Today, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that her running mate in the 2024 presidential election will be two-term Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, an unexpected strategic decision with clear upsides and downsides. The Harris campaign must have felt that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro‘s positions on a handful of issues, including Israel’s war in Gaza and the ensuing campus demonstrations against U.S. support for it, might eat into some of ticket’s support on the left and that this intra-party risk outweighed his potential to help deliver the critical swing state of Pennsylvania.
It is also a bold choice to select a progressive favorite as the number two on a ticket led by a candidate who compiled one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate during her one term there. Harris is gambling that Walz, a folksy white guy with harmless dad vibes who nevertheless has proven extremely adept at serving as a campaign attack dog, can help Democrats at least hold steady with white working class voters in a way that Shapiro or the other contenders would not.
Walz’s elevation happened quickly because the decision-making timeline for the Harris campaign was unprecedentedly brief. It was barely more than two weeks ago that Harris emerged as the likely nominee as President Joe Biden stepped back, and she and her team had to crash-vet a short list of white men who seemed like they could help the ticket on the margins in battleground states. While I will always believe that the instant dismissal of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer from consideration by virtue of being a woman was a mistake, Harris still had a strong group of candidates to choose from, including Walz, Shapiro, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.
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Thanks in part to capturing a string of battleground state governorships in 2018 and 2022, Democrats have by far their deepest and most appealing political bench in a generation. And Walz ultimately brings strengths to the ticket that the Harris campaign believes no one else could.
Some of them are quite obvious and have little to do with Walz’s viral appearances on cable news over the past few months. Two years into his second term, he remains popular with Minnesotans, with a net approval rating of +14 points according to Morning Consult polling. While Shapiro was more popular in Pennsylvania, Walz nevertheless provides a clear contrast with the immediately radioactive Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who is the least popular vice presidential pick in history.
If you’ve heard him speak, you know that Walz sounds more like an ordinary guy riffing about things he cares about than a polished politician who has had talking points surgically drilled into his head. He is a former public-school teacher who represented a rural Minnesota district in the U.S. House of Representatives for 12 years, and the Harris campaign hopes that his appeal will help the party keep former President Donald Trump‘s margins from getting out of hand in predominantly white rural areas.
The fact that Walz has remained this popular in a state with the 12th-highest non-Hispanic white population in the country could have implications in other swing states with largely white populations like Wisconsin.
The choice of Walz also signals that the Harris campaign is going to stand by a number of policy positions that are important to progressives. As Minnesota’s chief executive, Walz has signed a blitz of innovative policy proposals, including joining a short list of states that offer paid family and medical leave for caregivers, new parents and individuals facing medical problems. He made Minnesota the first state to codify abortion rights following the Supreme Court‘s 2022 decision to vacate Roe v. Wade, and he has a strong record on LGBTQ+ issues. These policy strengths will mesh well with the Harris campaign’s focus on reproductive rights and its strategy to paint the Trump-Vance ticket as “weird” and outside the mainstream on culture war issues. They also decrease the chances of significant, public party disunity ahead of or during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that begins on Aug. 19.
But the pick is not without substantial risk. While existing research doesn’t offer airtight conclusions, it is clear that vice presidential candidates help the ticket perform better in their home states than they otherwise might. One 2016 study by political scientists Boris Heersink and Brenton Peterson found the effect to be as high as three points. And no state is more critical to the 2024 presidential election than Shapiro’s Keystone State.
Former 538 data guru Nate Silver, who now operates a Substack empire called The Silver Bulletin, gives Pennsylvania by far the highest odds of serving as the tipping point state in this election and predicts that if Harris wins it, she has greater than a 91 percent chance of carrying the Electoral College. If Trump captures Pennsylvania, Silver’s model gives him a 95.9 percent chance of winning the election. No other state is nearly as important to both party’s hopes. And while Minnesota was close in 2016, if Trump is anywhere near victory there it would be as part of a broad GOP landslide that would make these running-mate calculations irrelevant anyway.
For some reason, only two sitting governors have been chosen by a major-party nominee as a running mate since 1972—Indiana Gov. Mike Pence in 2016 and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in 2008, neither of whom hailed from a swing state. Even the senators and other political figures chosen by modern nominees have largely hailed from non-competitive states, like Joe Biden himself in 2008, Dick Cheney in 2000 and Jack Kemp in 1996. Given the centrality of America’s unusual Electoral College math to victory, this is pretty inexplicable. Imagine, for example, if 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry had picked then-incumbent Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who could have not only delivered his state, which Kerry lost narrowly, but also might have helped across the Rust Belt, including in the decisive state of Ohio.
If Trump wins Pennsylvania as part of a narrow victory in which the Keystone State was decisive, the Harris campaign is going to come under a lot of justifiable criticism of this decision. It might even be regarded, to borrow Walz’s language, as pretty weird. If, on the other hand, Walz helps the Democratic Party unify around its ticket and keeps margins in white working-class areas closer to 2020 than 2016, it will be seen as a strategic masterstroke. And there’s no way any of us will know the answer to that question until November.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.