Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz made their debut as the Democratic presidential ticket on Tuesday night, kicking off a campaign against Donald Trump and JD Vance in front of an electrified crowd in Philadelphia.
The governor strode on stage at Temple University’s Licouras Center on Tuesday with Harris just hours after she announced him as her running mate, with 91 days to go until the November election.
Walz’s appearance ended the closely-watched contest for the next potential vice president, landing on a seasoned Midwestern politician, military veteran and former school teacher with a progressive track record.
Harris told the estimated 12,000 people in attendance that she “set out to find a partner who can build this brighter future” during her weeks-old campaign for the presidency.
Her search for a running mate led her to a “leader who can unite this nation and move us forward,” someone who was “a fighter for the middle class” and a “patriot who believes as I do the extraordinary promise of America, a promise of freedom, opportunity and justice not just for some but for all,” she said.
She told the crowd that she “found such a leader” in Walz, a 60-year-old former high school teacher who enlisted in the Army National Guard at 17 and served for 24 years, then spent more than two decades teaching and coaching football before entering politics.
The vice president recounted how during the 1990s, a time when the federal government enacted a law banning any recognition of same-sex relationships, Walz served as a faculty adviser for a high school gay-straight alliance group because he “knew the signal it would send to have a football coach get involved.”
Walz “makes people feel they belong and inspires them to dream big, and that’s the kind of vice president he will be,” she added, “and that’s the kind of vice president America deserves.”
He represented Minnesota in the House of Representatives from 2007 to 2017 and is now in the middle of his second term as the state’s governor. He has had a recent meteoric rise on to the national stage with his no-nonsense assessment of the GOP’s platform and the “weird” agenda behind it.
In the governor’s office, Walz ushered through a series of popular progressive policies, including protections for abortion rights and LGBT+ Minnesotans and a free breakfast and lunch program for public school children.
“Minnesota’s strength comes from our values, our commitment to working together, to seeing past our differences, to always be willing to lend a helping hand,” Walz told the crowd.
Trump, however, “doesn’t know the first thing about service, because he’s too busy serving himself,” according to Walz.
The former president “weakens our economy to strengthen his own hand, mocks our laws, and sows chaos and division, and that’s to say nothing of his record as president,” said Walz, who said Trump “froze” during the Covid-19 crisis, “drove the economy into the ground,” and “make no mistake: violent crime was up under Donald Trump.”
“That’s not counting the crimes he committed,” he added.
Walz said he “can’t wait to debate” his GOP counterpart JD Vance.
“Like most people who grew up in the heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a best seller trashing that community,” he said, his voice carrying more than a hint of sarcasm.
He added that what Vance represents is “not what Middle America is,” and drew some of the loudest cheers of the night when he told rallygoers: “I can’t wait to debate the guy … if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
“See what I did there?” said Walz, making an apparent reference to an online joke that Vance wrote about having sex with a couch in his best-selling memor.
Harris’s announcement arrived roughly three months before Election Day and two weeks before the Democratic National Convention, where the Harris-Walz ticket will formally receive the party’s nomination.
After President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and backed Harris as the party’s nominee, she quickly collected endorsements and delegate pledges to clinch the nomination, with record-breaking fundraising numbers that have eclipsed Republicans’ multi-million dollar war chest.
A campaign spokesperson said the newly-christened Harris-Walz effort pulled in yet another $20m in the hours after the announcement.
The electic atmosphere recalled the boisterous rallies of the Obama-Biden campaigns in 2008 and 2012. It attracted a racially diverse crowd that included a pair of gray-haired white men sporting shirts declaring themselves “Old White Men for Harris and Freedom.”
“It’s as clear as the T-shirt says,” Bernie Strain told The Independent. “It’s about two old white men liking our Social Security, liking our Medicare, liking our freedom, liking our democracy — we’ll lose it if Trump gets elected.”
Strain said that his son, a Marine, had served a pair of tours at the base that was struck by Iran-backed militants in Iraq on Monday.
“He’s no loser and he’s no sucker for serving in the United States’s service, and Trump’s not going to call my son a loser or a sucker,” he said. “Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
Harris even drew a pair of former Republican members of Congress, including former Pennsylvania congressman James Greenwood, who told The Independent that he understood Biden had to stand down after his June 27 debate against Trump.
Greenwood described the vibe after Biden stood down as “like an electric charge.”
“The excitement, the volunteers, the fundraising, — everyone’s pretty excited,” he said.
Another ex-Republican House member from Illinois, Joe Walsh, said Walz was “a great bet” for Harris because the Minnesotan is “like an everyman.”
“I disagree with him on a lot of policy, but he’s like a regular guy, and that’s what Democrats have to have,” he said.
Andrew Feinberg reported from Philadelphia
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