Democrats’ Return to Walz-ism

When Kamala Harris announced that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz would be her running mate in 2024, my first reaction was curious optimism for the Democratic ticket. I hadn’t followed Walz’s career especially closely, but I was familiar enough with him to know that he hailed from a rural area of a Midwestern state and that he had been a Blue Dog Democrat during his time in the House of Representatives. This seemed like exactly the kind of candidate the party could use to engage with the more conservative-leaning rural and working-class voters whom they had lost to Trump over the previous eight years.

But then I began to see the reactions from my peers, many of whom are highly educated, work in the knowledge economy, live in big metropolitan areas, and are very culturally left-wing—essentially, the median Democratic base voter. Most were elated by the Walz pick, and I was suddenly less sure about my initial reaction.

When I dug into Walz’s background some more, and I found that his political profile had changed pretty dramatically since his days as a Blue Dog. In his two campaigns for governor in Minnesota, he had adopted more progressive positions on a number of issues. His base of support had also shifted away from red-leaning rural counties, where he had lost immense ground, to blue-dominated and highly educated metro areas—especially the Twin Cities. Even so, Democrats believed he could open doors for them in the former. As one pollster said at the time:

Selecting Walz is a signal that [Harris] 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.

Many Democrats seemed jazzed that they had found a candidate who looked like the voters whose support they needed to win but who also didn’t seem to hold any of the culturally conservative views shared by those voters. And ideally, he had the credibility to convince some of them to leave their “outdated” views behind and to nudge them toward Harris’s forward-thinking agenda. It was a win-win-win.

As I observed at the time, however, the argument in favor of Walz’s appeal was

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…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… 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.

Ultimately, there was not only no evidence that Walz had helped Harris improve her standing in these places or with these voters, but in fact she lost further ground. In fairness to Walz, running mates rarely have a major impact on presidential tickets, and it was probably unreasonable to expect him to turn Harris’s fortunes around with voters who had an issue with the party brand, not just one or two specific politicians.

Still, he clearly did not add much to the ticket, either, and there was evidence even at the time that rural voters, specifically, were not keen on him. There may be a useful lesson in this for Democrats: in today’s highly polarized America, where cultural issues increasingly inform political divisions, candidates who appeal to culturally liberal college grads are probably less likely to find support among culturally conservative working-class voters.¹

It’s not evident, though, that Democrats have accepted this. They certainly seem to comprehend the importance of improving their standing with working-class voters and in red-leaning places. Yet, some of their candidates running in key midterm states have quite Walz-ian profiles.

Two notable examples are James Talarico and Graham Platner, who are running for the U.S. Senate in states that will help determine which party controls the chamber in 2027 (Texas and Maine, respectively). Both men appear to embody a “new way” for Democrats hoping to win difficult races.

Talarico has garnered national attention for his well-spoken manner as well as his eager willingness to engage with conservatives and talk about his faith—rarities among Democratic politicians today. Polling ahead of Democratic primary election showed these attributes had helped convince likely voters that he was more moderate than his opponent, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. This, coupled with the Christian roots of his campaign messaging, has excited Democrats who hope Talarico can make inroads with conservatives in highly religious Texas.

Platner, meanwhile, looks on the surface like he was designed in a lab to win over working-class voters. He is a burly, blue-collar figure from a small Maine town whose resume includes military service and a career as an oyster farmer. He has touted his support for gun rights and, like Talarico, leaned into economically populist messaging. Early primary polls have shown him trouncing increasingly unpopular incumbent Governor Janet Mills. Democrats seem to hope Platner will break the archetype of affluent, lawyerly candidates the party is known for fielding.

Talarico and Platner have clearly captured the imaginations of liberal Democrats around the country who are desperate to win back the Senate and check Trump’s power. According to 2025 fourth-quarter fundraising estimates, both of them finished in the top five among all Senate candidates, and much of their support has come from small-dollar donors. All this has surely convinced some Democrats that they are close to cracking the code to winning conservative-leaning rural and working-class voters.

There are a couple of problems with this thinking, however. The first is that both candidates engage in what my colleague Ruy Teixeira has called “cultural denialism”: a tendency that some Democrats have of dismissing cultural issues—and thus voters’ concerns about them—for not being “real issues.” This usually manifests as deflecting from conversations about thorny topics like race or gender toward others like economic populism, where candidates feel they are on more sound footing.

Talarico, for example, has attempted to side-step past controversial statements regarding transgender issues by suggesting they don’t really matter and voters aren’t concerned with them. Speaking on a panel at the SXSW conference this week, he asked, “What do the American people care more about? Culture wars or actual wars? Pronouns or prices?” Elsewhere, he has stated, “Trans people aren’t taking away our health care. Muslims aren’t defunding our schools. Immigrants aren’t cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It’s the billionaires and their puppet politicians. The culture wars are a smokescreen.”

Many Democrats likely agree with him. The problem, however, summed up by Washington Post columnist Ramesh Ponnuru, is that “a lot of voters…find the issues he dismisses important in themselves and signs of whether a candidate shares their worldview,” and they will find these deflections off-putting.² All this, plus a growing digital trail of other, highly left-wing statements, isn’t likely to do Talarico any favors in a state that voted for Trump by 14 points, where conservatives are a large plurality of the electorate, and where voters overall see themselves more ideologically aligned with the two prospective Republican candidates than with Talarico.

Platner has taken a similar approach to dismissing cultural issues, saying, “Every single breath we take discussing culture war stuff is a breath we are not talking about universal healthcare. It’s a breath we are not talking about going after wealth where it’s been hoarded. Not talking about breaking up corporate monopoly power. That’s what we need to be focusing on.” Though he may not want to talk about these issues, Maine voters have thoughts on them, and statements like this risk signaling that he doesn’t care about those thoughts.

The second issue facing both men relates to their coalitions. Let’s start with Talarico. To win Texas, which no Democrat has done at the statewide level since 1994, he would need to at minimum replicate Beto O’Rourke’s coalition from 2018. That cycle, when O’Rourke came the closest of any recent Democrat—falling short by just 2.5 points—Republicans and Republican-leaning independents accounted for nearly half (49 percent) of the Texas electorate, according to the AP VoteCast survey. A fascinating analysis of post-COVID migration trends from the New York Times found that newcomers have made Texas even more Republican in recent years.

Moreover, generic ballot projections from Nate Silver show that under the current national environment, which leans five points toward Democrats, the partisan baseline in Texas would be +5.6 points Republican. This means Talarico would need a national shift of another five points just to be on an even playing field in Texas.

As regular TLP contributor Justin Vassallo has pointed out, there were some promising signs from the primary election results for Talarico, including his strong performance with affluent liberals and ability to turn out Hispanics at a high rate. Early general election polling, however, still shows him trailing O’Rourke’s 2018 numbers with key groups, including Hispanics and non-college voters—both of whom are typically more conservative than the median Democrat. It remains to be seen how these groups will trend as they get to know him better in the campaign, but there is a real possibility that they struggle to connect with his cultural attitudes.

In Maine, Platner may be facing similar coalition issues. Nicholas Jacobs, a longtime rural politics scholar who himself lives in rural Maine, has documented how Platner’s biography isn’t quite as “everyman” as it may seem at first glance:

But his story cuts both ways. He’s the grandson of a celebrated Manhattan architect, his father is a lawyer and his mother is a restaurateur whose business caters to summer tourists. He attended the elite Hotchkiss School. It’s a life of silver spoons and salt air.

Jacobs added:

That tension mirrors the Democratic Party itself, led and funded by urban professionals who are increasingly aware of just how far they strayed from their working-class roots. If Platner is to prevail, he must assemble a coalition that expands beyond what the party has become—concentrated in urban and coastal enclaves, financed nationally and culturally distant from much of rural America. Yet Platner’s immediate hurdle isn’t rural Maine at all. It is the Democratic primary, and those voters do not live where his campaign imagery is set.

Maine remains far more Democratic-friendly than Texas—Harris carried it by seven points, so Platner would not be starting a general election as far behind as Talarico in Texas. And some analysts have shown that longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins could be vulnerable in this midterm environment. Still, the state has a long history of electing moderate, independent-minded senators, and Collins would have plenty of material to work with against Platner to paint him as anything but. This makes it more imperative that he break through with the types of voters Democrats have lost ground with over the past decade.

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The real issue facing Democrats is this: they are still struggling to understand how to connect with conservative-leaning Americans largely because many of them don’t know any. They therefore end up rallying behind candidates whose presentations, biographies, and views they like, and then convince themselves that these candidates will appeal to conservatives, too—an often misguided assumption.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that candidates running in red places who lean left on culture, such as Talarico, can win. Some voters may even be willing to overlook their more liberal cultural views for an economic message that resonates with them. But that disconnect does make these candidates’ jobs harder. Texas and even Maine are not as liberal as Virginia and New Jersey—and certainly not New York City—where Democrats running for governor and mayor last fall more or less successfully side-stepped hot-button culture war fights in favor of “affordability” messaging. This approach is less likely to work in the states Democrats need to win for a Senate majority like Maine, Texas, Ohio, Florida, or Iowa.

An alternate path for the party is to try identifying candidates who have at least some genuinely right-leaning cultural attitudes that are more in line with the voters whose support they need. As Matt Yglesias wrote in the New York Times yesterday:

Iowa was won twice in a row by the Black guy with a professorial demeanor from Chicago and then three times sequentially by the silver-spoon real estate tycoon from New York. Neither fit the part perfectly, but both catered to the views of voters who like the existing social safety net but worry Democrats will sacrifice their well-being to serve narrow special interests or small minorities.

Yglesias noted that Trump successfully pushed Republicans away from many of their unpopular positions on issues like Medicare, Social Security, the Iraq war, abortion, and gay marriage. Meanwhile, Obama

questioned whether his daughters deserved a boost in college admissions and affirmed that marriage should be between a man and a woman; as president, he took on teachers’ unions over questions of pay and seniority and espoused an all-of-the-above energy strategy that environmental groups didn’t love.

In a recent interview with TLP, the Searchlight Institute’s Adam Jentleson recalled how not long ago the Democrats controlled Senate seats in deeply red states, including Arkansas, Louisiana, and West Virginia, all of which helped deliver them a super-majority during Obama’s first term. He added that to earn power like that again, Democrats would need to expand their tent to include people who hold more culturally conservative positions, noting that the party has fielded some of these candidates in House races this cycle.

Indeed, if Democrats are uncomfortable allowing these kinds of candidates into their tent, they will struggle to consistently compete in the Senate and Electoral College—institutions that have longstanding biases toward states with smaller and more rural populations—among other offices. The path forward will require an embrace of ideological pluralism in their ranks and a heterodox coalition, including identifying and welcoming centrist candidates who can compete in places that lean to the right of the nation. This may not thrill the party’s base, but it may be just what Democrats need.

1. And vice versa.

2. The writer Josh Barro has similarly called out these “clever” word games, like responding to voters concerned about welfare fraud by simply pivoting to corporate welfare instead.