Since Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate in August 2024, political commentators have offered various takes on Walz – is he pragmatic or progressive, centrist or radical, a grassroots lefty or a mainstream Democrat?
Walz will have a chance to speak directly to voters and possibly explain who he is and what he stands for when he debates Republican contender JD Vance on Oct. 1, 2024.
I am a scholar of populist politics in North America, and I understand why it is difficult to define how Walz fits within the Democratic Party.
On the one hand, Walz is a shock to the Democratic Party, which often endorses elite-educated, moderate politicians from the country’s two coasts. Walz is a former public school teacher who graduated from a state college in Nebraska – and he is not afraid to embrace the moniker of a “progressive,” which some Democrats reject in order to avoid false comparisons to socialists.
As Walz said in an August 2024 donor call for Harris: “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”
Yet, Walz is unlike many other progressives in the Democratic Party. He is a gun owner and a hunter – and was one of the “best shots in Congress” when he represented Minnesota in Washington, as he will remind people. He uses sports metaphors to convey his messages, rallying Democrats behind a “fourth quarter” comeback in the election, for example.
Yet these apparent contradictions make sense when considering that Walz follows a rich lineage of Midwestern progressive politics that starts with the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, a state affiliate of the Democratic Party that maintains the traditions and values of populist farmer politics in the American Midwest.
Since Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate in August 2024, political commentators have offered various takes on Walz – is he pragmatic or progressive, centrist or radical, a grassroots lefty or a mainstream Democrat?
Walz will have a chance to speak directly to voters and possibly explain who he is and what he stands for when he debates Republican contender JD Vance on Oct. 1, 2024.
I am a scholar of populist politics in North America, and I understand why it is difficult to define how Walz fits within the Democratic Party.
On the one hand, Walz is a shock to the Democratic Party, which often endorses elite-educated, moderate politicians from the country’s two coasts. Walz is a former public school teacher who graduated from a state college in Nebraska – and he is not afraid to embrace the moniker of a “progressive,” which some Democrats reject in order to avoid false comparisons to socialists.
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