Tim Walz is a Minnesota Nice choice

It's fine. But Shapiro was the higher-upside option that was probably worth the risk.

Wikipedia defines “Minnesota Nice” — the property stereotypically associated with the home state of Kamala Harris’s new running mate, Gov. Tim Walz — as follows:

Minnesota nice is a cultural stereotype applied to the behavior of people from Minnesota, implying residents are unusually courteous, reserved, and mild-mannered compared to people from other states and more akin to their Canadian neighbors in Northern Ontario. The phrase also implies polite friendliness, an aversion to open confrontation, a tendency toward understatement, a disinclination to make a direct fuss or stand out, apparent emotional restraint, and self-deprecation. It is sometimes associated with passive-aggression.

Playwright and corporate communications consultant Syl Jones suggested that Minnesota nice is not so much about being "nice" but is more about keeping up appearances, maintaining the social order, and keeping people (including non-natives of the state) in their place.

This was a choice designed to maintain the social fabric of the Democratic Party, and avoid news cycles about a disappointed left and Democrats’ internal squabbling over the War in Gaza. Or at least, that’s what I think it was: we’ll need to learn more about Harris’s deliberation process. I’m not inclined to be too deferential to any political candidate, but it’s plausible that there were vetting issues with the runner-up, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. Harris certainly has more information about the internal feeling within the Democratic caucus than I do, or she may just have thought the chemistry of a Harris-Shapiro ticket wouldn’t work.

It’s a nice pick: Walz, a two-term governor and six-term U.S. Representative, is from the family of Tim Kaine-style VP choices: inoffensive, unlikely to cause any harm, “safe”. Although maybe that’s unfair: Walz is likely to be better on the stump than Kaine. If you surveyed Democratic members of Congress, he’d probably be who they’d choose. But I believe he’s probably the wrong choice, a step back toward the Democratic Party’s instincts to triangulate instead of the boldness the Harris campaign has displayed so far.

I have a busy day ahead — the book publicity people have me busy, and later today I’m going to attempt to set a World Record by appearing on four consecutive podcasts in four hours (it’s not an Olympic sport yet, alas) — so let’s see if we can’t get through this quickly.

Do I think this is the right pick? No. On Saturday, I made the case that Harris should pick Shapiro. And nothing has really changed since then — although you could argue that Harris’s increasingly strong position in the polls compels greater risk-aversion than when she’d initially appeared to be an underdog against Donald Trump. The basic reasons for picking Shapiro are that he increases the likelihood you win Pennsylvania, he has a demonstrated track record of popularity in the most important swing state, he’s obviously an extremely talented politician and perhaps a future standard-bearer for the party himself. And also, the reasons for not picking Shapiro aren’t great. Democrats in the political bubble overstate the salience of the Gaza issue and understate the benefits of moderation, and that’s before getting into the issue of Shapiro’s Jewishness.

Is Walz a reasonable pick in a vacuum? Sure. He’s not JD Vance. He’s well-qualified. Personally, I find his schtick kind of charming, although you might expect me to say that as a fellow Midwesterner. And not unimportantly, he’s not particularly left-wing himself and will likely read as being pretty moderate to voters, having a fairly centrist track record as a member of Congress. He might have been my second choice among Harris’s finalists, although I think it was a real mistake not to consider Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who would seem to be a dominant strategy over Walz other than that it would mean having two women on the ticket.

Do the margins of error overlap? Sure. Could this have been the right choice given reasonable uncertainties about the direction of the campaign? Sure. There’s a lot we don’t know. All of this veepstakes stuff is speculative — other than home-state effects, which are meaningful at the margin but not that large. In chess terms, I’d call it an inaccuracy — but not an outright blunder.

Do I buy the Walzpilled arguments? In other words, do I think Walz has unique strengths of his own, perhaps even helping Harris elsewhere in the vote-rich Midwest? Mostly not, though maybe to some degree. It’s an interesting biography — former U.S. Army officer, former schoolteacher. And although Walz’s margins of victory as governor are nothing particularly impressive, his track record in a rural, increasingly Trumpy Congressional District was pretty good.

But Minnesota is very unlikely to be the tipping point state — less than a 1 percent chance. It’s not necessarily that Trump can’t win it, but that if he does, it means that he’s almost certainly already won states like Wisconsin and Michigan, with which Minnesota’s electoral outcomes are strongly correlated — and if he’s already won those states, that means he’s already at 270+ electoral votes. And some of Minnesota’s mannerisms — like “Minnesota Nice” — are a bit peculiar and may not translate well outside of the state. It’s a small thing, but Democrats from Minnesota (Humphery, Mondale and arguably Amy Klobuchar’s primary campaign in 2020) do not have a great track record on the national stage.

Do I trust the process here? In other words, do I think Harris came to this choice for the right reasons — or at least the reasons that I think are the right reasons? Mostly not, I suppose, although as I said above, I’ll want to read more reporting on the reasons for her pick. I certainly trust anything and everything involving the Harris campaign much more than I trusted anything that Biden was doing. But I thought the decision not to consider Whitmer or other candidates who weren't white men was poor and in some ways ironically harkened back to the process by which Harris herself was chosen.

And I thought the rollout was a bit weird, creating some sense that Shapiro was left at the altar. With that said, I’m not seeing a ton of disappointment on Twitter — mostly just from strategy-minded, EV-maximizing folks like me — and maybe that was part of the problem for Shapiro. I’m not sure that he and his team played their cards well, allowing what were some pretty minor controversies to fester, and not securing the sort of vocal support that Walz did.