Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) has spent so much of his time in the limelight as Kamala Harris’s running mate that the Democratic vice presidential nominee was hardly recognizable when he showed up to debate Republican running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). Walz was a shadow of the smiling, strutting, Cheshire Cat of a caricature that the public has gotten used to seeing. Instead, his gaze was vacant, his face growing redder, and his expression utterly perplexed.
And then he opened his mouth.
Jesus Christ himself would struggle to defend the disaster that has been Harris’s tenure in the White House, and to his credit, Walz kicked off his first answer, admittedly to a softball typical for the CBS anchors, with a fairly anodyne commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself from the barrage of rockets fired at it from Iranian terrorists. Walz indeed did as well as anyone would expect him to do.
But Walz, an identity politics hire chosen specifically because he was a mediocre Midwestern white male to stand small in contrast to Harris, did as well as anyone would expect of such a self-congratulatory amateurism. He failed to recall the word Gaza and froze up repeatedly throughout the most rehearsed of his answers. He spent Vance’s answers either scribbling over his notepad like the last student struggling over Scantron or gazing desperately as the Ohio senator cooly delivered detailed answers straight into the camera. None of this is to mention when Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell briefly even pushed back on Walz’s pathological lies over his past coziness with the Chinese Communist Party.
It’s almost like Walz would have benefitted from actually talking to the press at some point in the past two months.
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Recall that since the Democratic Party quietly removed Joe Biden from the presidential nomination and replaced him with Harris, a candidate who received not one national primary vote in either 2020 or 2024, Harris and Walz have done a combined 21 nonscripted interviews, and that includes Harris sitting with interviewers such as Oprah Winfrey and Stephanie Ruhle who outright endorsed her. In that same time, Vance and former President Donald Trump — who, you may recall, survived two assassination attempts — have sat for three times as many unscripted interviews.
It didn’t have to be this way. Harris had the chance to choose Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) as her running mate, a swing state leader so uniquely popular that Republican senate candidate Dave McCormick had cut advertisements boasting of his relationship with him. But Harris didn’t want to be upstaged. She chose Walz not in spite of his painfully nervous energy and the “folksy” and false facade concealing it but precisely because he would cosplay as a schlubby and unimpressive Homer Simpson next to her telegenic and trendy visage. Walz may make for fun headlines and favorable comparisons to a candidate as lackluster as Harris, but in the spotlight, he crumbled, and in a race as close as this one, such a minor underperformance can exact a real cost for Harris.