Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) outed himself as a diversity hire on Monday, telling the Harvard Kennedy School forum he was chosen to be former Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate to create a “permission structure” for white, rural men to vote for the Democratic ticket.
“I could code talk to white guys — watching football, fixing their truck, doing that, that I could put them at ease,” Walz said. “I was the permission structure to say, ‘Look, you can do this and vote for this.’”
It’s hard to take anything Walz says about himself seriously. He is the same “knucklehead” who claimed to carry weapons in war despite never seeing combat, who waved a “Veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom” placard despite being stationed in Italy, and who claimed to witness the Tiananmen Square Massacre despite being in Nebraska at the time. His revelation about being a diversity hire may be just the latest fabrication of a politician making it up as he goes, but one suspects he is telling the awful truth.
If Walz was picked to appeal to men, the selection was an abject failure. According to NBC News exit polling, 55% of men voted for Republicans in the 2024 election, while only 45% went for Harris and Walz, a 9-point swing among men toward Trump from 2020. Men of all racial groups swung toward Trump relative to 2020, including a 15-point lurch among Latinos. Trump especially dominated among rural men in Walz’s Midwestern region.
There are glaring explanations for this. The first and most obvious is that Walz is not a convincing representative of the demographic he was meant to court. In addition to his many falsehoods and deceptions about his past — real men don’t fib — Walz’s “code talk” often came off as phony, an inherent aspect of “code talk.” His caricature of a Midwestern everyman was believable only to people who’d never met a Midwestern everyman, which probably describes the people who ran the Harris campaign.
Walz, who apparently was a former football coach (though his role appears to have been exaggerated), was incapable of talking about football coherently in public appearances. During his highly publicized game of NFL Madden with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the live-streaming video game platform Twitch, Walz posted on X that Cortez “could run a mean pick six,” which jumbles football jargon so oddly that it called into question whether Walz had ever watched a game, let alone participated in one.
TIM WALZ SAYS HARRIS CHOSE HIM FOR VP TO ‘CODE TALK’ TO WHITE GUYS
Walz’s forays into the manosphere got worse as the campaign wore on. His fumbling with a shotgun at a pheasant shoot intended to bolster his image as an outdoorsman called into question his entire military history. Tramping through tall grass in a blaze-orange Department of Natural Resources vest and Carhartts, Walz looked for all the world as if he’d never loaded a gun or hunted in his life.
But there’s a larger lesson for Democrats and Republicans who might be tempted to play identity politics, too. It is that voters are not the shallow and ignorant people that political elites believe them to be. They are remarkably open-minded about being led by people who don’t look or sound like them. America is a majority white country that twice decisively elected a black man, the son of a Kenyan. It is also a country whose minority voters swung hard for a white man accused by Democrats of racism each day for a decade. In both cases, voters chose the candidates according to their proposed work, not by their skin color. Perhaps there was a time when stunts such as Walz’s mattered, but that time is long past. More than ever, and much to the Democrats’ chagrin, the public judges candidates based on the content of their character and ideas, not the color of their skin. Identity politics has been a plague on American society and its culture. We hope the failure of Walz’s everyman cosplay campaign is the final nail in its coffin.