By Katie Rogers, Nicholas Nehamas, Katie Glueck and Jess Bidgood
Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, issued a full-throated appeal to rural America earlier this week, promoting her economic policies and his Midwestern bona fides as they refined their one-two-punch campaign approach before 12,000 supporters in rural Wisconsin and their largest crowd yet in Detroit.
In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Walz, who needs to introduce himself quickly to a national audience, ticked off his resume as a former football coach who was raised in small Nebraska towns and has a by-the-bootstraps backstory. In a speech resembling his debut with Harris on Tuesday evening, he pointed out that he was a former schoolteacher and House member who served in a conservative-leaning district.
“I learned how to compromise without compromising my values,” he said.
Walz, a military veteran, castigated former President Donald Trump as having “no understanding of service because he’s too busy servicing himself — again and again and again.” He warned of Project 2025, the far-reaching conservative proposals pushed by Trump allies, and of a second term for the former president: “It will be far worse than it was four years ago.” Walz even incorporated a rallygoer’s suffering in the dusty heat into his message of inclusivity and kindness.
“That’s who we are,” he said, pausing his speech so the person could be helped. “It’s not about mocking.”
In Detroit, Walz leaned into his broadsides against Republicans and their efforts to restrict women’s health care and ban some books from public schools. Walz reminded a crowd of 15,000 supporters of his view of the Midwestern way. “In Minnesota, we respect our neighbor’s personal choices,” he said. “Don’t like a book? Don’t read it!”
If Walz was laying his background on thick, it was because he was hired to do just that: When Harris took the stage, she did it with a “warm Midwest welcome” from him and the crowd. She brought greetings from President Joe Biden and then jumped into her well-worn (by now) efforts to strike a contrast with Trump, warning of his tax policies, his administration’s efforts to end the Affordable Care Act, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the Project 2025 agenda.
She framed the election, as Biden has, as a decision between protecting democracy or allowing it to backslide.
“Do we want to live in a country of freedom, of compassion, of rule of law?” Harris said. “Or a country of chaos, fear and hate?”
She added, “We each have the power in a democracy to answer that question.”
Harris and Walz have spent little more than 24 hours together as running mates, but their campaign tactics are quickly coming into public view: Walz, the heartland-born dad with a stash of Trump-campaign zingers in his back pocket, and Harris, able to train her focus on policy, on her background as a Bay Area prosecutor and on Trump.
When she recounted her career and told the crowd that she knows “Donald Trump’s type,” it broke into a chant of “Lock him up.”
“Here’s the thing, the courts are going to handle that,” Harris said. “We’re going to beat him in November.”
Harris and her running mate are not an odd couple, exactly. Both of them have unleashed harsh words for Trump. On Wednesday, Walz repurposed a line that caught the ear of Harris and her advisers during her lightning-quick vetting period.
“It’s a very clear thing: Yes, they are creepy and weird as hell,” he said. “This is not normal behavior. Nobody’s asking for this crazy stuff.”
Dewey Hill, who owns a small business in Siren, Wisconsin, said he had gotten a “chill” when he saw Walz deliver his debut speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday. Hill, 64, said that he was going to vote for Biden, but that it was actually Walz, not Harris, who made him feel “reenergized” about the campaign. His wife, Sara Reimann-Hill, 49, who also owns their business, chimed in: For her, the excitement had been for Harris.
“She’s got the women’s vote,” Reimann-Hill said. “She’s got the Midwest because of Walz. She’s got the Black votes, too. Walz has the teachers. I think they’ve got the crew.”
Still, one of the prime challenges facing Harris’ campaign is an economy that has largely performed to expectations but whose benefits a majority of voters say they cannot feel.
She spoke to that tension directly Wednesday.
“While our economy is doing well by many measures, prices for everyday things like groceries are still too high,” she said. “When I am president, it will be a Day 1 priority to fight to bring down prices.”
As vice president, Harris has a portfolio that has included support for expanding the child tax credit that was introduced during the pandemic. She has also promoted affordable housing efforts. But for the past 3 1/2 years, Biden has taken the credit and weathered the criticism for the undulations in the post-COVID economy.
The theory among Harris’ advisers and other Democrats is that the elevation of Walz could assuage concerns among white, rural voters that an administration led by Harris would not be interested in helping them.
“There’s no one that’s going to out-small town Tim Walz,” said Ken Martin, the chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. “He can speak to those sort of Midwestern values and Midwestern sensibilities in a way that no one else can, in a very folksy way and a very common-sense way.”
But many rural Midwestern voters are loyal to Trump and the Republican Party, and are out of reach for Democrats.
Before the Wisconsin rally, Republicans in the state scoffed at the idea that a liberal like Walz could motivate rural voters to support Democrats.
“He is going to have as much impact on the vote in Wisconsin as it would if we hired a hula dancer from Hawaii: It’s going to be zero,” said Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin General Assembly. “Most people in Wisconsin have not heard of him.”
Polls show Harris and Trump tied in Wisconsin. She had 50% support from likely voters to his 49% in a survey released Wednesday by Marquette University Law School. Recent polling shows Harris and Trump tied in Michigan, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
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