Readership Capture

Tim Walz had never been a moderate; he simply looked like one as he pulled you into a hug. “At the age of 18,” Klaber says, “I fancied myself a bit of a strategist and was like, Yeah, I know you support gay marriage, but you don’t have to talk about it in this district. Don’t say it. He was like, Fuck it. He did. He did.”

There would be six terms as congressperson, even while nearby districts fell to the nativism of Michele Bachmann and Steve King. There would be two terms as governor. “He’s always just literally running,” says an adviser. “He’ll see in the news there’s a fire or a storm somewhere in Minnesota.” Walz will want to go to the site: “We’ve got to go; let’s go tomorrow. We’ve got to go.”

“The Republicans always say, You don’t learn anything from us,” Walz said in February. “Yes, I do. I learned what a one-vote majority is: It’s a majority.” In 2023, Minnesota Democrats working with a trifecta and a budget surplus legalized marijuana, instituted protections for abortion and transgender rights, restored voting rights, provided a tax credit to low-income parents, passed gun-control measures and paid family leave, banned conversion therapy, provided free breakfast and lunch to public-school children, waived college tuition for low-income students, and on and on, an onslaught of progressive achievement we do not have the word count to exhaust. This was only possible because he coded conservative to a comic degree: not just a football coach but a coach who had helped usher a losing team to a triumphant state championship. Not just someone who knew his way around a gun—someone who kept a gun in his locker in high school. “I’ll go ahead and put my credibility up against anyone else when it comes to this issue,” he said in his 2023 State of the State address, which was surprisingly combative for a guy riding what the press would call “the Minnesota miracle.” “I’m a veteran and a hunter,” he said. “I was one of the best shots in Congress, and I got the dang trophies to prove it.”

“How does it feel to be outshot every year by a liberal gun grabber?” he said later, taunting his Republican colleagues. “Most of these guys have never been around guns; it’s just like a persona.”

Tim Walz had a persona too, but it was authentically held and he knew how to play with it. He posted terrible selfies, posting like a man who had no idea how to post, online in a way that read offline. He could chase national office while projecting none of the unseemly striver sweat of a J.D. Vance or a Josh Shapiro. In 2023, Walz was already trying out lines: “They’re banning books in their schools. We’re banishing hunger from ours.” On Juneteenth as a federal holiday: “They’re afraid of facing up to this great nation’s entire history. And maybe here in Minnesota we’re just made of stronger stuff.” “Who is asking for this?” is somehow a question no one else had asked.

By 2023 Democrats were soliciting Biden surrogates to come to their states and give talks. “His whole thing was,” says an adviser, “ ‘I want to go to the states that nobody else is going to go to. I want to go to the state party dinner where they can’t get a guest. They need to be inspired too, and nobody’s ever going to go there.’” And so instead of going to states like South Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada, Walz went to Topeka, Indianapolis, Kansas City, and Omaha. “Mind your own damn business,” he said in Fargo in November, at a small event space above a local restaurant, to an audience of 50 or 75 senior citizens. There was no podium; he stood at a table with a handheld microphone. It was basically the same speech he later gave in Philadelphia, standing beside Kamala Harris, to millions of people…

We go up the giant plane stairs in Phoenix, off in Tucson, back into the van, the streets cleared. On the roof of Palo Verde High, snipers stand under a small blue tent rippling in the desert wind. We are hours late. Backed by inspirational posters of questionable persuasive power (“We believe SPORTSMANSHIP is an EXPECTATION”), a small-business owner named Raul is talking about his seven daughters and their right to bodily autonomy and this man who will protect it. Walz runs onstage. The scoreboard reads 20-24. “I’m ready,” says Walz, “to run through the wall for Raul on that!”

“I love you,” someone shouts from the crowd. Walz points straight at him. “You love America!” Walz has neither notes nor teleprompter. It is difficult to make policy physical, but Walz could mime the agenda if pressed. He has a lexicon of moves. There’s one for the word revulsion, which he presumes the audience members feel as they hear Trump’s ethnonationalist accusations of pet consumption — Walz’s hands rise in a waving motion — and one for the word conversation — a kind of swatting back and forth — which is what his mom is engaged in now that she has a hearing aid. It is a speech about the space Republicans have ceded, the “Party of Freedom” curdled into obsessive transgression: “free to invade your exam room, to invade your school library, to invade your bedroom, and have government be just small enough,” and his arms go wide, “to be in every damn part of your life that they shouldn’t be.”

He’s on the subject of Social Security when he swerves. “The other freedom is — and being in this space, as a schoolteacher, and knowing the joy that’s here, and knowing the parents” — and here he crouches, as if toward a kid — “who dress their little ones in their best clothes and they send them off to school, and that teacher is waiting there to shake their little hands and welcome them into the world of learning.” The audience is with him, with the little kid with his new shoes and supportive parents, here, in this school gym. “Our kids need to be free to be kids and go to school without being shot dead in their classroom.” He looks legitimately angry. The little kid in his best clothes with the supportive parents has been executed. “We got 27 days,” he says. “All gas, no brakes … Let’s go.” The audience unleashes a wave of stamping, screaming. He rides it.

Really enjoy all the crying in these mentions. Losers. https://t.co/jT31m7Qo8r

— Jean-Michel Connard ??? (@torriangray) October 18, 2024