Can Tim Walz Help Harris Win Back the White Working Class?

A look at what the Democrats’ new vice-presidential nominee brings to the ticket.

(Photo by Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images)

Over the past decade or so, the Democrats have faced a growing electoral problem: non-college voters, who make up a huge majority of the electorate, have been shifting heavily toward Republicans—especially, though not exclusively, whites. What makes this such a pressing issue is that many of these voters are overrepresented in the party’s “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which are a critical part of any path to 270 electoral votes.

Solving this issue seems to be part of the reason the Democrats’ nominee, Kamala Harris, selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. Before ascending to the governorship, Walz represented a rural, working-class district in Congress, and his profile as a blue-collar worker—he was previously a public school teacher and football coach—is one that the campaign thinks voters in similar areas throughout the Blue Wall states might find attractive. As one Democratic pollster put it:

Selecting Walz is a signal that she and the campaign think she can be competitive enough in rural, small-town areas, and her path to 270 still does cut through the Rust Belt. It also sends an important message about Harris, how she wants to round out her ticket…She picked a white guy governor from the Midwest who can go into small towns in the Midwest and help her with those voters.

However, this argument is predicated on little more than identity politics: the idea that white working-class voters will be reassured by having someone who “looks like them” on the Democratic ticket and thus be likelier to vote for Harris. A better way to approach the question of Walz’s value-add would be to take a look at the data—specifically, his actual electoral record with these voters.

Walz first won public office in 2006, ousting a six-term Republican incumbent in Minnesota’s First Congressional District, which covers a large, rural area stretching across the southern part of the state. Walz’s record here is impressive: he won re-election five times before running for governor. Additionally, in the three presidential cycles when he was on the ballot—2008, 2012, and 2016—he outran the Democratic presidential nominee each time by wide margins, even as the district began moving to the right. Part of the reason he routinely won in spite of this was because he had a more moderate voting record for a House Democrat, including supporting gun rights.

In 2018, when Walz ran for governor, he won by 11.4 points and overperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 margin by 9.9, regaining much of the ground she had lost in rural Minnesota compared to Obama four years earlier. He also outran Obama by 4.3 points statewide, though tellingly, only ten of the state’s 87 counties swung toward Walz by more than that statewide shift. What’s more, in eight of those ten counties, the share of college-educated residents was higher than the statewide average, and six were in or around the Twin Cities.

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So, even though Walz performed well on the whole, his 2018 election offered an early sign that he played better in areas that were more populated and whose voters were likelier to hold a college degree. Meanwhile, rural and working-class areas—including some in his old congressional district—grew more Republican. During this time, Walz’s politics also notably grew more progressive, as he sought to appeal to the college-educated suburban voters who have outsized influence on statewide elections.

Then, in 2022, Walz won re-election, defeating his Republican opponent by a slimmer 7.7 points. This was the same margin by which Obama carried the state in 2012, offering an even better case study for analyzing where Democrats have been gaining ground and where they’ve been losing it. The story this time remained the same: Walz outperformed Obama in just nine counties, and all of them were either located around the Twin Cities area, home to a higher-than-average share of college degree-holders, or both.

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Even as Walz’s margin was smaller the second time around, he actually improved on his 2018 performance in eight counties, including six of the seven that make up the Twin Cities metro area. Still, his showing in rural Minnesota was abysmal. In all but three of the 80 counties comprising this region, Walz performed at least five points worse than in 2018—and that gap hit double digits in 59 of them.

Of course, Walz is not the only recent top-of-the-ticket Democrat in Minnesota to struggle in rural counties or to fare worse than Obama in them. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden both experienced big losses there as well. Walz even performed as well as or better than both of them in his re-election campaign. But looking at the overall picture, his appeal has obviously been much greater among voters living in highly educated metropolitan areas than in working-class rural communities.

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Herein lies the problem: Walz’s putative appeal to the white working-class and rural voters is a chief reason for his addition to the ticket, at least according to Harris’s allies. But in his most recent campaigns, there haven’t been many signs he has succeeded in making inroads with them. Moreover, several other elected officials who do not fit the Walz mold of a white, blue-collar guy have had success on this front.

Josh Shapiro, a Jewish man who was heavily favored to be Harris’s VP, is the highly popular governor of the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania. In 2022, he crushed his Republican opponent and only lost white non-college voters by two points compared to Biden’s 23-point deficit there. He also won the the state’s attorney general race in 2016 as Trump carried it in the Electoral College, and he outran Biden’s margin there in 2020. As governor, he continues to be popular among many of these key constituencies.

Gretchen Whitmer, the two-term governor of Michigan—another presidential battleground—was never seriously considered for the spot but had a similarly dominant showing in her 2022 re-election bid. Harris may have decided putting two women on the ticket risked turning off some of these Republican-leaning voters, but Whitmer’s track record suggests she has some real strengths.

Even in Walz’s home state of Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar has been elected to the U.S. Senate three times, and she trounced her Republican opponents in each race, winning by more than 20 points. In her 2012 election, she notably carried all but two counties, and even in her last race in 2018, she won 52 counties and only lost 12 of them by more than ten points.

The point is that Democrats are not clearly not doomed in rural America or with non-college white voters, but it’s probably in their interest to lean into candidates who have demonstrated strengths with these groups. The fact that Harris never really entertained candidates like Whitmer or Klobuchar (or even black first-term Maryland Governor Wes Moore) thus seems like an unnecessary limitation. It also strikes at the heart of an assumption that the party continues to wrongly make in the year 2024: that most voters need to identify with a candidate’s race or gender to consider voting for them.

Recently, the writer Zaid Jilani reviewed a meta-analysis of research that found voters are more open to supporting non-white and female candidates than some people might assume—a finding that seems obvious when one considers that two of the last three national popular vote winners were a black man and a woman, or that both major political parties in Congress are growing more diverse. Other research has come to similar conclusions. This is something to be celebrated, as it means race and gender are no longer meaningful reasons why many Americans support (or don’t support) a particular candidate.

But it’s unclear whether the Democrats really understand this—the Walz pick is a sign that they may not. Offering Walz to white working-class voters as a means of “representation” may actually come off as quite patronizing. Rather, many voters are looking for someone who shares their values or supports their favored policies. Let us not forget that Obama was president in large part because he listened to the views of downscale white voters, who made up a large share of the electorate and who trusted him over John McCain and Mitt Romney.

If Harris wanted to make meaningful inroads with the voters that have been slipping away from the Democrats, she might have considered bringing someone on board who the party’s liberal base, which tends to be highly educated and concentrated in urban areas, wasn’t necessarily thrilled with. That candidate might hold less conventionally progressive positions on at least some issues such as education, COVID lockdowns, or immigration—after all, rural and working-class voters often have views that are quite distinct from those of the Democratic base. Instead, she went with someone whom the party’s base seems to think appeals to those groups, even though they agree with him on virtually everything.

None of this is to say that Walz a bad pick or that he will be a detriment to Harris; on the contrary, he’ll most likely be relatively safe and not detract much from the ticket. It’s also entirely possible that his “everyman” persona will indeed resonate with some working-class voters and move them toward Harris and the Democrats. Sending him into community settings where he’s able to connect with voters on a more personal level may prove more effective than his appearances at the campaign’s mega-rallies.

Still, any vice-presidential pick can only carry a ticket so far. Given that the data show Walz’s appeal with these groups may be limited, it will ultimately be up to Harris to prove to them that she deserves their vote.