From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. It is Tuesday, August 6. We just found out that Tim Walls, the governor of Minnesota, who we just did a show with, a week ago, you can find it just back there on the archives, is going to be Kamala Harris 's choice for Vice President. And so we now know what the shape of the races we have, Donald Trump and JD Vance on one side, and we have Kamala Harris and Tim Walls on the other.
And we've been covering this closely enough and talking about Walls enough that it felt like it would be good to just have a conversation about how this looks. So I'm joined as I am so often in the cycle by our great senior editor, Claire Gordon. Claire. Hi Ezra. So I've seen Walls describe as a unity pick, but he isn't exactly a moderate, and Minnesota isn't exactly a swing state. So would you describe this as a safe choice or a bold choice? I would describe Walls as clearly a bold choice.
So my friend Nate Silver, who I have been aligned with on most questions over the course of this campaign, has been making this argument that Shapiro would have been the bold choice. And Shapiro would have been the bold choice because there's a little bit of friction with the left potentially on Israel, maybe on some other questions. But look, Shapiro has a 60% plus approval rating in Pennsylvania. So far as any state in the country is likely to decide the election.
Pennsylvania has the best shot at it. And so forget what the left is saying. Pick the guy who's going to give you the best shot at winning the state you most need to win. I would say in that analysis, Shapiro is the safe choice. I don't think that there would have been static from the left in a way that would have been meaningful for the Harris campaign. Democrats are quite united.
Shapiro's actual positions on Israel are not very different from Kamala Harris's, not very different from frankly any of the other vice presidential possibilities. Walt submerges as a media phenomenon. He is not an unknown figure. He's the head of the Democratic Governors Association. He's the governor of Minnesota, which is not a swing state, though it is worth noting that in internal democratic polling after Biden's collapse, Minnesota had become competitive.
But it's probably not with Harris under any of the vice presidential possibilities. You know, a board is Wisconsin, there's an argument that somebody like Walt's will be appealing in Midwestern states. I don't expect there to be a significant effect like that. But Walt's gives this interview on Morning Joe where he says that Trump and Vance are weird. They're the kind of people who ruin Thanksgiving. And in a minute, he functionally upends all democratic messaging.
The Harris campaign begins to sound like him. Walt's goes on a media tour, he's on CNN, MSNBC, a bunch, he does an hour interview on the ESRGANCHO, which I will say, by the way, I have interviewed a lot of politicians. I don't know how many by now. I try to avoid doing it because politicians are terrible to interview. And Walt's is one of the five best politicians I've ever interviewed because he actually thinks aloud. He is responding to you in the moment in a genuine conversation away.
You can always tell with politicians this buffering happening in their heads. He has a question and this program fires up really fast. It says, what are all the ways I can answer this wrong? And what is my message here supposed to actually be? And Walt's, you could feel the conversation actually happening. It was like talking to a normal person, which is one reason he's so effective on TV.
While Walt's begins giving these interviews, he breaks through the media, he breaks through the attentional field is what I would say. Shapiro becomes a candidate who is most likely to help you win Pennsylvania. Walt's becomes the vice presidential candidate, most likely to help you win the day-to-day fight for attention and message and enthusiasm.
And Harris picks Walt's, which I'm sure there are a lot of reasons she did so, but it is a pick about making the ticket most appealing nationally and trying to continue generating a momentum in energy that she has been generating to the surprise of many Democrats. It's a moment she became the presumptive nominee. And that is a riskier play, but it is a bigger play. It is a bet on the intangibles of the Harris ticket, not the tangible possibilities of Pennsylvania.
So, the comparison that you see around to Tim Cain, Hillary Clinton's 2016 pick, because they have similar, affable dad vibes. You don't think that's a fair comparison. I think that comparison isn't sane. And I don't understand the people. Like, I've seen people who know a thing about politics making that comparison. And it has made me question their judgment at fundamental level. I like Tim Cain. Tim Cain is a good man. I've covered Tim Cain for a long time.
He can remember a thing Tim Cain has ever said in public. He is just not a memorable media figure. The theory of a candidate like Tim Cain was a theory of a good governing partner. Hillary Clinton was very confident she was going to win the election. She really liked Tim Cain. She felt that Tim Cain in election where she was trying to appear reassuring against the very unreassuring Donald Trump. Tim Cain helped her do that. But she wasn't looking at Cain to win her any states.
She wasn't looking at Cain to be a kind of messenger she could not be. She liked them. It was a perfectly good pick for a perfectly good way of thinking about the vice president, which is who do you think can best do the job if you die? But what walls is, again, is a media phenomenon. He also has a great record as a governor. We can talk about some of that.
He could be a very significant governing partner in his ability to help Harris with particularly House Democrats where he served for some time and actually knows them and has a good sense of how the House works. You can imagine that as one of the things in her head. Tim Walls is a candidate who knows the House and he knows governors. And those are two places that Harris does not herself have any kind of deep experience.
But that is not what vaulted walls from being an obscure governor to becoming her vice president. What vaulted walls from being an obscure governor to her vice president was walls broke through the cacophony of not just the campaign, but the post Harris moment, the run of every charismatic white male Democrat who thought he could be a possible vice presidential pick for Harris. That's bootage edge. That's right. Cooper. That's Shapiro. You could just run this list down. That's Mark Kelly.
He broke through past all of them, reshape the whole way people are talking about the race, develop a rabid online fan base in a matter of days. There's a certain segment of liberal leaning pundits or campaign strategists who act like attention is not a thing. Who act like that whole mediating layer between what a candidate says and how they get heard doesn't exist.
And that the only thing that really matters are their sort of demographic characteristics, the state they are from, the kinds of policy positions they take. But that's not true at all. To compare it to Tim Cain, it's just miss the entire field on which Harris is currently thinking about playing, which is a field, by the way, the Joe Biden seated to Donald Trump, which is a field of attention.
Joe Biden's theory in 2020, and then again in 2024, was it the election should be about Donald Trump in 2020 when Donald Trump was the unpopular incumbent president. That was a theory that benefited Joe Biden hugely. Donald Trump wanted the election to be about Donald Trump. Joe Biden wanted to be about Donald Trump. The election was about Donald Trump and Donald Trump lost.
In 2024, when Biden's communication skills had deteriorated and he was the unpopular incumbent president, making the election about Donald Trump, which was always the theory of the Biden campaign was failing. In part, it wasn't working because Biden's age had made the election too much about Biden's own competence. But also people had become somewhat nostalgic, I think wrongly, but nevertheless for Donald Trump's economy, for a time before the war in Gaza, a time before the war in Ukraine.
And Trump's existence was not repelling people in the way that strategy acquired him to do. Harris, from the second she became the clear nominee, some intangible energy emerged around her to the extent that Republicans were so shocked by this vibeship. They've called it a sia, they pretend it's concocted, but no Democrat expected it either. The whole Kamala is brat. The whole world of being coconut-pilled.
Harris has completely shouldered Trump out of his typical position of dominating the media, dominating social media, dominating cable news. It has become harder and harder for Trump to get a word in edgewise. The main ways that Trump advance or breaking through are when they say outrageous, unpopular things, which by the way is predictable. It is what Donald Trump always does when he can't break through into the media.
He gets crazier and crazier until people begin to report on him again, which is an excellent strategy for the Harris campaign. But so they have begun dominating, intentionally. And they have picked a vice presidential candidate who is able to help them do that. A vice presidential candidate with a very, very clear capability to dominate in the media. Now, whether or not that works all the way through, I don't know, but that is the theory here. That was not the Tim Kaine theory.
So just to underline this, you think weird won this for walls. I don't think there's any doubt. And do you think weird is more than just a moment? Do you think that's a sustainable message, a successful long-term message in the selection? I think they could overdo it. If you go to the conversation I had with walls, we talked a lot about that. And I both think the weird messaging is very powerful.
And walls is able to do it from a grounded place that other Democrats can't when he actually delivers that line the first time, not the rest time he has ever delivered it, but where it broke through in the cycle. He talks about being from a small town of 400. He talks about there being no private schools in that town.
He talks about the way in which JD Vance's effort to weaponize the resentment of rural Midwestern Appalachian whites is inauthentic that that is not what people in small towns are like. People don't like that politics has become like this. They don't want politics tearing their Thanksgiving dinner table apart. If the Democrats pick up the weird thing, they can take it into a bit of a school yard place. Fine. So they have to be careful with that.
And I think walls talks in that interview quite perceptively about how to be careful with it. But I do think he picks up there and that the Democrats have now understood this vulnerability in Trump and Vance in an important way. And I would say it's actually a different vulnerability in the two of them. Little Trump is weird in a very particular way. He's a person who you might ask, how will you make Social Security solvent?
And he might answer by lying about how many people were at his inauguration speech when he became president. He's a narcissist. His mind goes down very strange pathways. I talked to somebody who worked with him where the guy was telling me what it's like to brief Donald Trump. And he said, you just spend the whole hour chasing squirrels. And he'd tell him something and he just goes wherever he goes. JD Vance, he's not weird. He's off-putting is where I would put it.
And the particular problem with Vance is that he's too online. Behind Donald Trump, where Donald Trump had a very authentic to Donald Trump form of weirdness, but it was a showman's weirdness. It was Arnhem and Bailey weirdness. Behind him emerged this very dark online set of subcultures. I would call this sort of extended MAGA online cinematic universe, but it has white supremacists in it. It has very weird forms of natalists and it pronatalists in it.
It has people who just are obsessed with race and immigration. It is in your reactionaries. If you dig in to where the intellectual world that is following behind Donald Trump has gone and we've done a lot of this reading, it's bizarre. And JD Vance, his conversion, went through this online world. What is weird about JD Vance is what is weird about somebody who spends too much time watching neo reactionary YouTube videos and then participating in the comment sections.
And that is why Vance has this completely unusual, particularly for vice presidential nominee tendency to take a perfectly popular policy idea or insight about the world and present it in the most unpopular off putting possible way. So when he comes out and says that childless people should pay a higher tax rate than people with children because you want to disincentivize bad things and incentivize good things.
In some way he's describing the child tax credit, which is a very popular policy supported by among other people, Kamal Harris, supported by among other people Tim Walls, not supported importantly by many congressional Republicans. But you would never describe that policy in terms of punishing people without children. You describe that policy in terms of helping people with children.
When Vance is out there saying that people without children are more often deranged in sociopathic on Twitter, these things are natural in the world he was in, where you are vying to show that you are most on the train. V has described himself in this language, it is very common out there as an anti regime politician. When you begin talking to those people like Patrick Deneen and these post liberals, they talk a lot about the regime, right?
The sort of networked group of institutions, media, government, business, etc. that dominates all American life. And in this world, you have to show you're actually on board and the way you show it, and if you go to the Tucker Carlson interview where J.D. Vance makes his comment about childless cat ladies, it's actually worth hearing the way Tucker Carlson opens that interview. So there are two kinds of people who run for office. And one category is really big, one category is really small.
The big category is people who just want to get to office because they want to prove something that their apps and their alcoholic fathers or fill some empty space inside or have power over you. That's almost everybody. There's a small category people run for office because they really believe something and they've got something to say. They really mean it. We almost never see these people. One of those J.D. Vance, he didn't need to run for office, but he is. He's running for Senate in Ohio.
And since the second he announced, places like the Daily Beast and the Washington Post and the Atlantic, the Axis of Protectors, the ruling class have gone crazy. They hate him. They really hate him. And that's how you know he means it. This is how you know J.D. Vance is serious. By inviting that kind of attack and a probrium, he is proving to these people that he is for real. The politicians in the Magal world who are for real are the ones who everybody else hates.
Vance is promoted to Donald Trump by the very online people around Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Steve Bannon, Elon Musk is reportedly was pushing for J.D. Vance, Elon Musk is permanently online and that is what I think Walls picked up on and now what Democrats are picking up on, which is that there's something unsettling about where these folks have gone and Trump picked up vice president who amplifies that rather than someone who like Doug Bergham who calms it down.
But Trump in 2016 set a lot of things that the media thought was off putting and it turned out he could win a presidential election saying those things. A lot of that stuff that seemed to come out of right wing talk radio world is it possible this is just the next the next wave next gen of this kind of rhetoric. Donald Trump can absolutely win this election and nobody should have any illusions about that. This is at best a toss up.
If you look at the polling right now Harris has gained a lot from where Joe Biden was. He's ahead of Trump narrowly national polling. It depends on what polls you're looking at of ballot ground states and we don't have a lot of high quality ballot ground state polling since Joe Biden stepped aside. But she's much more competitive there. But it is very competitive. It's like tied in Pennsylvania tied in Wisconsin tied in Michigan.
The thing that is different is she might have brought Georgia, Arizona, Nevada back into a winnable place for Democrats. So I think she's expanded the map, but she hasn't made Trump an underdog in the Midwest. So the idea that the Trump can't win that's wrong. But the things that Donald Trump has been good at are not the things that make him off putting in the media. I don't believe. So Donald Trump correctly identifies certain things that the people are very upset about including immigration.
And that had been suppressed in both Republican and Democratic party politics in 2016. So Donald Trump creates a cleavage in terms of what the election is about in 2016 that favored Republicans in 2012. The Obama Romney cleavage was over the economy in 2016. The central cleavage was over immigration. I think the smart run for Donald Trump in 2024, which at times it seemed like he was leaning into, was almost as a kind of stability candidate.
Remember how much you liked the Donald Trump economy before all this inflation? Remember how the world seemed more peaceful? Maybe that was because Donald Trump was such a loose cannon that people were afraid to do anything that they made him angry. That was the argument Trump was making for a while. And that argument was breaking through. People felt there was a lot of disorder on the Joe Biden. They also felt that Joe Biden was too old to be in charge of it.
And trusted he could handle a world that had gone a little nuts in the way. Price has seemed to be going nuts in the way that Russia had invaded Ukraine. What was happening? Gaza was a catastrophe. And the more Trump falls away from that, the more he's not making the argument about inflation, but is making the argument that it's not possible to be both black and Indian American at the same time.
The more he is out there giving voice to his resentments, the more he is out there saying the election has been and will be stolen. Trump was campaigning in Georgia. And he opened up in Georgia by attacking Kemp, the popular Republican governor of Georgia for not doing enough to steal the election on his behalf in 2020. That is not the Donald Trump that wins elections. And what seems to be happening right now is as he feels more backed into a corner and is having more trouble breaking through.
He is lashing out from that space of resentment, pay attention to me. He's running a more high risk set of plays. And as of yet, I don't think they're working out great for him. In some ways, the single best thing that Kamala Harris has done for Democrats is to knock Trump off the campaign he was running and knock him back into the resentful, cramped, conspiratorial version of himself that is now emerging.
Because this guy who is raging at Kemp, this guy who is going to the National Association of Black Journalists and saying that nobody knew Kamala Harris was black, I will say, by the way, as a Californian who was aware of Kamala Harris in California politics, it was known, actually, people were aware of that. This guy does not strike people as excellent on inflation, laser focused on the economic and pocketbook problems they have to solve.
This is not effective campaigning right now from Donald Trump. And Vance is not helping. Well, I'd love to wrap by just talking about Waltz's potential vulnerabilities, particularly with race becoming more salient in the campaign. And one that's come up, I think the most is how he responded to the protests and the riots after George Floyd's murder.
Do you think that's going to be a risk and a point of attack or maybe even reminding bringing 2020 back into the electorate's memory could potentially be a plus for Democrats? Do you want to say what the attack is? He hesitated in calling the National Guard to respond to the riots in Minneapolis. So it's interesting to me because the attack on the left on Waltz was that he did call in the National Guard and there are places it didn't.
I think it is going to be hard for Trump to make the election about the George Floyd riots. It's also not for nothing a period in which Donald Trump was the president. Right? It reminds people of a period of disorder and chaos under Donald Trump. Bringing people back to 2020 when Trump was mishandling the pandemic and there is a huge racial reckoning is not bringing people back to the part of the Trump presidency that I think Trump should want to remind people of.
I don't want to tell you that Waltz doesn't have possible vulnerabilities. Every politician does. I think they're not likely to go after his vulnerabilities or likely to go after Kamala Harris's vulnerabilities. So I don't think Waltz has said or done the things that are offensive or unusual enough for them to become major dimensions of the campaign. And I think the question is if does he help fortify Harris? So that leads you to what are Harris's vulnerabilities.
I think the case we're going to make on Harris is one that she is responsible or at least can be blamed for things people do not like about the Biden administration. Inflation and high prices and high levels of border crossings, although those have gone substantially down in the last couple of months. So that is going to be a series of attacks they run. I don't really think Waltz helps her on that in particular, but maybe.
And then there's either thing that Democrats have often worried about with Harris, which is just to be blunt about it, that a liberal black woman from San Francisco is not a good candidate profile to win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. And there what Waltz is on the ticket to do is balance out the perceptions of Harris. They're going to have Waltz functionally going door to door, offering to check the oil in your car in those states. That is the vibe of Waltz.
That is what they have picked with him. I actually think in a weird way Shapiro would have been worse for Harris on this level. The Shapiro and Harris are both lawyers. They both have a sort of Obama era politics vibe to them, very smart, very educated, seem like they could have been on the same law review in law school, seem like they could have worked for the same firm.
And if you're worried about the way in which the Democratic Party has become a more educated coalition, that it seems to give off a college voter vibe and has begun winning college voters and losing non-college voters, even though Shapiro does very well in Pennsylvania, but remember, Shapiro ran against a truly deranged candidate in Pennsylvania, so I don't know how much we should look at that election for governor as a sort of comp with people who ran against stronger candidates in their races.
But even though Shapiro does well in Pennsylvania, when you look at them and you listen to them, we sort of have the same energy, which if what you're trying to do is balance out that dimension of Harris and send a signal to voters who don't see in her and in the sort of online fervor around her, something that looks like them or feels like them, walls might be helpful from that perspective.
Walls is a not a former high flying lawyer, but a former high school football coach and long time army reservist. And from everything we know from vice presidential past, that probably is not going to matter that much.
People vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom of the ticket, but to the extent that there are attacks that I think the Harris campaign is thinking about, she has these past liberal positions, she is associated with the unpopular parts of the Biden administration, and she is a candidate who reflects the increasingly highly educated democratic coalition as opposed to the sort of older, more working class democratic coalition.
I think Walls is there to help with the last of those and he doesn't make the first to worse. Did Harris just pick a younger Biden as her VP, her version of the kid from screen? It looks like that to me and it doesn't. I do think it is easy to forget that what Biden was there to do in 2008 was add foreign policy experience. That was a foreign policy election first and foremost, at least until the financial crisis hit and it became an economic election.
And Biden had a confidence and an ease talking about foreign policy that if you were worried that Obama's position on Iraq was really helpful among democratic primary voters, but just as a younger, less tested candidate, that there were some voters who might think this is not the guy I want to use a Hillary Clinton add answering the three-amp phone call. Biden was there to help with that. He was there for other reasons too, Joe from Scranton, that kind of thing.
But first and foremost, that was a foreign policy election at that time and Joe Biden was a balancing pick for an anti-war ticket. And I think to the extent Walls is there to balance, he is balancing other things for Harris. He's not really a foreign policy figure. He's not a long time member of the Senate.
He's a midwestern governor who again broke through because there's a straight talking plainness to the way he is able to attack the Trump vans ticket and the way he is able to present who Democrats are and who occupies the space of normalcy in American life that reshaped the way Democrats were talking in the election. Biden for all that he was known as both a blustery but very effective order. Biden was never able to do that. He did not break through in the OA campaign.
He was there to make Obama see more seasoned. Walls is there to help Harris dominate the messaging of this campaign and help push Trump and vans into a space that Democrats want them to occupy, which is a space of abnormal cy, a space of something's off with these guys. You can't trust them. They're not going to bring stability. They're going to bring eccentricity and chaos. And Democrats have become very much the party of normalcy.
The problem Joe Biden began to represent for them is it in his age and in the way he presented, he didn't comfort people. It seemed like a risk to choose Joe Biden. Harris and Walls are, they want to be the non-risk ticket and Walls is there to make vans and make Trump look weird, not just by saying it, but by existing as a kind of icon of what normalcy looks like in American life. Well, I was just waiting for you to say weird again, so I think that's a good moment to wrap.
Thank you so much, Ezra. Thank you, Claire. This episode of the Ezra Clancho was produced by a senior editor, Claire Gordon. Fact checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary March Locker, our senior engineer is Jeff Gald with additional mixing by Amin Sahota. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Roland Hu, Elias Esquith and Kristen Lynn, original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Samueluski and Shannon Busta.
The executive producer of New York Times' opinion audio is Andrew Astrosser and special thanks to Sonia Herrera.