The moments that have broken through at the DNC

Tim Walz shows why he was picked.

Good morning! I have my latest DNC dispatch for your below. Tonight is the last night of the convention — concluding with Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech. I’ll be going live on Substack after Harris is done with her speech. Click below to download the Substack app and make sure to enable notifications so you’ll be notified when the live video begins. I’m looking forward to discussing Harris’s speech, and the whole week, with all of you!

Now, let’s talk Tim Walz:

Political conventions are, in addition to everything else, great “what-if” opportunities.

What would the Democratic convention look like if Joe Biden was speaking tonight, as the nominee, instead of on Monday, as an outgoing president? Or if Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who spoke yesterday, had been chosen as Biden’s running mate in 2020? Or a deeper cut: what if John Kerry had tapped runner-up Jennifer Granholm to deliver the keynote address in 2004? Would she have had Barack Obama’s time slot on Tuesday instead of headlining state breakfasts as Energy Secretary?

And then there was this counterfactual on display Wednesday: what if Kamala Harris had picked Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate?

I’m on record having written that Shapiro would have brought the “most obvious electoral upside with him to the ticket,” considering his popularity in Pennsylvania, a state Harris pretty much can’t win the election without. I still think that’s probably the case — but I also thought his speech, which came not long before Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s, gave a pretty good window into why Walz, not Shapiro, was ultimately selected as Harris’ running mate.

To be clear, there was nothing wrong with Shapiro’s speech! He’s a talented orator and, from inside the arena, he clearly fired up the crowd. His focus on “freedom” was nod to the fact that he helped start the Democratic Party’s renewed use of the term, back in 2022, before it became an essential slogan of the Harris campaign. But there was also nothing particularly memorable about the address.

As we head into Day 4 of the Democratic convention in Chicago, having watched almost all the speeches from inside the United Center, I will tell you that — at a certain point — many of the speakers start to blend together. They’re almost all politicians (save the occasional exception like Oprah Winfrey), and they almost all talk like it. And if I’m feeling a bit tired of it, I have a hunch a lot of viewers at home are too.

More and more, I’ve been watching for the authentic moments that manage to break out of the standard pablum and appear like a respite of humanity from the sea of speechifying. It is those moments — especially in a short-attention-span-world of TikTok clips and 30-second soundbites — that tend to define a convention.

In my opinion, there have been three of those moments so far. (Let me know in the comments if you believe there have been others!)

• Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett emotionally recounting Harris wiping tears from her face during a visit to the vice president’s residence.

• Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s speech. Sometimes speakers are unpracticed, and the speech falls flat. Sometimes speakers are unpracticed, and it works. Emhoff’s speech worked because it came off as a husband authentically talking about his love for his wife. He wasn’t orating, he was just talking — and he seemed every bit as surprised to find himself on that stage as most Americans would.

• Rachel Goldberg, the mother of Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, collapsing onto the podium in tears as the audience chanted “bring them home.” There were few dry eyes in the room as Goldberg and her husband spoke, memorably declaring, “In a competition of pain, there are no winners.”

And then, last night, came the fourth moment: Walz speaking about his family while accepting the vice presidential nomination.

“If you’ve never experienced the hell that is infertility, I guarantee you, you know somebody who has,” Walz said. “I can remember praying each night for a phone call, the pit in your stomach when the phone would ring, and the absolute agony when we heard the treatments hadn’t worked.”

“It took Gwen and I years, but we had access to fertility treatments,” he continued. “And when our daughter was born, we named her Hope. Hope, Gus and Gwen, you are my entire world, and I love you.”

Inside the United Center, the big screen almost always stays trained on the podium; the camera rarely cuts away to the audience. But, in that moment, it did, panning over to Guz Walz, who was sobbing as his father spoke. “That’s my dad!” he could be seen saying.

And that right there is why Walz was selected as Harris’ running mate — not because he loves his children any more than any other contender, but because he is willing to talk about it with his heart on his sleeve. Because he comes off, more or less, like a regular guy, and not a politician.

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At least, that’s certainly the overriding sentiment of the Democrats I’ve spoken to in Chicago.

“He’s one of the most genuine, special people we know,” said New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who has attended a Springsteen concert with Walz, in addition to preceding him as chair of the Democratic Governors Association. “He’s a great guy. He’s as genuine, as special, as fun, as warm as he seems.”

“You just gotta love him,” David Hogg, the gun control activist who launched a (successful) social media campaign to land Walz on the ticket, told me. “He’s a politician but he doesn’t feel like a politician. It’s because he was a teacher for 20 years, and that’s never gonna rub off, never gonna go away.” (As we were speaking, Walz’s personal aide and a colleague came up to Hogg to thank him for his pro-Walz activism. “The tweets were great!” the colleague said.)

“I think it’s chemistry,” former Alabama Sen. Doug Jones said when I asked him why Walz was selected for the ticket. “I also think he brings an interesting balance to the ticket. He can go where a lot of Democrats are afraid to go. That’s in rural places, those working-class voters: he speaks their language. A perfect complement for her.”

I also spent some time chatting with Nick Frentz, a Minnesota state senator who represents North Mankato — a separate city from Mankato, Walz’s hometown, Frentz made sure to remind me, although they are contiguous.

Frentz has known Walz since the governor moved to Mankato in the 1990s; they’ve hunted and fished together. I asked him what he made of Walz back then, before he entered politics. “What you see [today] is exactly what my impression was,” Frentz told me. “Very sincere, family-first type person, great neighborhood guy, outdoorsman.”

“He’s funny,” Frentz added. “He’s always had a good sense of humor.”

That’s something that came up in a few of my conversations: at the Democratic convention, the word of the week seems to be “joy,” and whenever it’s mentioned, Walz’s name is never far behind. “He’s definitely embodying what we like to talk about from the original Hubert Humphrey: happy warrior,” Minnesota State Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy told me.

But, of all my conversations about Walz, it was a non-politician — Randy Fair, a delegate from Walz’s native Nebraska — who stuck with me most. “He’s the same guy that I go to the local football games and see next to me,” Fair said. “While we may disagree about things, we get along, we come to watch our kids play games, and we go home. Then we see each other the next day, and we’re friends.”

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Of course, Walz is not without his critics. “We’re not casting a sitcom star, we’re electing a vice president, and the portrayal of Walz’s record last night was airbrushed in a wind tunnel,” Jim Geraghty wrote in the National Review this morning, in a piece titled “That Wasn’t the Real Tim Walz.”

Last night, I ducked away from the United Center for a bit to appear on the livestream of the Free Press, a right-leaning Substack, and that was their argument as well: that Walz was, at heart, a pretender, a politician who was putting on a folksy persona for the cameras.

Certainly, it’s true that he has made misstatements at times, falsely stating that he carried weapons of war “in war” and even previously fudged the details of the heartwarming story he told on Wednesday. (He has suggested in the past that he and his wife used IVF to conceive their daughter Hope, even though it was a different infertility treatment that has no states or politicians have attempted to restrict access to.)

At the convention on Wednesday, I also though the whole coach schtick was a tad overdone. Not only did his high school football team being paraded onto the stage feel a bit tacky, but the repeated references to him as “Coach Walz” can come off a bit dishonest, as if the campaign is trying to get you to forget that he has been in politics for almost 20 years.

“You know, you might not know it, but I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this,” Walz said on Wednesday, although by now he has served as both a congressman and governor, giving countless political speeches. He spent much less time talking about those experiences yesterday than he did about his tenures as a teacher and coach. It’s true that this was his biggest stage yet — but it’s not as if he just stumbled into the DNC straight from the football field, as it somewhat felt he was suggesting.

And yet, there’s a reason that’s how the campaign is packaging him. The DNC has enough politicians who will tell you about being politicians — Walz is there to sound like a dad, and that’s why one of the convention’s most memorable moments wasn’t him reeling off Minnesota’s legislative successes but him talking about fatherhood. It may be an act that elides a few key truths about his career, but — so far — it’s working.

Of the four people on the two national tickets, Walz is the only one who is rated more favorably than unfavorably in polls, according to the FiveThirtyEight average. An AP/NORC poll out yesterday found Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance 17 percentage points underwater in favorability; Walz, meanwhile, was 11 points above ground.

And then there was this key measure, from an Axios poll: by five percentage points, voters are more likely to say Walz “feels and talks like someone from a small town” — something core to both candidates’ political stories — than Vance. By eight percentage points, voters viewed Walz as having a more “authentic connection to everyday Americans.”

Republicans have thrown all manner of attacks at Walz — so far, none seem to be sticking. He may be the first member of a national ticket to dad joke their way out of scrutiny.