The suspicion was that Kamala Harris was going to pick a "moderate" battleground state Democrat who could expand her path to 270 electoral votes. She didn't do that. She went with a radical leftist governor from a blue state: Tim Walz. While this choice had many scratching their heads, the conventional wisdom from the Democratic Party is that with Walz as her running mate, it will significantly enhance the ticket’s appeal in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
"One of the Democrats’ chief challenges in those states is in blue-collar and small-town areas, where the party once ran competitively (or at least respectably) before the floor fell out amid and after Donald Trump’s emergence in 2016," explains MSNBC' national political correspondent Steve Kornacki. "The thinking is that Walz’s story and style will be relatable and reassuring to some of those voters, blunting at least part of the Trump GOP’s newfound dominance."
The problem with this theory, Kornacki points out, is that Walz "wasn’t able to do that himself in his last campaign."
The theory was that Minnesota shares demographic similarities with Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The one thing that makes Minnesota a blue state and not a battleground is that "it has a higher share of the college-educated, Democratic-friendly cohort."
Walz won his 2022 re-election bid 52%-44% over his Republican foe. That’s virtually the same as the 52%-45% margin Joe Biden carried the state by in 2020.
Walz put up those numbers in a worse year for Democrats, to be sure. But did he attain that 52% with a different coalition from Biden’s — one less skewed toward the well-educated Twin Cities area, with broader support in the small cities and towns of Greater Minnesota? If he did, it would buttress the notion that he has a strong and unique connection with the exact type of voter Democrats have been shedding in those three key battleground states.
County-level results show that 49 of Minnesota’s 87 counties, predominantly rural and white, surged for Trump, with Republicans improving by at least 20 points in 2016 and 2020 compared to 2012. These counties, where 72%-85% of adults lack four-year degrees, resemble areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania where Democrats have lost significant ground.
These counties were competitive before Trump with some voting for Obama in 2012. And if Walz could appeal in these areas, it could boost the ticket, but as Kornacki notes, "There’s no obvious difference between Walz’s strength in those areas and what Biden showed in 2020."
Walz also didn't perform any better than Biden in what Kornack calls “blue surge” counties or "places in the state where Democrats performed better in 2020 under Biden than they had in 2012 under Obama."
What’s striking, if anything, is how different the Walz and Biden numbers are from Obama’s. When Obama won his two elections, he joined strong metro-area support with respectable showings (and sometimes better) among small-town and blue-collar voters. A primary feature of American politics since Obama has been the virtual disappearance of that kind of demographic and geographic balance from the Democratic coalition.
In his ’22 campaign, Walz didn’t restore that old balance. His coalition, instead, looked just like what has become the standard post-Obama coalition for Democrats. He rolled up massive margins in metro areas and took a beating practically everywhere else.
None of this is to say the Harris-Walz ticket won’t be able to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. It very well may. But to boost the ticket in those states beyond what has become the Democratic Party norm, Walz will need to break through Trump-era polarization in the kinds of places he wasn’t able to do it in 2022.
In other words, the main reason for picking Walz — helping the Democrats win the blue wall — was a mirage. Oops.
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