Sixteen years after Republicans unveiled vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin as America’s “hockey mom,” Democrats introduced their own relatively unknown VP pick with a spin on the same folksy framing: here is America’s football dad, Tim Walz.
Walz, the popular governor of Minnesota and former high school teacher and coach, formally accepted the vice presidential nomination with a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention that was heavy on football metaphors that highlighted his “everyman” demeanor.
He walked onto the stage to a standing ovation as thousands of convention goers held up cutouts of his face and signs that read “Coach Walz.” He told the country: “I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this, but I have given a lot of pep talks.”
Leaning on his roots as a Midwesterner, Walz delivered a speech filled with broadsides against Donald Trump and the Republicans interspersed with sports analogies that served to remind the exuberant attendees that the race remains, by all accounts, a toss up.
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“It’s the fourth quarter, we’re down a field goal but we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball,” Walz said to close his relatively short — by this convention’s standards —speech. “We’re driving down the field and boy do we have the right team.”
“One inch at a time, one yard at a time, one phone call at a time, one door knock at a time, one five dollar donation at a time,” he said. “We’ve got 76 days. That’s nothing. There’ll be time to sleep when you’re dead. We’re going to leave it on the field.”
It was an address that called back to the 2008 Republican convention, when a then-unknown governor by the name of Sarah Palin rocketed to national attention with a barnburner of a speech remembered for her line: “They say the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull — lipstick.”
Walz had a similar duty on Wednesday. Still unfamiliar to the broader public, he was there to introduce himself to the American people as both a happy warrior and someone who could take the fight to the Republicans.
He led the audience to cheers of “we’re not going back” and laid out an abbreviated policy plan that he told Democrats to “send to your undecided relatives.”
Like Palin in 2008, Walz is also a state leader with rural appeal. He was propelled to the top of the Democratic ticket after rising to national prominence for dubbing former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party as “just weird”—a phrase Harris’ campaign has been quick to adopt.
But while Walz and Palin may have similarities “on the surface,” their records show starkly different trajectories for their futures, experts told Newsweek.
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“[Palin] was one millimeter deep. She had almost no experience and had not thought deeply about the issues confronting Americans, while Walz has,” veteran Democratic strategist Matt Bennett said. “He’ll make the case for the ticket the way he’d do it for the PTA spaghetti dinner back home. And that will resonate.”
Walz has been hailed for his ability to speak to regular Americans in blunt terms. Democrats have promoted his decades-long service with the National Guard and his teaching career as part of a broader message that paints Walz as an affable everyman far from the coastal elite that have come to define the party.
In the two weeks since he was named Harris’ VP, Walz’s charm and energy have been apparent on the campaign trail, as he’s given the job of opening up the Democratic Party‘s “big tent” to conservatives who are tired of Trump.
“I’m ready to turn the page on these guys,” Walz said to cheers.
Political consultant Jay Townsend told Newsweek that one of the key reasons Walz is able to appeal to rural voters and small town America is because “he is an authentic messenger to that group.”
Born and raised in Nebraska, Walz has argued that Republican policies are hurting rural America and offered a foil to Republican vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance. While Vance grew up in Middleton, Ohio and lived in Kentucky before he served in the military, Democrats have focused on his life after that, painting him as an elitist with an ivy-league degree and resume in finance.
“I grew up in Butte, Nebraska, a town of 400 people. I had 24 kids in my high school class and none of them went to Yale,” Walz said in a subtle jab at Vance, who went to law school in New Haven. “But I’ll tell you what, growing up in a small town like that, you learn how to take care of each other.”
He continued: “That family down the road, they may not think like you, they may not pray like you do, they may not love like you do, but they’re your’e neighbors. And you look out for them and they look out for you.”
On Wednesday, Walz also took the customary digs at Trump, hitting him over his wealth and pomposity while trying to pry rural voters from the GOP “by painting the Democratic party a better friend of rural voters than Trump will ever be,” Townsend said.
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During his speech, Walz mentioned Republican efforts to ban books in schools while touting the progressive policies he’s enacted in Minnesota, telling the audience: “While other states were banning books in their schools we were banishing hunger from ours.” Walz signed a bill last year that offered breakfast and lunch to the state’s public school students at no charge, regardless of household income.
“In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices that they make. Even if we wouldn’t make the same choices for ourselves,” Walz told the crowd before rerunning a line that’s become a calling card of his stump speeches: “We’ve got a golden rule: mind your own damn business.”
At the end of the night, Walz walked off to Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” a personal favorite of the governor’s and the very song that the rock legend previously sued the Trump campaign for playing at his rallies.