Kamala Harris Isn’t Playing It Safe

In picking Tim Walz as her running mate, Kamala Harris is after more than just Pennsylvania. Mentioned: “Is Tim Walz the Midwestern Dad Democrats Need?” by The Ezra Klein Show Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by our senior editor, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  It is Tuesday, August 6. We just found out that Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, who we just did a show with a week ago, you can find it just back there in the archives, is going to be Kamala Harris's choice for vice president. And so we now know what the shape of the race is. We have Donald Trump and J.D. Vance on one side, and we have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz on the other. And we've been covering this closely enough and talking about Walz 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?

• 1:00Claire Gordon?

  Hi, Ezra. So I've seen Walz described 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?

• 1:16Ezra Klein?

  I would describe Walz 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.

• 2:00Ezra Klein?

  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 were 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. Walz emerges 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, borders, Wisconsin, there's an

• 2:44Ezra Klein?

  argument that somebody like Walz will be appealing in in Midwestern states. I don't expect there to be a significant effect like that. But Walz 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. Walz goes on a media tour. He's on CNN a bunch, MSNBC a bunch. He does an hour interview on the Yes or No Show, 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

• 3:28Ezra Klein?

  Walz 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 conversational way. You can always tell with politicians, this buffering happening in their heads. You ask a question and this program fires up really fast. It says, what are all the ways I could answer this wrong? And what is my message here supposed to actually be? And Walz, 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. But Walz begins giving these interviews. He breaks through the media. He breaks through the attentional field, is what I would say.

• 4:11Ezra Klein?

  Shapiro becomes a candidate who is most likely to help you win Pennsylvania. Walz becomes the vice presidential candidate, most likely to help you win the day to day fight for attention and message and enthusiasm.

• 4:26Ezra Klein?

  And Harris picks Walz, 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 and energy that she has been generating, to the surprise of many Democrats, since the 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.

• 4:57Claire Gordon?

  So the comparison that you see around to a Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton's 2016 pick, because they have similar affable dad vibes, you don't think that's a fair comparison?

• 5:09Ezra Klein?

  I think that comparison is insane. 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 a fundamental level. I like Tim Kaine. Tim Kaine is a good man. I've covered Tim Kaine for a long time. Nobody can remember a thing Tim Kaine has ever said in public. He is just not a memorable media figure. The theory of a candidate like Tim Kaine was the theory of a good governing partner. Hillary Clinton was very confident she was going to win the election. She really liked Tim Kaine. She felt that Tim Kaine, in an election where she was trying to appear reassuring against the very unreassuring Donald Trump, Tim Kaine helped her do that.

• 5:53Ezra Klein?

  But she wasn't looking at Kaine to win her any states. She wasn't looking at Kaine to be a kind of messenger she could not be. She liked him. 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 Walz 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 Walz is a candidate who knows the House and he knows governors.

• 6:37Ezra Klein?

  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 Buttigieg, that's Roy Cooper, that's Shapiro, you could just run this list down, that's Mark Kelly.

• 7:22Ezra Klein?

  He broke through past all of them, reshaped the whole way people were talking about the race, developed 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.

• 8:06Ezra Klein?

  But that's not true at all. To compare him to Tim Kaine is to just miss the entire field on which Harris is currently thinking about playing, which is a field, by the way, that Joe Biden ceded to Donald Trump, which is a field of attention. Joe Biden's theory in 2020, and then again in 2024, was that 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 it to be about Donald Trump. The election was about Donald Trump and Donald Trump lost.

• 8:45Ezra Klein?

  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 required him to do.

• 9:24Ezra Klein?

  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 vibe shift, they called it a psy-op, 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 advances or breaking through are when they say outrageous, unpopular

• 10:08Ezra Klein?

  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 attentionally, 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 it's any doubt.

• 10:46Claire Gordon?

  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 this election?

• 10:56Ezra Klein?

  I think they could overdo it. If you go to the conversation I had with Walz, we talked a lot about that. And I both think the weird messaging is very powerful. And Walz 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 first 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 J.D. Vance's effort to weaponize the resentment of rural Midwestern Appalachian whites is

• 11:40Ezra Klein?

  inauthentic, that that is not what people in small towns are like, that people don't like that politics has become like this. They don't want politics tearing their Thanksgiving dinner table apart. Other Democrats picking up the weird thing, they can take it into a bit of a schoolyard place. Fine. So they have to be careful with that. And I think Walz 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. Donald Trump is weird in a very particular way.

• 12:23Ezra Klein?

  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. You tell him something and he just goes wherever he goes. J D Vance, he's not weird, he's off putting is the way 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,

• 13:07Ezra Klein?

  but it was a showman's weirdness. It was a Barnum and Bailey weirdness. Behind him emerged this very dark online set of subcultures. I would call it the sort of extended MAGA online cinematic universe, but it has white supremacists in it. It has very weird forms of natalists in it, pro natalists in it. It has people who just are obsessed with race and immigration. It has neo reactionaries. If you dig in to where the intellectual world that is following behind Donald Trump has gone, and I've done a lot of this reading, it's bizarre. And J D Vance, his conversion went through this online world.

• 13:52Ezra Klein?

  What is weird about J D 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 a 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,

• 14:36Ezra Klein?

  supported by, among other people, Kamala Harris, supported by, among other people, Tim Walz, 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 and 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. He 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,

• 15:21Ezra Klein?

  they talk a lot about the regime, right? The sort of networked group of institutions, media, government, business, et cetera, 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 JD Vance makes his comment about childish cat ladies, it's actually worth hearing the way Tucker Carlson opens that interview.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  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 through their apps and their alcoholic fathers, or fill some empty space inside, or have power over you. That's almost everybody. There is a small category of people who run for office because they really believe something and they've got something to say. They really mean it. You almost never see these people. One of them is JD 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 of the ruling class have gone crazy. They hate him. They really hate him. And that's how you know he means it.

• 16:28Ezra Klein?

  This is how you know JD Vance is serious. By inviting that kind of attack and opprobrium, he is proving to these people that he is for real. The politicians in the MAGA 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 JD Vance. Elon Musk is terminally 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 a vice president who amplifies that,

• 17:12Ezra Klein?

  rather than someone who, like Doug Burgum, who calms it down.

• 17:17Claire Gordon?

  But Trump in 2016 said 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 wave, next gen of this kind of rhetoric?

• 17:36Ezra Klein?

  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. She's ahead of Trump narrowly in national polling. It depends on what polls you're looking at of battleground states. And we don't have a lot of high-quality battleground state polling since Joe Biden stepped aside. But she's much more competitive there. But it is very competitive. It's 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.

• 18:16Ezra Klein?

  So I think she's expanded the map, but she hasn't made Trump an underdog in the Midwest. So the idea that 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 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.

• 19:00Ezra Klein?

  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 made him angry. Right? That was the argument Trump was making for a while. And that argument was breaking through. People felt there was a lot of disorder under Joe Biden. They also felt that Joe Biden was too old to be in charge of it. Right? They didn't trust that he could handle a world that had gone a little nuts in the way.

• 19:42Ezra Klein?

  Prices 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

• 20:27Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 21:10Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 21:31Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 21:47Claire Gordon?

  Well, I'd love to wrap by just talking about Walz'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?

• 22:15Ezra Klein?

  Do you want to say what the attack is?

• 22:17Claire Gordon?

  He hesitated in calling the National Guard to respond to the riots in Minneapolis.

• 22:24Ezra Klein?

  So it's interesting to me because the attack on the left on Walz was that he did call in the National Guard. And there are places it didn't.

• 22:34Ezra Klein?

  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 was 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 Walz doesn't have possible vulnerabilities. Every politician does.

• 23:16Ezra Klein?

  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 Walz has said or done things that are offensive or unusual enough for them to become major dimensions of the campaign.

• 23:35Ezra Klein?

  And I think the question is, 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 Walz helps her on that in particular, but maybe. And then there's a 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

• 24:17Ezra Klein?

  good candidate profile to win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. And there, what Walz is on the ticket to do is balance out the perceptions of Harris. They're going to have Walz functionally going door to door, offering to check the oil in your car in those states. That is the vibe of Walz. 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. That Shapiro and Harris are both lawyers. They both have a sort of Obama era politics vibe to them. Very smart, very educated, seemed like they could have been on the same law review in law school, seemed like they could have worked for the same firm. And if you're worried

• 25:00Ezra Klein?

  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, they 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

• 25:45Ezra Klein?

  that looks like them or feels like them, Walz might be helpful from that perspective. Walz is not a former high-flying lawyer, but a former high school football coach and longtime, you know, Army reservist.

• 26:00Ezra Klein?

  Again, 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 Walz is there to help with the last of those. And he doesn't make the first two worse.

• 26:40Claire Gordon?

  Did Harris just pick a younger Biden as her VP? Her version of the kid from Scranton?

• 26:46Ezra Klein?

  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 ad, answering the 3 a.m. phone call. Biden was there to help with that. He was there for other reasons, too.

• 27:31Ezra Klein?

  You know, 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 Walz is there to balance, he is balancing other things for Harris. He's not really a foreign policy figure. He's not a longtime, you know, member of the Senate. He's a Midwestern governor who, again, broke through because there is a straight talking plainness to the way he is able to attack the Trump Vance ticket and the way he is able to present who Democrats are and who occupies the space of normalcy in American

• 28:14Ezra Klein?

  life that reshaped the way Democrats were talking in the election. Biden, you know, for all that he was known as both a blustery but very effective orator.

• 28:26Ezra Klein?

  Biden was never able to do that. He did not break through in the 08 campaign. He was there to make Obama seem more seasoned. Walz is there to help Harris dominate the messaging of this campaign and help push Trump and Vance into a space that Democrats want them to occupy, which is a space of abnormality, 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 begun to represent for them is that in his age and in the way he presented, he didn't comfort people. It seemed like a risk to choose Joe Biden.

• 29:09Ezra Klein?

  Harris and Walz, they want to be the non-risky ticket. And Walz is there to make Vance 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.

• 29:26Claire Gordon?

  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.

• 29:31Ezra Klein?

  Thank you, Claire.

• 29:46Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by our senior editor, Claire Gordon. Fact checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Gald with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Merlin Hu, Elias Isquith, and Kristin Lynn. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina Sami-Louski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andrew Ostrasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrera.