on track. When election forecaster Nate Silver recently projected Harris’ chances in each state, he gave her only a 47 percent chance of winning Pennsylvania.

But that was five days ago, a lifetime in a 2024 election that has been lived inside a time warp worthy of a Christopher Nolan movie, where historic events barely get their moment in the sun before being supplanted by something else. In less than a week, Harris has gained substantial polling ground both nationally—where she’s risen by more than two points—and in Pennsylvania, where she’s risen by a point and a half and is now in the lead. And that’s just in the public polls that we can see. The Harris campaign is privy to far more data.

That’s not to say that the race in Pennsylvania is sewed up, but it is safe to presume that the Harris campaign is feeling much better about it right now. Indeed, if Harris had had to make this choice a week ago, the outcome might have been different. The fact that the Shapiro-helps-deliver-Pennsylvania case was no longer decisive means that the Keystone State must be looking a lot more solid. And that is good news for Democrats.

Deduction number two: Walz is a weirdly good messenger. The message setup for Democrats couldn’t be better in this race. Kamala Harris is a skilled, veteran prosecutor who has the chance to make the case of a lifetime against a convicted felon, serial fraudster, and adjudicated rapist who has ended up in court more than 4,000 times. And incredibly, a significant proportion of swing voters will be learning about all of this for the first time. Which is why Harris recently previewed a “prosecutor-versus-the-perp” narrative that had Democratic operatives drooling with anticipation.

But there’s a catch-22. Political scientists have identified an ingrained bias against female candidates where voters have a hard time simultaneously seeing them as both warm and tough. And the more that women—and particularly Black women—use the kind of “dominant language” that, say, a former prosecutor attacking a convicted felon needs to use, the more that voters view them as “less likable.”

In other words, Kamala Harris is eminently qualified to make one of the great political cases of all time, but the best strategy for her is probably to have someone else do a lot of the lifting.

Enter a politician who proved that he can go viral on attack, and make a single word soar 28 percent in Google searches with his line about Trump and Vance being “weird.” The book on Walz up to that moment was that he was an eyes-glazingly dry pol who gave off major dad vibes, while Shapiro was a polished former Attorney General who could wage deft verbal warfare.

Walz must have made that column at least a tie by proving that he can shiv with a smile.

Three: Consolidation is the straightest line to winning. Part of Shapiro’s appeal was the brute force pathway to winning for Democrats: holding just the three “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, which gets them exactly the necessary 270 electoral votes.

But there’s another way of looking at the math.

Since President Biden dropped out of the race and Harris became the de facto nominee, she’s risen 4.6 percentage points in polling averages, while Trump has fallen 1.8 points in that time. But the bulk of Harris’ rise comes at the expense of third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has fallen 3.3 percent.

What’s going on? Consolidation. Harris is clawing back Democratic-leaning voters who were uncomfortable with Biden. According to Democratic polling firm Change Research “Movement in Harris’s direction is coming primarily from Kennedy supporters, those who didn’t want to vote for any of the candidates on offer, and undecided voters” and is fueled by the core Democratic constituencies of “women, young voters, and voters of color.”

To be sure, much of the swell of progressive opposition to Shapiro in recent days was unfair. Shapiro’s position on the Israel-Hamas war is virtually the same as Walz’s. His support for some school voucher programs didn’t stop the teachers’ unions from endorsing him. And his support for fracking is the same as liberal darling Sen John Fetterman’s (D-PA). Besides, the whole point of trying to win moderates or Pennsylvanians is to have some positions that appeal to moderates and Pennsylvanians.

But the progressives might still have a point, too. They argued that keeping the consolidation momentum going is the most important winning ingredient, and that Walz does more to unify the Democratic base and keep grabbing back the Kennedy-curious than Shapiro. It is definitely true that Trump has done nothing in the past four years to win over new voters. So, it is plausible to say that re-assembling the Biden coalition, which Harris is well on the way to doing and which Walz advances, is the right move here. And again, it is highly likely that the Harris campaign had internal polling to back that up.

Finally, let’s not forget that Walz has a long, tested track record of winning in a tough, rural swing district and overperforming in a lean-blue state. So, it’s not as if he’s some lefty base-appeal play only.

All in all, picking him may not have been the obvious move. But it may well have been the best move.

Matt Robison is a writer, podcast host, and former congressional staffer.

The views in this article are the writer’s own.