The Nation MagazineVice President Harris’s running mate is a heartland governor who has championed Minnesota’s working class. It’s a departure from the party’s long slide toward Beltway elitism.
In naming Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has begun to redress a major deficit in the party’s leadership. After a generation-plus of recruiting Ivy-matriculated coastal knowledge professionals to lead the party, the Democrats have laid aside that dead-end class geography in favor of a prospective vice president who has logged decades as a union member after graduating from the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system.
It’s true that Joe Biden was educated at the University of Delaware—but it’s also true that Biden duly proceeded to Syracuse University Law School before launching his political career and embedding himself within the Delaware business establishment. Walz, amazingly, is the first Democrat on a presidential ticket in half a century not to have attended law school—going back to the 1976 run of Naval Academy physicist Jimmy Carter. The longtime high school social studies teacher and principal is also the first former long-term union member on a presidential ticket since former Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. (Technically, Reagan’s own vice president and later successor, George H.W. Bush, logged a weeks-long stint as a member of the United Steelworkers during his apprenticeship in the oil industry, but it was a footnote to his later career as a patrician boss.)
As we sized up the presidential prospects in 2019, veteran campaign reporter Walter Shapiro referred with dismay to the Democrats’ emergence as the “Advanced Placement” party—a development that paralleled the broader collapse of union organizing in the private sector workforce and the party’s embrace of global free-trade policies at the dawn of the Internet age. As the Democratic Leadership Council doggedly worked to remake the party’s image as “pro-business,” the party’s nominees parroted a fatalist vision of the working class’s inevitable marginalization as Information Age capitalism bestrode the globe. During the 1992 primary cycle, candidate Bill Clinton won pundit plaudits for empathizing with the plight of a displaced worker in New Hampshire by proclaiming “I feel your pain,” but in office, Clinton proceeded to inflict all sorts of pain on working Americans, from the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement to a new corporate-friendly set of accords within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to an executive order extending most-favored-nation status to China in the new American trade regime.
I can picture Walter, who worked with me at The New Republic, and who died just as Joe Biden was about to relinquish his reelection bid, greeting the news of Walz’s selection with his trademark puckish grin; Walter was a New York transplant to Michigan who mounted a quixotic campaign as an anti-war candidate for Congress there in the 1960s.
