The Chaser Report - Who Is Tim Walz? | David Smith

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Who is Tim Walz, Kamala Harris' running mate, and why is he potentially a game changer? Dom reflects on the end of the Democrat's veep-stakes with Sydney University's Associate Professor in American Politics, David Smith. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is the Chaser Report. Welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom. And today we have Associate Professor David Smith of the US Study Centre at the University of Sydney. Yesterday, we didn't know who the VP was going to be. Now we know it is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who's been picked by Kamala Harris to be her. Kamala Harris, if she wins in the election. David Smith, welcome back.

Thanks for having me. Now, Emma Shortus, yesterday we've really been going strong this week. She hoped it was Tim Walsh. She thought from a policy perspective, possibly better. Keen to get your thoughts on the political calculation of all of this and indeed his debut at an event in Philadelphia not long ago after this. Okay, so a bit of an awkward one, David. Josh Shapiro, the governor of Philadelphia, was the other final frontrunner.

And he had the job of turning up and introducing the the man who apparently beat him in the Veep Stakes are Tim Walz but he seemed to be happy to be there. Yeah, there are actually reports today that Shapiro himself was a bit worried about having to leave the governorship of Pennsylvania if he got chosen.

Now, I don't know if that's just sour grapes being put out but certainly at the moment for everybody the imperative of unity is everything. AOC noted today that this seems to be the last issue that she and Joe Manchin actually agree on. They both laugh at him walls. I don't think you're going to be seeing any open dissent about this, including from Democrats who were passed over for the job.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, Shapiro's only been there, what, two years or something like that. So very, very early to be getting out of the governor's mansion having won it so comfortably. We don't have even much of a record to campaign on. No, and I mean, he is definitely a future presidential candidate himself. And being a vice presidential candidate is not necessarily the best springboard to being a presidential candidate, whereas Tim Walls, as far as we can see, didn't really have any presidential ambitions. And in this way, he slots into it really quite nicely.

Shapiro, the theory behind Shapiro, which is quite a compelling one, is that the state of Pennsylvania is so important and he is so popular in Pennsylvania that he really would have locked the state down. The question is, though, okay, Pennsylvania is unquestionably very important, but what about all the other states? Part of the thinking behind choosing Tim Walls is that he's got a broader appeal than Shapiro does, even though he's even less known than Shapiro is. There was a poll done by NPR Marist this morning that found that 70% of respondents had no opinion on Tim Walls, likely because they had no idea who he is. The idea is that he's got a broad rural appeal. So he's originally from rural Nebraska.

He was in Congress representing a seat in rural southwest Minnesota. He won that seat six times. And that's a seat that voted for Trump by margin of 15% in 2016. He flipped it from red to blue and kept winning it, even though it voted Republican at the presidential level. So certainly Republican dominance in rural districts. streets is one of the major stories in American politics of the last 30 years. It's easy to forget that in the 90s, Democrats were still routinely winning some areas of rural America, including the rural South, in places like Tennessee and Kentucky and West Virginia.

Iowa used to be a fairly reliably democratic state, even if it wasn't what we would now call a blue state. It was somewhere where Democrats could pick up even when they had massive losses. Now we see Republicans, and Trump in particular, who has, has a major following in rural areas, winning in rural counties by margins of things like 80 to 20. And certainly a lot of the states that we look at that are very close, a states that have both large rural areas and large urban areas. And part of the Democratic thinking here, and they've been waiting for someone who can do this for a very long time, is if they can just cut down those rural margins a bit, you know, cut it down from 80, 20 to 75, 25, then that would be hugely helpful

for them in these in these close races so that i think is what they're looking for in walls is someone who can really identify with rural voters someone that rural voters will really identify with at the same time as very progressive very progressive policy record in minnesota which even though we tend to when we think progressive we think of cities and we think of coastal elites there are a lot of arts of the progressive program, which are quite popular in rural areas, including things that Tim Walts did, such as free school lunches and things like that. So what they're hoping for is this is somebody who can sell progressive policies to rural America. And this is one of the things that's so interesting about the choice, because in terms of his biography, he really

seems to have so many different upsides in terms of what I've been hearing from him and about him since it became clear it was going to be him. The idea that he's a shooter and not even just a but a good shooter, like won the congressional contest or something like that, but also is in favour of gun restrictions and introduced some of them. That he's very progressive when it comes to sort of social issues. You mentioned the school lunches and all that kind of stuff. So has done a lot of things, people, practical things that progressive supporters like. But then also he's ex-military, served in the National Guard, I think.

And the football coach thing, right? Like, from what I understand, Kamala Harris talked about him as coach, which is I learned today, apparently Senator Tommy Chuberville's staff insist on referring to him as coach rather than Senator in all official communications. So that is, though, the sort of Friday night light small town, USA, is it a myth or is it not, vibe that I can imagine might play really well in swing states, particularly if people are looking for something new, David. And if, as you've mentioned before, there's fatigue setting in.

Let's just listen to a little bit of Tim Walz here at his debut event in Philadelphia yesterday. regular people I grew up with in the heartland. J.D. studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community. Come on. That's not what Middle America is. And I got to tell you, I can't wait to debate the guy. That is if he's willing to get off the couch and show up. I mean, pretty foxy, David, and he does seem to be an effective communicator. And that's the other thing he brings to the table. People love his communication vibe. and the way he's been really making fun of Republicans. Yeah, and I've got to say,

I think this is something that has been honed in his years as a school teacher. He had to figure out ways how to talk to audiences who would be bored and hostile. That's what school teachers have to do. And he does it very well. I was reading that one of the problems with another one of the leading candidates who was Mark Kelly. So Mark Kelly is an astronaut. Now, astronaut has got to be the most respected profession. in the United States.

But do you remember that Simpson's episode from the 90s where NASA panics because all the astronauts are so boring that no one's watching space launches anymore and so they resort to getting Homer Simpson in as an astronaut? That still seems to be a problem. He was apparently described as an uninspiring speaker who wouldn't fire people on the campaign trail. Now, fair or not, that is a very important attribute

of being a vice presidential candidate. The better vice presidential candidates have been people who can actually get people excited on the campaign trail, especially this time around, where Harris is trying to give people something to vote for. And at the very first event in Philadelphia, just a few hours ago, Harris was really emphasizing this point

that this is not just about beating the Trump, this is about the future. If you're trying to tell people, we've got something to vote for, having people who can really communicate, who can entertain a crowd, who can give them something to hang on to, is going to be really important.

And given that Walls was really quite unknown until about a week ago, really elevated into the national spotlight because he was so good at deploying this weird label, it shows how important that is to Harris, to have somebody else who is going to excite people on the campaign trail. Yeah, and it does seem as though she's trying to run

a very positive campaign. She has been playing Beyonce's freedom and talking a lot about freedom, is generally a word that you don't hear from the left, which is really interesting. But, of course, reproductive freedom is part of the brand. She's brought to the table. Also, this idea of we aren't going back. Or maybe she even says we ain't going back.

I'm not sure. But she's getting the crowd to chant it. And that is quite an interesting message because it means not only we aren't going back to the Trump era, but just the sort of world of these very old men that have been dominating the sphere for so long, she really wants to be seen in something fresh and different. And Joe Biden's big pitch was just, look, democracies on the ballot. People didn't seem to really care about that, as important as it might be, to, I don't know, political scientists like yourself. Yeah, one of the things that Waltz really did was, he explained this.

When he was introducing the weird label, he said, we're afraid of fascists, but we're not afraid of weird people. And he was saying all of these fears that people have about Trump are correct, but at the same time, we're giving him far too much power. What Walls is doing is taking the fear out of the campaign. When you have a campaign that's all based around democracy is on the ballot and if we lose this, there's never even going to be another election again, you are campaigning in a state of fright. And fear, unfortunately, is a demobilizing emotion. Anger is a mobilizing emotion. Hope is a mobilizing emotion. Fear is the opposite. People don't feel like doing anything when they're afraid. And so it was quite important to have this shift from talking about democracy to talking about. that weirdness. And what we see now with the Harris Walls campaign is Walls is right in step with this much lighter, sunnier, more optimistic, more fun approach to politics, that walls could probably bring that better than anybody else that Harris could have chosen.

And I think we discussed before, David, this sort of the fun note. And this is something I wasn't expecting from Kamala Harris, given her sort of prosecutorial vibe in the past and her fairly anonymous time as vice president. I was mentioning yesterday on the podcast that Matt Bevan's, if you're listening, had reminded me that she actually ran out of money. So it's not even that she failed in terms of connecting with the people. She actually just didn't have the money and the connections the first time around. It was a very serious campaign about her legal background, whereas it does seem this time it really is about the light. And Donald Trump tried to attack her as laughing, but maybe people don't mind the idea

of a bit of laughter at a political event. And she's firing up the rallies. And Donald Trump must be watching the footage of her in front of adoring crowds and seething somewhat, surely. Yeah, but reports suggest that he is, and this is why he seems to be so far off his game at the moment. He doesn't really know how to respond to this. Yeah, thinking back to 2020 and thinking back to why haven't we seen this fun side of Carmelah Harris before, it was because all of the factors in 2020, the fact that they were desperately trying to remove Trump, the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests in the middle of the year. It wasn't exactly fantastic fun types. Also that little thing of Kiev, you mentioned COVID. Yeah. None of us

having fun. It wasn't the, it really wasn't the time to run a fun campaign. If we think back to Biden's campaign, it wasn't much of a campaign at all. He didn't. He did hide in the basement, as Donald Trump said. Yes, I remember writing an article saying Donald Trump is struggling against two invisible enemies, COVID and Joe Biden. But it has to be different this time. And people do want to leave that behind, which means Harris is not going to be able to run on the accomplishments of the Biden administration, which I think is fine with her because Biden running on the accomplishments of the Biden administration was not working. She's in this very unusual position where she can actually present herself as a clean break from the past,

despite having been vice president for the last four years. And this whole huge shift in tone really helps that. And Republicans do not know how to respond. I saw J.D. Vance's very first response to Tim Walls was to describe him as a San Francisco liberal. So after two weeks where they've landed on this is what they think is the most effective attack on Harris, they're now using this against a guy who is about as unsan Francisco

go as it gets. And it's worth keeping in mind that there is this left-wing tradition in the Midwest that is all of its own, which Tim Walls is very much a part of. Minnesota, by some measures, is one of the most progressive states in the country. It has the longest record of voting Democratic at the presidential level every year since 1976. It was the one state that voted Democratic in 1984, partly because the Democratic candidate was from there. It, was a state that only went Democratic by one and a half points in 2016. But then in 2020, after all of the Black Lives Matter protests that began in Minneapolis, it went for Biden by eight points.

It has long been a state, even before Tim Walz was bringing in these rafts of very progressive legislation, it was long a state of progressive legislation surrounded by a bunch of states that were enacting more and more conservative legislation. So you can't just ride off everything that's liberal, everything that's progressive, everything that's left wing as a product of the coasts and particularly the West Coast. There are these traditions that exist in the Midwest as well that have roots in all kinds of things in the German and Scandinavian migrants that came to that part of the country that often kind of brought these social, democratic or cooperativeist traditions with them. It's based in the fact that the Midwest is a very harsh environment to live in, especially rural Minnesota. and everyone in small towns needs to cooperate with each other in order to survive. It's also a place where there has been a lot of importance invested in public schools.

Public schools are often the centres of communities in the rural Midwest. And this is another part of what has shaped him walls, the feeling that you have a responsibility as a high school teacher to really foster that entire sense of community. And this is something that's clearly reflected in how he has governed as well. So you can't just ride off everything as San Francisco liberalism. And that's not going to be a successful line of attack.

In a second, David, let's look at the numbers, because that's what this is all about in the end, the swing states that are needed if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are to win. But then also the Friday night lights factor. The idea that this is a football coach in a country that still loves football more than just about anything else. The Chaser Report, news you can't trust. Okay, so the numbers are interesting because all of the finalists from what we understand were pretty much from the Midwest, Shapiro Walls, Buttigieg. J.D. Vance, of course, his brand is very much from the Midwest as well. You talked a little bit about what this means, but not only is there a particular brand and sense of what it means to be from these areas, and there's a big sort of contest of whether J.D. Vance is legitimate, given some of the things he's done in his career. Obviously, Tim Walls is still very much from there, and that's where he's from. A lot of the swing states seem to be concentrated.

traded in the Midwest, and particularly, there are others that talk about the Sun Belt as well in the Southwest. But I'm right in saying, Anto, that essentially if the Democrats get a lot of these Midwestern states, that's it. Yeah, the three big ones are Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. It's generally believed that because of the fact Democrats are also likely to win one electoral vote in Nebraska, which borders Minnesota, that if they get those, that gets them to 270, although they want to have more than that. They want to have Georgia and Arizona. as well. One of the things that nearly all of these states have in common is that all of them have one very large metropolitan area and a lot of rural places. And that's the key dynamic of

a swing state in the 21st century. It's really that urban rural mix because Democrats are increasingly the urban party Republicans are increasingly the rural party. So it's when you have this mix that you get these perennially very close, close contest. And there are quite a few of these states in the Midwest. One of the reasons, for example, I think why Iowa is no longer so competitive for Democrats, why it's become such a Republican state, is it's really predominantly rural. It's far more rural than urban. But places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, you have this classic dynamic of a large metropolitan area than with a lot of rural areas as well. Pennsylvania's got a couple of large metropolitan areas, but it's that rural urban dynamic that is so important

and it makes these states so perennially close. The traditional way of winning in these states is get more of your areas out than the other side has. Selecting walls represents a different approach. It's actually tried to make some inroads into the other parties area. Yeah. And that is really fascinating. And the sort of football aspect of this is worth touching. on you did your graduate study in Michigan. You went to the absurdly large football stadium that is there that I still, whenever I look at photos of it, I think it's called the big house.

I can't quite get a sense of just the sheer scale of it. It's as big as the MCG for a memory. And the notion of Tim Wales is having been a football coach from this area. People were talking about how the masculinity, particularly in this area, is completely tied in with football and going to the football on a Friday night. in particular, that sort of Friday night lights school football that unites communities. And so how strong is that aspect of his, I guess, story and in a sense his brand? I think that is very important.

In a lot of places, football coaches are among the most prominent members of the community. He was never the head coach of a high school because that is usually a full-time job, but he was a defensive coordinator and a linebacker's coach. And that would have made him a prominent person in whom a lot of trust. was invested by people. And part of the mythology around football coaches in America is not just that they develop these teams into winning teams. It's that they play this very important mentorship role in the lives of young men and the lives of teenage boys. Football coaches at the high school level and even at the college level are always talking about how they

see their responsibility as being shaping these young men. Sometimes I found this whole discourse a little bit distasteful, to be frank, because especially at the college level, you're talking about actual adults, unpaid adults playing in front of millions of people on television and being talked about as if they were the children of these coaches in some ways. But certainly at the high school level, in small towns, coaches are seen as more than just athletic coaches. They're seen as when you have teenage boys, young men, at very volatile times of their lives, at times when they could go in a number of different directions, some good, some bad. Football coaches are seen as people who put them on the right track.

So it is something that really resonates. Another really interesting thing is that I think this was when he was still in, I can't remember whether this was still in Nebraska or whether he was in Minnesota by this point. But at his school, he offered to be the staff. mentor for the school's first student Gay Straight Alliance, which in the 90s would have been a pretty cutting edge thing to have in a Midwestern school. And people who were there at the time have talked about how important it was that it was a football coach who was taking on this role as the mentor of the Gay Straight Alliance,

giving it a kind of credibility that it might not have had otherwise. And how important that was for the students who were actually involved in that to have to have the support of somebody like that. So this is why he could seriously be a figure who builds bridges between progressivism and cultural conservatism. Because everything about him culturally is associated with a background

that people would code as conservative, would see as conservative, would see as heartland, but which doesn't necessarily have to support conservative politics, which can actually support progressive politics. And finally, David, it's a white man. She only looked at white men. And a few people have kind of been going,

surely Gretchen Whitman would have been good to look at. But one step at a time seems to be the feeling here. It's a bit sad that you can't possibly have two. I mean, you can't possibly have two people of colour. It just has to be a white man. But I guess that's the way the world is these things happen incrementally. It does seem as though they've found the most reassuring possible Democrat white man to try and win.

And I'm seeing the polls already looking pretty good for Harris. They're certainly both in swing states, things are tightening and the national poll she's looking good. It does seem to be working. Yeah, it really seems to be working at the moment. As we've talked about before, we don't really know how long the so-called honeymoon effect is going to last with Harris.

And I think she is in a definite honeymoon period at the moment. We don't know if that is going to wear off in the next few weeks or if it could continue for a lot longer, potentially. But certainly it's working at the moment. I think the thing to always keep in mind when you look at polls is to acknowledge polls can be wrong. Polls can be biased and not through conscious political bias of the pollsters, but just to do with the way that they've assembled samples or whatever.

So the important thing to look at in polls is how are they moving over time? And what we're seeing at the moment is just about every poll I can see is moving towards Harris over time. So whether or not she's actually in front, because people will remember from 2016 and 2020, the polls must by quite a lot when it came to estimating Donald Trump's vote. Whether she's actually in front,

she's definitely doing a lot better than Biden did. And at the moment, she still seems to be improving. So whatever she is doing, I think, is definitely working at the moment. Okay. So it seems as though another strong pick. She also manages to avoid the debate over Israel-Gaza to a degree by not backing Josh Shapiro. I discussed that with Emma Shored us yesterday. So you can listen back to that if you want to look at this aspect of it, but certainly avoiding

eventually big protest at the DNC, which is in how many weeks, David? The DNC starts on August 19th. So that's 12 days from now. It's two weeks minus two days. So will the honeymoon continue up to that point, I guess we'll see. Thank you as always. Great to have your views. A little bit of good old-fashioned Midwestern insight.

Thank you for that. My pleasure. Our Gears from Road, we're part of the iconic class network. Catch you tomorrow.