Jill Lawrence writes:

And the winner of the Democratic veepstakes is . . . Tim Walz, who makes perfect sense. He’s a popular, plainspoken, moderate Midwestern governor, a former teacher, a football coach, a gun owner who hunts pheasant and turkey, and a 24-year National Guard member who flipped a rural Republican congressional district in 2006 and won it six times. Also, here’s a photo of him holding a piglet.

Vice President Kamala Harris chose the second-term Minnesota governor as her running mate for all those reasons and more. What’s really telling is that her two other reported finalists were also popular moderates who made perfect sense: Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a decorated naval aviator and former astronaut with tough border views and bipartisan appeal, and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, known for his working-class outreach, support for school vouchers, and getting a section of I-95 reopened twelve days after it collapsed.

Harris represents an emerging America—a biracial lawyer born to a Jamaican father and Indian mother, both immigrants, both professionals in Northern California. Walz, a Nebraska native, represents “the course-correction on class, rural & regional messaging that Dems have needed for decades,” writes author Sarah Smarsh, a chronicler of working-class rural America who grew up on a Kansas farm.

That balance is the difference between Democrats and today’s MAGA Republicans under Donald Trump, and what could save them this year. They get what the late columnist Mark Shields called a “semi-iron rule” of politics: It’s about addition, not subtraction. Coalitions, not circular firing squads. Finding and welcoming converts—not uncovering and banishing heretics.

None of this is rocket science, it’s basic political science. [Continue reading…]