Tim Walz helped Kamala Harris fire up the base on his Midwestern home turf.
Now, Democrats are about to find out how he plays outside that region. The new running mates are turning their attention from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt — testing whether Walz’s folksy, Midwestern brand can resonate beyond middle America.
Harris’ campaign is betting that Walz’s biography — he is a former schoolteacher and football coach who grew up in small-town Nebraska, served in the Army National Guard and held a battleground House seat in Minnesota for over a decade before winning two terms as the state’s governor — and his unassuming demeanor will appeal beyond the Midwest.
But Walz is largely unknown outside his home state. He has more limited experience with the southern border, a crucial issue in this election but especially in Arizona, where the campaign will make an appearance on Friday as part of its battlegrounds tour. It’s the home state of one of Harris’ rejected contenders, Sen. Mark Kelly.
And some Sun Belt Democrats fear that Walz tips the ticket into more progressive territory that could be hard to sell to more moderate voters across the suburban and rural South and Southwest.
“Walz is a question mark” because he is untested with swing voters outside of the Midwest, former Democratic Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux told POLITICO. “The challenge is going to be for Harris to figure out a way to win over those [swing] voters, and I don’t think Walz is going to do the trick.”
Harris’ own candidacy appears to have opened the electoral map significantly for Democrats, putting back in play some Southern and Southwestern battlegrounds where President Joe Biden had been lagging. The first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent elected to the vice presidency, polls suggest she is already making inroads with young people and Black and Latino voters whose support for Biden was dropping — and are key voting blocs in the Sun Belt. At least two race-raters this week have shifted Georgia from leaning Republican to “toss-up.” One, the Cook Political Report, made similar moves for Arizona and Nevada.
“Having an experience that connects with people that live outside of the metropolitan areas and respects that way of life and can speak plainly to folks is a skill that he has and that resonates in those places,” said Dan Kanninen, battleground states director for the Harris campaign, of Walz’s addition to the ticket. “You can’t win close states without getting beyond just your base and your comfort zone.”
Walz has already campaigned for Democrats in northern Nevada — though not as part of the new ticket. Many Democrats across the Sun Belt believe the governor’s background and plainspoken approach could help expand Harris’ reach there by balancing her coastal credentials as a former California attorney general and senator.
“He can just speak to ordinary people,” said Tick Segerblom, a former Democratic state lawmaker in Nevada who chairs the Clark County Commission. “We don’t need more lawyers.”
Democrats say Walz’s blue-collar background and support from organized labor — he was a member of a teacher’s union — gives him credibility with workers in Nevada. In Arizona, where President Joe Biden beat Trump by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, both Democratic and Republican operatives say the pairing of Walz, whose daughter was conceived using in-vitro fertilization, and Harris, who has been the Biden administration’s leading voice on abortion issues, could further help motivate voters to turn out both in the presidential race and in support of a ballot initiative that would enshrine access to the procedure in the state’s constitution.
In North Carolina and Georgia, Walz’s credentials could help Harris gather support among rural and military voters, strategists said. Douglas Wilson, a Democratic consultant in the Tar Heel State, said this positions Harris to potentially become the first Democrat to win the state since President Barack Obama’s coalition succeeded in 2008.
“They have a message that they can put on the ground in some of these areas that Democrats haven’t won in some time,” Wilson said. “[Walz] is someone that can really appeal to a lot of these voters that are in rural areas or that may not have voted for a Democrat in awhile and are now considering it seeing this full ticket.”
But Walz’s appeal in the rural South is not a guarantee, said Trey Hood, who leads polling as the director of the University of Georgia’s Survey Research Center and argues that the governor’s background might not matter on Election Day with rural white voters.
“They’re the most Republican voters we have in the state, period,” said Hood, who has written a book on rural Republican voter realignment in the South. “The margins are huge in the rural areas for Republicans, unless you’re talking about a Black belt county.”
And as governor of a predominantly white state, Walz has little record appealing to Latinos — a critical demographic in the Sun Belt.
“What he doesn’t bring to the table is Hispanics,” said Suffolk University polling director David Paleologos. “That’s a big voting bloc that neither vice presidential candidate can really speak to.”
The Harris campaign is working quickly to introduce Walz outside of the Midwest — and prepare a response to the counterattack Republicans have already launched against the Minnesota governor over his military record and progressive agenda.
For their part, Republicans are betting that more moderate voters across the battleground states won’t be able to look past Walz’s progressive bona fides, which made him a favorite with organized labor and on the party’s left flank as Harris’ shortlist narrowed. Republicans moved swiftly this week to frame Walz as a far-left “radical” who has backed “dangerously liberal” policies — including those that support undocumented immigrants.
“We were certainly anticipating that she would pick a more moderate, centrist to balance the ticket with,” said Josh McKoon, the chair of the Georgia Republican Party. “But instead, she didn’t just pick someone that’s not a moderate — she’s picked the most radical, far-left vice presidential nominee, certainly in my lifetime, maybe in American history.”
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