Tim Walz grew up in a rural town in Nebraska, about 1,500 miles from the blue coastal cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco.
He rules over Minnesota, a state in the Midwest even further away.
But that hasn’t stopped the GOP from rushing to portray Walz — Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick — as an extreme “radical leftist” looking to spread California’s “dangerously liberal agenda” far and wide.
“It’s no surprise that San Francisco liberal Kamala Harris wants Tim Walz, a West Coast hopeful, as her running mate,” Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s campaign press secretary, said in a statement as soon as Harris announced her pick. “Walz has spent his tenure as governor trying to remake Minnesota in the image of the Golden State.”
Former President Trump went further, claiming that Walz was more radical than his running mate, who grew up in the Bay Area.
“Even worse than the dangerously liberal and corrupt Kamala Harris – SHE’S THAT BAD,” Trump wrote in a fundraising email. “She will unleash HELL ON EARTH and open our borders to the worst criminals imaginable. She will pass Kamla’s NEW GREEN SCAM and burn trillions of dollars.”
It's a line of attack that GOP strategists and pundits believe resonates with a Republican base that sees California as the ultimate symbol of blue-state leftism and liberal excess.
The problem for Republicans is that Walz, a straightforward, outspoken politician who grew up in Valentine, Nebraska, has many qualities that deviate from the stereotypes of the progressive Democratic urban elite: He is a veteran who served in the Army National Guard for 24 years, a former football coach, a hunter and a gun owner.
The Republican narrative about Walz’s radicalism — like some Democratic accounts that emphasize his moderation — fails to capture the complexity of his life and political legacy as a congressman and governor.
Sean Hannity, the conservative Fox News commentator, dubbed Walz the “Bernie Sanders of governors” and vowed to devote his afternoon radio show to investigating Walz in detail.
“Tim Walz is a weird radical liberal,” the “MAGA War Room” posted on the social media site X on Tuesday, citing a bill Walz signed last year that required school districts to provide “all students who menstruate” with access to menstrual products and an executive order directing state agencies to support access to “gender-affirming” health care for LGBTQ+ people.
“What could be stranger than signing a law requiring schools to have tampons in boys’ bathrooms? Or stranger than signing a law allowing minors to undergo sex-change operations?”
Elected governor of Minnesota in 2018, Walz championed many policies associated with California, from clean energy to codifying abortion rights.
He signed laws requiring Minnesota to generate all of its electricity from wind, solar, and other carbon-free sources by 2040, guaranteed free school meals for all students in pre-K through 12th grade, and allowed immigrants without legal status to obtain driver’s licenses. Under his leadership, Minnesota was one of the first states to ban so-called conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ minors.
In 2020, Minnesota, like California, received backlash from conservatives when Walz kept strict COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in place. Walz was also accused of being too slow to crack down on protests that resulted in widespread vandalism and arson in Minneapolis and St. Paul after George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer.
Walz was deployed with the Minnesota National Guard three days after Floyd's death. Nearly 1,500 properties in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area suffered property damage at a cost of about $500 million.
In Congress, however, Walz was a barrier-crossing centrist who appeared almost exactly in the middle of the spectrum of Democrats and Republicans, earning him a purple rating from the nonpartisan site GovTrack.us.
“While Walz has governed Minnesota as a progressive, in Congress he represented a Republican-leaning district and was known as a relative moderate,” Christopher J. Devine, an associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton in Ohio, and Kyle C. Kopko, an adjunct professor of political science at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, wrote in an opinion piece in The Times on Tuesday.
While Walz doesn’t have a deep connection to California, Devine said, his liberal record as governor and endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) may give Republicans some ammunition to paint him as too far left.
But Walz's personality — he took Harris's call Tuesday wearing a camouflage baseball cap — often seems at odds with ideological expectations.
“He doesn’t fit the national stereotype of what someone who is far to the left should look and sound like,” Devine said. “He’s often called a Midwestern dad. He’s not someone from one of the coasts. He’s not someone who has lived his life in a big city, separate from the lives of people who live in more rural areas… His personal presentation is such that voters might feel that what they see with their eyes doesn’t match what they hear.”
Democrats hope Walz can appeal to different factions of the party, from rural workers to urban progressives like Generation Z. But Republicans argue Walz's outspoken, hard-working demeanor is a sham that masks his radicalism.
“While Walz pretends to support Americans in the heartland, when the cameras are off, he believes rural America is 'mostly cows and rocks,'” Leavitt said, referring to a statement Walz made as a congressman that conservatives argued was an example of Democrats disparaging the rural heartland.
“You see those maps,” Walz told an audience in Minneapolis in 2017. “Red and blue and all that red there. And Democrats get depressed about that. It’s mostly rocks and cows that are in that red zone.”
Conservatives vow to continue their strategy of portraying Walz as a radical Democrat out of touch with ordinary Americans.
On Tuesday, Republican Party politicians, strategists and pundits shared Walz's comments last week to a group of male Harris supporters:
“We never shied away from our progressive values,” Walz said on a “White Dudes for Harris” call on July 29. “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”
Sharing a clip of Walz’s remarks, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said: “This is the most radical candidacy in American history.”
For his part, Walz is quick to dismiss the GOP's bluster about socialism.
“I have to tell you, they scream ‘socialism,’” Walz said last month on MSNBC. “We just build roads, we build schools and we create prosperity. Their whole plan is to go backwards.”
