Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as a running mate is a doubling down on extreme leftist ideology. It’s a huge gift to the Trump-Vance campaign.

As governor, Walz let Minneapolis burn during the race riots of 2020. He literally ordered the police to abandon the third precinct, surrendering local businesses and residents to anarchy. For the few rioters and looters that were arrested, soon-to-be vice-presidential candidate Harris fundraised to help them post bail.

Not even Sen. Barack Obama would have been so brazen on the national stage. He famously ran his 2008 presidential race as a moderate, even embracing traditional marriage, before revealing his true colors once safely ensconced in the White House.

A Weird Choice

Weird is a good word for the Walz selection. It’s the word Democrats have tried pinning on Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a faithful husband and father of three who has a compelling life story, and who is a convert to Catholicism and a veteran who deployed into a combat zone.   

For starters, Walz doesn’t put a new state into play in the presidential race. Minnesota hasn’t voted for a Republican in a presidential election since 1972. Selecting Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania could have closed the gap in that state — a state that really could decide the outcome. Pennsylvania has 19 electoral votes, the most of any state that RealClearPolitics identifies as a toss-up just 90 days out. Selecting Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona would have helped Harris earn that state’s 11 electoral votes. It was widely reported that Shapiro and Kelly were among the top three contenders for the running mate position.

It’s hard not to see Shapiro’s rejection as a nod to the anti-Israeli wing of the Democratic Party. Shapiro was elected governor in 2022, winning by a 15% margin in a state Joe Biden carried by a razor’s edge just two years earlier. Shapiro won a higher share of the vote than Biden in every Pennsylvania county. The man’s fatal flaw is that he opposed the anti-Israeli campus occupations this spring. I won’t call them protests, because those would have been fine. What Shapiro and most Americans opposed was taking over campus buildings and unlawfully sleeping in tents in the campus common areas.

Shapiro happens to be Jewish. The fact that there is rising anti-Jewish sentiment in the Democratic Party is now being openly discussed, even on CNN. Some say that selecting Shapiro would have helped Harris in Pennsylvania but hurt her chances in Michigan. Pro-Palestinian Democrats were the only Michigan delegates to vote against endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris a couple weeks ago. These Democrats said they’d be willing to reconsider if Harris flips on the administration’s Gaza policies. This is telling.

Michigan’s 15 electoral votes are up for grabs, leaning slightly in Harris’s direction at the moment. Even with the switch on the ticket from Biden to Harris, there’s a possibility of a large Free Palestine march at the Democratic National Convention in a couple of weeks. Choosing Shapiro as her running mate would probably have turned that prospect into a reality, exposing an ugly rift among Democrats.

Others wonder if Harris feared that Shapiro would upstage her. If you consider the likelihood of backroom Obama influence — the former president was an early supporter of Harris, once calling her “by far, the best-looking attorney general in the country,” for which he was forced to apologize — the Walz pick is not unlike Obama choosing Biden in 2008: a white guy with limited ambitions and horizons, with rural roots, who “checks the box” as being different than you, but who will do exactly as he’s told.

An Extreme Choice

Walz has quite the highlight reel, and the Trump campaign has been aggressive in defining him right out of the gate. They would do well to be equally laser-focused on Harris, not digressing to discussions of her ethnicity, her IQ, or criticizing the popular governor of Georgia (and his wife!) while campaigning in that battleground state (which should be solidly red). But now I’m digressing.

Walz served in the National Guard for 24 years. But he cut and ran in May 2005 after learning that his battalion would be deployed to Iraq — and after allegedly assuring his fellow troops that he would join them there later. In his race for governor, he claimed a military title he would only have merited had he not quit. As governor, he closed churches during COVID. When he reopened bars, he refused to reopen churches. He kept public schools closed. He rationed lifesaving COVID treatments based on race instead of risk. To be black, indigenous, or a person of color (BIPOC) was as qualifying for scarce monoclonal antibody treatment as being elderly, having a high BMI, diabetes, or kidney disease.

It gets weirder. Walz set up a hotline to monitor his March 2020 stay-at-home order. It led to thousands of residents snitching on their neighbors for highly dangerous activities like playing basketball or walking their dogs. Law enforcement monitored this hotline until November, well after the stay-at-home order had ended.

Last June, Walz signed a bill requiring schools to stock tampons in boys’ bathrooms — grades 4 through 12. Last April, Walz signed a bill to make his state a safe haven for minors seeking sex-change surgeries, puberty blockers, and hormone therapy.  

But the most egregious example of Walz’s poor leadership is how he dealt with the riots following the death of George Floyd. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called Walz, a fellow Democrat, on the second night of the mayhem. He warned the governor that a Target store was being looted and asked him to send in the National Guard. Walz dithered, saying he’d consider it. Walz would eventually send in the Guard, but that was precious days later.  

At one point, the Minneapolis police gave up an entire command post. Shockingly, a police union official in the command post testified that she heard Walz order the cops to give it up. The city would ultimately sustain more than $55 million in property damage. But when the smoldering dust settled, the governor had the audacity to blame the mayor for losing control of his city. How’s that for leadership?

No doubt about it, the selection of Walz as Harris’s running mate is a gift that will keep on giving. More fodder will no doubt unfold in the days and weeks to come.

Alex Chediak (Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley) is a professor and the author of Thriving at College (Tyndale House, 2011), a roadmap for how students can best navigate the challenges of their college years. His latest book is Beating the College Debt Trap. Learn more about him at www.alexchediak.com or follow him on Twitter (@chediak).