In selecting Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Kamala Harris has made the most brand-defining decision of her weeks-old presidential bid. A win for the progressive activist base, the Walz pick highlights contrasts with the conservative populism of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.
So far, Harris has focused on blunting possible negatives by retracting some past policy stances, playing up issues that speak to her base (particularly abortion), and luxuriating in the glow of revived Democratic enthusiasm. In the Senate and as a 2020 presidential candidate, she tacked to the left. Now, she has made some gestures toward the center. Often through spokespeople or campaign intermediaries, she has backed away from her previous positions—on gun buybacks, on banning fracking, on single-payer health care, on a federal jobs guarantee, and other issues. Untested by a primary battle, she has leaned into broad themes of “freedom” and meme campaigns rather than a specific policy agenda. Her campaign website as of this writing even lacks an “issues” page. Harris’s recent endorsement of Biden’s “court reform” proposal—which included sweeping changes, including term limits for Supreme Court justices, without a specific mechanism for achieving them—was quintessential vibes-based politics.
This vagueness has worked to Harris’s advantage thus far. A politics of personality will not disappoint activists with moderation or alienate swing voters with extreme commitments. The vice president and her allies have also indicated that they would prefer to have the 2024 election be about personality. Polling suggests the logic of this approach. In a Wall Street Journal survey from late last month, voters gave Trump a healthy advantage on handling the economy (52 percent to 40 percent). But voters thought that Harris has a better temperament to be president than does Trump (46 percent to 38 percent). A battle about personae may favor Harris in a way that it did not favor Biden, whose age often overshadowed other characteristics.
Since announcing her candidacy, Harris has presented a tightly controlled media image, and the media are not pressing to put her on the record on various issues. Under normal political conditions, a vibes-based candidacy would melt under the Klieg lights of national scrutiny, but these are not normal conditions; the window for the general election is quickly closing. We have three months until Election Day, and voters will begin casting their ballots weeks before that.
The Walz pick may represent an inflection point for this strategy of imprecision. The first Democratic vice presidential nominee in a century who is a sitting governor, Walz has a long record as a chief executive. Echoing the broader shift in the Democratic party, Walz ran as a blue-collar moderate in his first campaign for Congress in 2006 but shifted leftward in his 2018 and 2022 gubernatorial races. As Minnesota governor, Walz was at the epicenter of some of the most explosive controversies of 2020: the coronavirus lockdowns and the “racial reckoning.” He instituted a hotline where state residents could report people for not following his stay-at-home orders. Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey has complained that Walz hesitated to send in the National Guard—despite Frey’s request—as the city erupted in riots in May 2020. Walz’s educational plans have emphasized an “equity” framework and called for establishing a “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Center” within the state’s department of education. On economic policy, Walz has shown some sympathy with left populism, supporting expanded family-leave programs and what the AFL-CIO described as “some of the most pro-worker packages of legislation of any state in the country.”
With Harris as the Democratic nominee, the map of the 2024 presidential election has changed. States that, if lost by the Democrats, would have portended a Trump landslide are now sorting back to the Democratic column, and states that had seemed reliably pro-Trump have become battlegrounds again. After the first presidential debate, Trump had surged to an advantage in lean-Democratic New Hampshire against Biden, but now Harris enjoys a significant lead there. The vice president holds a lead in much Michigan polling now, and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania remain razor close.
How the Walz pick figures into Harris’s overall strategy remains to be seen. As governor, Walz has not coded as a social moderate, so his selection could be calculated to charge up the highly educated progressives and wealthy suburbanites who wield growing clout in the Democratic Party—and have helped the party make inroads in Arizona and Georgia. Elections analyst Steve Kornacki recently noticed that among the working-class counties that have swung Republican over the past decade, Walz won a similar share of the vote in his 2022 gubernatorial reelection campaign as Democratic presidential nominees did in 2016 and 2020. This, combined with Walz’s electoral record as governor, raises doubts about his ability to win back blue-collar skeptics of the new Democratic Party. On the other hand, Walz originally won his House seat in a swing district, so perhaps he will try to pivot back to his small-town roots as a way of making up some ground with working-class and rural voters.
This next stage of the race puts even more pressure on the Trump campaign to articulate its own vision. Trump’s team has alternated between two messaging strategies: portraying Harris as “dangerously liberal” or as a chameleon who continually changes positions. This is a standard Republican tactic. George W. Bush’s campaign threaded a needle that fine in 2004, when it portrayed John Kerry as both a “flip-flopper” and “out of the mainstream.” But Bush’s strategy took considerable messaging discipline and occurred in a very different political environment. Bush was branded as a conviction politician with a consistent record—a contrast with Trump’s own transactional brand of policy disruption.
In the general election, Trump has given himself some political maneuvering room. The RNC platform was relatively minimal, and the former president has continually distanced himself from more granular policy agendas (such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025). When Trump was running against Biden, this policy amorphousness might have helped him keep the 2024 election from being a referendum on himself.
The playing field has now changed. The Biden-Trump rematch was going to be a clash of the presidents, with voters weighing record against record. Polling indicated that this kind of contest favored Trump—especially on the economy and immigration. While Harris is the sitting vice president, she does not seem to be as tied in the public’s mind to many parts of Biden’s record. A poll taken just after Biden dropped out, for example, showed that voters trusted her and Trump equally to bring down prices. Her negatives might not be quite as entrenched as Biden’s. Since announcing her presidential run, Harris’s net approval rating has shot up; a Forbes poll, for instance, had her at a -15 net approval in the middle of July but at -8 by the end of the month. That’s obviously not a stellar number, but it is more promising compared with Biden, mired in double-digit net disapproval ratings for most of the past two years.
Trump may need to execute a more thoroughly defined populist turn to heighten contrasts with Harris and help define her image. If Trump plays up policy questions (from the breakdown at the border to energy production), he could help bring out the populist voters he needs to win in November.
The American public remains restive. Under a third of voters approve of the direction of the country. The recent bump in the unemployment rate and turmoil in the markets may be signs of potential vulnerabilities in the economy, beyond inflation. This national dissatisfaction could be a strategic opportunity for Republicans, but the party needs to hone its message for a rebooted battle of the brands.
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