“Wow,” Tim Walz kept saying, his face spread in amazement. “Wow.”
On Tuesday night, Mr. Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota — a scarcely known political figure just two weeks ago — made his giddy, fiery, fidgety, folksy national debut as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate.
He waved, with big flapping hands, at the ecstatic crowd. He bowed. He bowed again. He stood behind Ms. Harris as she launched into her fledgling presidential stump speech. He bobbed and grinned. He played with his ear and twiddled his thumbs. And when she ceded the podium to him, 30 minutes later, he played the role of a forceful surrogate.
Ms. Harris, more accustomed to the political choreography of waiting for someone else to finish talking, smiled, her hands clasped. “That’s right,” she said repeatedly. “That’s right.”
The running-mate dynamic can be complicated, even just in terms of staging — how to stand, where to look, what to do with one’s hands.
On Tuesday, though, both Mr. Walz and Ms. Harris seemed comfortable in their new roles. He gushed over her “joy.” The whole night, he looked like a guy who had won the political lottery and could not believe his luck.
She seemed very excited about football.
“Coach Walz,” as Mr. Walz was once known — back when he was a high school social studies teacher and football coach — had helped lead his team to a state championship. He was also the faculty adviser for the student gay-straight alliance.
Ms. Harris described him as “the kind of person who makes people feel like they belong and then inspires them to dream big, and that’s the kind of vice president he will be.”
If Ms. Harris’s campaign started out as “Veep,” it has now taken a detour to “Ted Lasso,” by way of “Friday Night Lights.”
Even before Mr. Walz and Ms. Harris took the stage, the differences in their styles were obvious to anybody who has watched the last wild six weeks unfold.
Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor — and, more relevantly, a Black woman in the unrelenting spotlight of national politics — wears broad-shouldered suits, pearls and heels, sometimes crisp Chucks. She marshals an arched brow, a studied hand flip, carefully curated sentences. Her wave is controlled, her eyes always fixed on a distant point, her movements smooth.
Mr. Walz, who is broad-shouldered, is often pictured in T-shirts, white hair slightly rumpled, if not hidden under a camo hat. Even when he wears a jacket and tie, he tends to look like, well, a flustered high school football coach, red-faced, as if he is about to draw up a play on a dry-erase board.
But Mr. Walz’s breakthrough, over the past few weeks, has also been Ms. Harris’s. Having struggled for years to get popular traction, she suddenly has the winds of Democratic enthusiasm and hope at her back. Long a mystery to even those who wanted to support her, Ms. Harris has become beloved for her big laugh, her dance moves, her mother’s coconut metaphor.
Mr. Walz, like his running mate, has a big, irrepressible laugh, which was on display on Tuesday night.
They are both a little folksy — his public remarks have been peppered with phrases like “that dude” and “these guys” and “damn sure.” They both get a little feisty.
And like Ms. Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, Mr. Walz is, in his own way, quintessentially American: a small-town boy who went to state school, joined the Army National Guard and became a schoolteacher. Ms. Harris touched on this common thread on Tuesday, describing the improbability of their rise, as “middle-class kids,” to the highest reaches of political power. “Only in America is it possible for them together to make it all the way to the White House,” she said.
In the coy and gendered tabloid vernacular, Ms. Harris’s fast-paced selection of a running mate was often likened to “The Bachelorette”: Which broadly palatable white man from a purple-ish state would get the final rose? But in the hours leading up to their appearance onstage in Philadelphia, the dating-show metaphor actually did capture the almost romantic anticipation that prevailed among Ms. Harris’s supporters, some of whom said they did not know who he was until last weekend.
Any doubts or uncertainty they had about Mr. Walz had been dispelled — at least for a night. Once he gripped the lectern — finally, something to do with his hands — and started speaking, he gathered momentum and carried the crowd.
“Thank you for bringing back the joy,” Mr. Walz said as he opened his speech, barely able to control his grin. By the end of the night, he had the crowd of 12,000 people roaring back at him, as he railed against former President Donald J. Trump and vowed, “We’re not going back.”
Mr. Walz told the story of his upbringing, his military service and his years of teaching high school social studies and coaching football. He said his students had encouraged him to run for public office in 2006.
“Those same values I learned on the family farm and tried to instill in my students — Vice President Harris and I are running to take those very values to the White House,” he said.
At the end of the evening, Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz were joined onstage by their spouses. Stepping back from the lectern, Mr. Walz’s arms were once again untethered, reaching for the skies in an effusive political gesture, the double-arm wave. He shook his wife’s hand, thought better of it, and pulled her in for a hug.