Tim Walz on Respect

Excerpt from "Is Tim Walz the Midwestern Dad Democrats Need?" on The Ezra Klein Show

I’ve watched a lot of presidential campaigns, and I can’t remember one in which the contest for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination has played out quite so publicly. And that’s allowed for some voices and figures to break through who you might not have imagined before. Foremost among them is Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, because of one interview on “Morning Joe,” saying of Donald Trump and JD Vance, “These guys are just weird.”

That was the interview heard around the Democratic Party. I remember it hit me on social media. I saw that and thought, “Oh, that really connects.” And then all of a sudden, it was all you heard from Democrats. “Weird, weird, weird. These guys are weird.”

Why did this connect this way? And is there a risk of this falling into something that can bedevil Democrats, coming off as an insult to Trump’s supporters, like Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment in 2016?

I wanted to hear Walz go deeper on all of this. He grew up in a small town in the Midwest and repeatedly won a congressional seat that was quite red. So I also wanted to hear his thoughts on why the Democrats have been losing the types of voters he knows so well and how to win them back.

Walz joined me for a conversation on my podcast. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.

You’ve had a hell of a couple of weeks. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen any single person, including, for that matter, a president, change an entire party’s messaging the way your riff on “Morning Joe” — on the weirdness of Donald Trump and JD Vance and Republicans of their ilk — did. You’ve been using that word for a while when a lot of other Democrats are using “existential,” “terrifying,” “undemocratic.” I’m not saying you don’t believe those things. But why, for you, “weird”?

All those things are true about an existential threat to global peace, in my opinion, a desire to strip constitutional power and division. All of those things are true.

What I see is that that kind of stuff is overwhelming for people. It’s like other big issues like climate change. If you can’t tackle it one piece at a time, it just seems, why should I do anything about it?

It’s the emperor’s wearing no clothes, is all this story is — this guy’s weird stories and inability to connect like a human being. What happened was, the minute that spell came down, the minute everybody in the crowd realized the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes, we can sweep in and say, “Who’s asking to ban birth control? Who’s asking to ban these books? Who’s asking to take veterans’ benefits away?”

And then we come in and say, “Look, Kamala Harris is talking about making sure that you have expanded health care, making sure there’s day care available, making sure that it’s easier to get free school lunches.”

And “weird" is specific to him. I’m certainly not talking about Republicans. I’m not talking about the people who are at those rallies. I’m hearing this from my Republican friends, because the people at those rallies, they’re the ones that can most benefit from the message we’re delivering.

I looked at him the other night in St. Cloud, Minn. Young women behind him. We’re going to provide reproductive care for them. I saw a group holding “Somalis for Trump.” We have a large Somali population. We’re very proud of that. Donald Trump has said, “We’re going to have a Muslim ban.” And he talked about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and the Somali community as being so detrimental rather than an asset to this. So we’re going to take care of those people, too.

He’s not going to do that. What do they have if they don’t have that fear? What do they have if there’s not a dystopian society? What do they have if only Dear Leader can come in and fix it?

If people are saying, “Actually, I’d like to have cheaper day care. I’d actually like them to quit talking about this. And I really don’t care who somebody’s married to” — because I believe the vast majority of people really don’t want to be in other people’s bedrooms.

And I use the thing of small town — this is where JD Vance doesn’t get it. You survive best by just minding your own damn business. Just stay out of people’s business.

I want to get at this distinction you’re making, between Trump or Vance and the crowds. Because one of the most dangerous emotions that Democrats sometimes let slip — the negative side of, I think, the liberal personality — can be a kind of contempt, a kind of smugness. This is why Hillary Clinton’s comment on deplorables was so damaging. How do you police that boundary?

This is where I take offense to JD Vance and “Hillbilly Elegy.” Those are my people. I come from a town of 400 — 24 kids in a class, 12 cousins, farming, those types of things. And I know they’re not weird. I know they’re not Donald Trump.

The thing is, we have to get them away from what he’s trying to sell because that’s not who they are. Just picture in your mind Donald Trump coming home after a day of work and picking up a Frisbee and throwing it. And his dog catches it, and the dog runs over, and he gives him a good belly rub because he’s a good boy. That’s what I do. And that’s what those rallygoers do. That is exactly who they are, and they’re going through the same things all of our families are.

He’s captured some of this. And fear is scary. I mean, the world is changing. We’re seeing, you know, conflict in the Middle East. We saw a global pandemic, which he did nothing to fix but seized upon.

And I think it’s kind of breaking that spell again of saying, “Look, he’s not offering you anything.” And then we dang sure better be ready to offer something.

Have you ever read “Hillbilly Elegy”?

I did, years ago.

I read it years ago, and I’ve been rereading it this week. I remember not thinking all that much of it then, but it feels like he’s predicting himself now. One of the big points early in the book is, he says: This is a story about people in a hard situation responding to it — and I’m paraphrasing — in the worst possible way. With anger, with resentment, with scapegoating of others without personal responsibility. A liberal would never talk about people and the places he’s from like that.

No, that’s why I take offense to it. Look, societal changes, you’re going to see a migration of population patterns. But you’re also going to see those that accelerated that, those that took advantage of that, those like Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are telling you, “We need to do school vouchers.” How are you going to get a private school in a town of 400? That’s not where the private school is going to be. The private school is going to be where it already is, giving tax breaks to the wealthiest.

The two things that are core to small communities: school and hospital. So I don’t know the irony or the masterful design of this. It’s guys just like him telling you that these people are just angry, bitter. That’s not who we are. That’s not who they are.

But I’ll tell you what. There are concerns. Economies have shifted. Young people leave those communities. My community felt thriving when I was there — two grocery stores, a couple of bars downtown and all that. Now it’s empty main streets. That vision of “Hillbilly Elegy” was true. But he doesn’t tell you the story why. And the bitterness, the cultural bitterness, whatever, that’s just not true. They’re just looking for “What are things to rejuvenate us? How do we get back?”

And I think about this: A town that small had services like that and had a public school with a government teacher that inspired me to be sitting where I’m at today. Those are real stories in small towns.

These guys, they talk about how evil the public schools are. For many of us, public schools were everything. That was our path. That’s the great American contribution.

You say there’s not a cultural bitterness, but there is a cultural frustration with the Democrats. If you looked at where people who didn’t go to college voted, they used to vote for Democrats. Now Democrats win college-educated voters nationally and lose non-college-educated voters. Those numbers are particularly stark among white voters. What do you make of that?

I think some of it is the alignment of economics. We’ve seen a migration to tech jobs, health care jobs in the cities. And then the cultural pieces — firearms start to get into that. You have long traditions that felt like they were being crushed.

We have got to figure out and see if we’re to some of the blame that we haven’t made the message clear enough. We haven’t delivered on those promises that people wanted to see.

The Affordable Care Act being one of those — it does a lot of great things, but people now have kind of forgotten that if we take away the A.C.A., you’re back to pre-existing conditions. And I don’t know if we built that into people’s thinking right now. So when Donald Trump says he’s going to get rid of the A.C.A., all right, that sounds good. I guarantee you those people at those rallies don’t want the A.C.A. to go away.

So I keep coming back to this: If they’re not voting for us, there’s not something wrong with them; there’s something that’s not quite clicking. So don’t assume they’re just not clever enough to understand what you’re selling them.

I do think that people don’t vote on policy as much as policy wonks would like to believe. That’s one thing. But the other thing is that we always think about whether or not voters like politicians. But my experience of voters is that they’re more sensitive to whether they think politicians like them. That’s a heuristic I think voters use a lot. Like, if you feel that a politician would like you, they’re probably going to look out for you. If you feel they would look past you, that they would look down on you, they’re probably not.

How do you explain Trump in that? You think they feel that he sees them?

I do. Look, I’m sure you have Trump voters in your family. I have Trump voters in my family.

I do.

And I think a lot about how unappealing he is to me and how appealing is to people I love.

Yeah, me, too. I spend a lot of time on that.

Well, what’s your theory of it?

I do think he’s entertaining to some. I think there is a sense, especially if you’re a little frustrated, that he’s not afraid to poke the bear. It feels like it’s empowering. And look, I think the world is complex. And if you don’t understand something, there’s a tendency that you might turn to the unexplainable, the conspiracy theories that caught on and things.

These aren’t stupid people. These are smart people. But there’s a frustration of: Why aren’t things working? Why are they so complex? So, I don’t know, I’m just theorizing on it.

But that district that I represented in 2016, I won that district six times. There’d been one other Democrat since 1890, but I won it in 2008 by 32 points. I sneak by in 2016. He wins by 17 points in that same district. They never see him. They knew me. I coached their kids. I was there. I delivered in Congress. I was a ranking member on the V.A. committee. Just six, eight years before, nearly 70 percent of them voted for me. I didn’t do any scandal or do anything to lose their support. But this guy came in and — even though I was of them or felt I was of them, that this was me, I was truly their representative — they identified with him. So I don’t know....

So I don’t know what it is. I think the Democrats’ way out of this is with optimism and a sense of grace toward folks. I want to be very careful. Like I said, those folks at those rallies, you insult them at great peril. Your neighbor is flying the flag, you insult them at great peril. Because they’re my relatives. They truly are, and I know them.