Looking California, Feeling Minnesota

Why Kamala Harris (CA) chose Tim Walz (MN) and what it tells us about the Presidential race

Target Field in Minneapolis, home of the Minnesota Twins, from a game I went to in 2010. See, I have Minnesota cred.

Last week on What’s Wrong With Democracy? we looked at political protests, which turned out to be…uh.. timely. I don’t think the far-right riots in the UK warrant the term protest - more like coked-up thugs causing trouble. But the anti-racism protests with thousands attending that followed up - yep, more like protests. In the episode I talk to Ilya Marritz about another dubiousish ‘protest’ - the Jan 6 insurrection - as well as to Dawn Brancati about pro-democracy protests and the graffiti artist MadZoo about protests in Senegal.

This week we talk about contentious identity politics in multiethnic nations - namely Rwanda (with Sharun Mukand) and Malaysia (with James Chin). Don’t ever say we don’t cover a lot of territory! Indeed, we now have over eighty listeners in Myanmar apparently. Welcome!

But now for a quick trip Stateside to talk about the US Presidential Election. Which incidentally is what the next three episodes of What’s Wrong With Democracy? will be covering after a two week break.

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A month or so ago I got one thing very right and another thing very wrong. In a piece bemoaning Joe Biden’s unwillingness to step down, where I compared it to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s fateful decision not to retire, I argued that the best thing for the Democrats would be for Biden to call it a day, in fact to have done it several months earlier. That was a good call.

And then, who should replace him… Ah… Here’s what I wrote:

Let’s start with within the Biden administration. The most obvious choice would be the Vice President Kamala Harris. I didn’t mention her in the recounting of the 2020 primaries above because frankly she polled poorly and was not a credible rival to Biden in the way Sanders, Warren, or Bloomberg were. Indeed she pulled out before the primaries began (though she participated in the debates). Harris is much younger (born 1964) but she has failed as a VP - whether through her own fault or the fault of Biden’s team - to cut through or gain in popularity. Her approval ratings are sub 40%, almost as bad as Biden’s. In my mind it’s implausible that Harris would do any better than Biden in the presidential race.

Oops. Good thing I don’t charge for this Substack really.

More things happened in July 2024 in the US Presidential race than in the whole of the 1996 or 2012 snoozefests. Biden flunked the debate (OK that was right at the end of June), then Trump was almost assassinated, then Trump picked J D Vance and had a triumphant Republication National Convention. Then Biden dropped out. Then the Democratic Party converged on Harris with a certainty of mind unprecedented for a party who are synonymous with corny jokes about disarray, disorganisation and hating themselves. Then Harris started zooming up in the polls with massive buzz about who she would choose as her running mate. And now the Harris-Walz ticket seems to be just about edging into the lead.

So as far as predictions go, I won’t say this was one of my best. The bit I got right is that Harris was polling poorly - though not any worse than Biden. The bit I got wrong was that this would tell us anything about how she might fare once she was the presidential candidate in waiting. Plus also how incredibly poorly the Trump campaign would respond to this unexpected event.

So that takes us to where we are now, a surging Harris choosing Tim Walz as her running mate. What does that tell us about the state of the campaign?

First, the Harris team are confident they are in a strong position. Vice Presidential picks probably don’t matter much. But you can blow them (see below on a certain Senator from Ohio). Or you can signal weakness through them.

There is a long list of very poor vice Presidential choices out there - Thomas Eagleton, who didn’t tell George McGovern he had had electroshock therapy for depression and had to drop out; Spiro Agnew, who ultimately had to resign for corruption (though this didn’t stop Richard Nixon winning two campaigns with him); Sarah Palin, who seemed like a good idea for about one week. And sometimes candidates get picked in desperation to pick up an important state that is basically out of reach - John Edwards and North Carolina, Paul Ryan and Wisconsin.

But Walz, as far as we know, has no mad back story involving electroshock therapy or kickbacks, and he can speak off the cuff without devolving into Palinesque word salad. So he’s definitely not a poor choice. But nor is he a Hail Mary choice aimed at keeping or grabbing a key state. There is no way Minnesota was voting for Trump. It has voted Democratic since 1960 1976, even under Reagan. Don’t believe me? Well you should. I lived in Minnesota for seven years (see my photographic evidence above). That’s more than you’re getting out of any other British Substack.

If you are choosing Tim Walz you are doing so not because of his direct Electoral College effect. Harris was going to win Minnesota before and she will now. The more important thing then is that she didn’t choose the other two finalists, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or Mark Kelly of Arizona. Either these two really couldn’t actually move enough votes in their states (plausible I suppose for Kelly, not that plausible for Shapiro), or the Harris team were confident that they would win Pennsylvania and didn’t need Arizona.

The one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that they polled and focus grouped the hell out of this decision. So, despite the complaints of Nate Silver, Nate Cohn, Jon Chait and other well-known centrists, Shapiro ‘the moderate’ didn’t add enough (or possibly at all) compared to Walz the alleged ‘progressive’.

This is the crucial thing about the VP decision - it tells us more about the overall state of the campaign than it does about the precise polling advantage accruing to particular candidates in swing states. The chances of the VP decision really mattering are very low. Yes, marginal gains matter. But most Presidential elections won’t be decided by one key state where the VP decision is crucial. And let’s say that that really was the case this time - then it would be Pennsylvania, and they would have picked Josh Shapiro. The Walz decision then is one being made in confidence.

Since the decision, the Republicans have been attempting to make a baroque complaint that by leaving Shapiro on the side, Harris has proven that the Democrats are antisemitic. Seems a stretch, given that Harris’ husband is Jewish but that links us nicely into point two.

The Republicans are panicking.

It all seemed so perfect. Biden was visibly deteriorating and essentially corpsed at the Presidential Debate. Then Trump was almost killed and did what he is still best at, seize the drama and pose for an absolute all-timer of a photo. Then a successful convention, at least in terms of all singing from the same hymnbook and getting behind a couple of Trump’s controversial (in Republican circles) policies, including removing a federal abortion ban from the platform. And then picked a young, up and comer, MAGA clone intellectual, the veteran, hedge-fundie, author J D Vance.

At which point… The Vance pick was the Trump campaign’s moment of hubris. A decision apparently made through the influence (possibly also under the influence) of Trump’s very-online sons. Vance is no idiot. He’s not Donald Trump Jr. He is, though, an opportunist. Someone who had denounced Trump as Hitler but had converted to MAGAism. But that flip-flopping actually turned out not to be the problem. The problem with Vance is that he is like the Intellectual Dark Web manifested as a Senator.

The IDW - at various points comprising writers such as Bari Weiss, the Weinstein brothers (not Harvey), and Jordan Peterson, is a group of anti-woke conservatives who are very very very online. The memes and peccadilloes of this group and fellow-travellers are the water in which Vance swims. Vance recently wrote a blurb for the book Unhumans, written by the Pizzagate conspiracist Jack Posobiec and Josh Lisec, which argues that leftists are ‘unhumans’, who should be ruthlessly crushed in the manner of General Franco. He has name-dropped Curtis Yarvin, a paleoconservative who advocates the replacement of American democracy with a monarchy.

And he wrote the forward for the Heritage Foundation’s bonkers Project 2025 - a neoreactionary wishlist with such vote-winners as replacing the entire civil service, banning pornography, and abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the people who provide public weather data). Trump has publicly disavowed Project 2025 and the publication of Vance’s forward has been ‘postponed’. But Vance cannot be. Trump is stuck with him and his off-putting brand of 4-channism.

And that is where Walz came in. Somehow Tim Walz managed to see something that had eluded a thousand highly paid Democratic consultants. That Vance was weird. And if you started to think about it, so was Trump. The themes that Republicans talk about on the internet are off-putting to normies. Regular readers will know I wrote a piece about the too-online British right earlier this year. It’s the same political hobbyism that doomed Ron DeSantis’ campaign. It’s all just too online.

Donald Trump is too, in his own way. He’s not scouring Pepe-meming shitposters. He doesn’t give off an incel vibe like some of the online right. But he cannot stop himself from posting mad screeds to his Truth Social feed. True, this hardly hurt Trump in the past. In the days of Twitter his account was legendary. Also sometimes quite funny. But he’s losing his edge. Witness this mad piece of wish-fulfilment.

Look no-one knows what ‘Kamabla’ is intended to mean - maybe it’s racist, maybe it’s not. It’s Trump. But other than the weird name calling there is also the flight of fancy that maybe Joe Biden can come back and Trump can run the campaign he wanted to all along. Trump is demanding to see the manager of the election. He wants a refund.

This insanity has been in plain sight for a long time for those who wanted to see. Trump has been riffing about Hannibal Lecter for months, possibly because he has confused mental asylums with asylum seekers, or possibly he does know the difference but he’s just riding the riff. Or the electric car vs the shark stuff. It’s all entertaining in classic Trump style but it’s increasingly surreal. Like you had gone to see a Ricky Gervais gig but ended up with Emo Phillips.

And all Tim Walz had to do was point this out. Use the word ‘weird’. And suddenly the Democrats had a single word that could castigate the entire Trump-Vance campaign. And worse, it clearly resonated. Not just with cable news presenters, or very-online people who watch too many clips (guilty as charged), or with partisan Democrats. It resonated with Republicans, for whom it cut too close to the truth. And it has led to a weeks long attempt to argue that they are not weird, led by a group of people who give off ‘off’ vibes.

This has culminated in attacks on Tim Walz that exemplify ‘weird’. Not the usual stuff about Walz being extreme left or letting Minneapolis burn in 2020. That’s all par for the course and normal politics. No, I mean doing a photoshop of Tim Walz’s head onto a tampon because he made sanitary towels and tampons available in school bathrooms. They are calling him #tampontim.

I’m going to suggest that this is weird. Nobody wants to see a political campaign that’s about intimate body parts. And arguing further that you are doing this because Walz had the tampons available in boys and girls bathrooms (and hence for trans students) will I doubt make anyone making the case seem any more normal. The kinds of people whose vote will depend on this were never going to vote Democrat in the first place. But the kind of people it puts off? Most of us.

So the Walz pick signifies a confident Harris campaign and a panicky Trump campaign. Not much of it has to do with Walz himself, save the coining of the ‘weird’ motif. Walz has a lot of strengths as a ticket-balancer - school-teacher, football coach, veteran, hunter, middle-aged white guy, Midwest governor. But I don’t think those matter hugely in terms of where the campaign goes now. What matters is what the choice signifies about the already existing momentum in the campaigns.

If you had asked me before Biden dropped out I would have said Trump had a 2/3 chance of winning or higher. A week after Harris entered the race, Trump was a slight favourite. Right now, I have Harris as a slight to moderate favourite. And after the Democratic National Convention? I suspect we will see five point leads for Harris and enough swing state leads to call her the clear favourite. I could be wrong. You may recall I was previously really rather wrong about the political merits of a certain politician called Kamala Harris. Perhaps I will be wrong in an exciting new direction.

But you know what I’m looking forward to? Donald Trump in a spiral of doom, wish-mongering, lashing out, and engaging in surreal flights of fancy for the next month. He knows things aren’t working out, despite the support of such luminaries as Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and Robert Jenrick. What a shame. Couldn’t happen to a weirder guy.