Hello and happy Saturday. Barring anything crazy happening (well, anything else crazy), the major party presidential tickets are set. Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris introduced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday.
In the days leading up to the announcement, much of the speculation about whom Harris would pick centered on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. Shapiro is a very popular governor in a very important swing state and the Harris campaign had chosen Philadelphia for the kickoff rally. Pretty straightforward, right? Wrong. Hours before the rally, Harris announced Walz.
Minnesota isn’t a swing state like Pennsylvania—it’s voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1972—but Walz brings other attributes to the ticket, as David Drucker noted. His record is pretty progressive, but he “exudes moderate sensibilities. He enlisted in the National Guard at the age of 17, and in 1999, he helped lead the Mankato West High School football team to a state championship as the team’s defensive coordinator,” Drucker wrote. “He is an avid outdoorsman and does not use the modern political lexicon of liberal activists when contrasting Democratic policies with those of the GOP.”
Chris Stirewalt called Walz the “safer pick” but also argued that Walz presents his own risk. Chris went back to the 2016 election, when Hillary Clinton beat out Bernie Sanders for the nomination but went on to lose to Donald Trump in November, and pointed out that Democrats might have learned the wrong lesson. In their minds, the problem wasn’t that Clinton was unpopular and ran a poor campaign, but that voters wanted more progressivism. And so maybe Harris should have gone with the more moderate Shapiro. “Snubbing the popular governor of such an important state is hardly without risk itself, especially when the decision sends a message to voters outside of your party that you may be beholden to ideological extremists,” Chris wrote. “Walz is no [Republican VP pick Sen. J.D.] Vance, but there is something of the same missed opportunity to attract new voters with the choice.”
We’ll see how that plays out in November. In the meantime, as we noted on Wednesday, Democrats are pretty jazzed about Walz. The Harris campaign raised $36 million in the 24 hours after the announcement, a packed crowd greeted Harris and Walker at their Philadelphia rally, and operatives told Dispatch Politics that Walz, the “folksy Midwesterner, 60, is a better fit for Harris and offers more political upside than Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.”
In the days leading up to Harris’ announcement, observers wondered whether one of Shapiro’s downsides was his religion. Shapiro is Jewish, and as you may have noticed, the Democrats have a bit of an antisemitism problem made more apparent by the war in Gaza. Is Harris’ choice of Walz a sign she caved to pressure from the left?
Robert A. George doesn’t think so. For starters, however those on the far left feel about Shapiro’s religion, they probably dislike that he’s a moderate who supports school vouchers. But George cited another reason, one on display at the Harris-Walz rally. As I mentioned above, that event took place in Philadelphia—and Shapiro was on hand. But his speech wasn’t just a gracious gesture to unify the party: The governor was electric. George wrote: “In the words of several social media wits, he is ‘Baruch Obama.’ Not only has Shapiro mastered Obama’s vocal cadence to an almost eerie manner, he also has incandescent star power and charisma. … Walz has a certain kind of star power, but it’s not the same as Shapiro’s. If you want to say that Harris is a coward for not wanting to be outshined, fine. But that means she’s a typical politician, not an antisemite.”
So what can we expect from Walz and what does he bring to the Harris campaign? Kevin wrote Friday that while Walz can sell himself as “another duck-huntin’ rustic from whatever is due west of the boonies,” that his “actual policy views are, for the most part, straight-up left-wing stuff.” Which makes him a perfect fit for the “campaign Kamala Harris plainly intends to run: an old-fashioned, pork-barrel, spend-all-the-money-on-all-the-things category-5, DEFCON-1 hootenanny of utter fiscal incontinence.”
On that note, thanks for reading and have a great weekend.
Back in early July, I started noticing that a lot of liberals were really mad about Project 2025. I saw friends posting about it on social media, and memes were flying around claiming (falsely) that it called for teaching Christianity in public schools and a complete abortion ban, that it would cut entitlements and raise the retirement age. (Our fact check drew a few angry comments.) Donald Trump responded to the outcry by disavowing the report. So what is in Project 2025, produced by the Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for a potential GOP administration? Andy Smarick read the whole thing. He writes, “At times, even a rock-ribbed conservative might think it goes too far,” citing a chapter on the Office of Management and Budget that would turn the OMB director into a kind of deputy president. But other parts are quite useful, including a chapter on organizing the White House staff, and many topics feature either pro-and-con arguments and good background about Cabinet departments’ recent history and structure. But really, none of it matters, Smarick points out. It’s 900-plus pages of policy recommendations, and Trump “has never been credibly accused of being a dedicated student of public policy.”
Warren Cole Smith reviews Shepherds For Sale, a book by Meghan Basham of The Daily Wire, that seeks to explain how the evangelical movement has been corrupted by politicization. If you’ve read The Dispatch even a little, you’re probably nodding along, as that’s a topic we’ve hit on a lot. But Basham has a novel theory—that the corrupting influence has come from the left. Smith knows Basham, as well as many of the evangelical figures mentioned in the book, and he points out that much of her book is just plain wrong. She takes comments and statements by evangelical journalists that seem to promote liberal ideas out of context, gets timelines wrong, and leaves out details that would deflate her argument if they were included. And then there’s the crux of the matter: “Shepherds For Sale has many villains, but it has only one true hero: Donald J. Trump,” Smith writes. He adds: “The real sin of those demonized by Basham is their public opposition to Trump. Her book purports to fight for the Gospel against heretics, but Basham is waging a proxy war, defending Trump against his evangelical critics.”
As political scientists and pundits and historians try to parse just how a billionaire celebrity real-estate developer from New York won over the working class base of the Republican Party in 2016, we hear a lot about how both parties, but especially the Democrats, ignored that segment of the population. But that idea is most often discussed in philosophical terms: The party started emphasizing identity politics and progressive social policy, a reflection of its growing segment of college-educated, professional-class voters. What if, as Tom Zoellner suggests, it was less a matter of ideology and more about tactics? “The scythe of Trumpism cut so cleanly through America’s farm and ranch country not so much because voters radically changed their beliefs but because Democrats made the disastrous strategic decision to abandon them,” he writes.
And here’s the best of the rest.
- We know a lot about Kamala Harris’ positions on domestic policy, but she lacks experience dealing with foreign policy and national security. Rebeccah Heinrichs argues that what little we do know shows that Harris is not ready for the international stage.
- The same day progressives got a win with the Walz selection, Rep. Cori Bush—a member of the “Squad” alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar—lost her primary and gave a vengeful concession speech blaming a pro-Israel group that funded her opponent. Charles Sykes writes that voters are turning against far-left candidates around the country and predicts the tension between mainstream and lefty Democrats will be on display at the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
- Kamala Harris’ surprisingly strong start and the attention her veepstakes commanded have left Donald Trump out of the spotlight for a few weeks. In Boiling Frogs (🔒), Nick observes that the former president is not coping well. He’s resorted to tantrums and race-baiting, and the best nickname he can come up with for his opponent is “Kamabla.” He writes: Trump is flailing strategically right now because he’s seething at seeing the race slip through his fingers and lacks the self-control to channel his anger more productively.”
- Jonah takes a break from politics, kind of, to rant about a Nike ad that celebrates athletes with killer instincts and values winning over everything. He laments other cultural examples that depict similar messages—citing Walter White in Breaking Bad and even Penny from The Big Bang Theory—and argues in the Wednesday G-File (🔒)that we’ve lost something along the way. I can’t do it justice in a few sentences, so read the whole thing.
- Did you catch J.D. Vance’s comment that “a million cheap knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job”? Well, Scott did, and in Capitolism he explains everything that is wrong with that sentiment.
- And we can’t forget the pods: On The Dispatch Podcast, our podcast guru Adaam and David French host an important discussion on Israel’s war against Hamas and address the possibility of a wider regional war breaking out. Speaking of David, he and Sarah kick off a special August book series on Advisory Opinions by talking to professor Keith Whittington about his book You Can’t Teach That!: The Battle over University Classrooms, and they discuss whether academic freedom should be a constitutional right. And get your weekly serving of rank punditry with The Remnant, as Jonah welcomes Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution to talk party politics, the Walz selection, and the twin scourges of populism and antisemitism.
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