The day after Tim Walz was chosen as Kamala Harris’s  running mate, the Trump-Vance team finally had a relatively good day campaigning. For the previous 16 days, since Biden had been forced out, Kamala Harris had huge wind at her back, her every move receiving hagiographic girlboss press coverage.  The Trump camp should have better anticipated it. It might actually have been quantifiable in the polls—a good day might be worth nearly a point in general national favorability ratings, and Harris had pulled off 16 of them in a row. 

Actual “who are you going to vote for” polls were somewhat stickier, but by the end of the period some polls showed the race tied, some showed Harris moving towards a large advantage. One poll—the Marquette Law School poll—showed her moving into a six point national lead. Horserace analysts like Mark Halperin (whose studiously non-polemical streaming show Two Way is surprisingly addictive) conveyed that some leading Republicans in private considered the race nearly over, that Harris was pulling into the kind of lead that Trump would never be able to overcome. (For what it’s worth, Halperin didn’t concur, but it is obviously significant that some well-informed people think that.)

What was the good day? Vance was on the trail in Wisconsin, mercifully not required to defend remarks that a conservative intellectual might reasonably make as a polemic make but a national politician wouldn’t, and he found a clever way to talk about Harris and Walz. He walked over to Harris’s plane on Eau Claire airport tarmac and addressed reporters, a way to point out that Harris seemed to be terrified of speaking to reporters without a prepared text and a teleprompter. He shifted the conversation over to Walz and made some points about Walz’s refusal to call the National Guard during the early days of the George Floyd riots, while noting that Harris was raising bail money for the same rioters. 

By then some voices in the national press were beginning to take an interest in whether Walz had an actual “stolen valor” issue—inflating his rank and his combat status, and bailing on his national guard unit as soon as it was ordered deployed to Iraq. CNN went as far to proclaim Walz’s campaign claim about guns he used “in combat” false. Walz clearly had less Teflon than Kamala. More importantly, the mainstream press (I was listening to CNN radio at the time) covered Vance’s remarks, without editorializing about how terrible they were. 

Kamala’s choice of Walz was important.  Donald Trump is sufficiently unpopular that it is likely that if Harris somehow indicated that she really would try to govern from slightly left of center, as Biden promised but couldn’t manage to do, she would win in a walk. She could have chosen Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s enormously popular governor, ensuring her Pennsylvania, and undermining (because Governor Shapiro has been willing to break from the left on charter schools, and on the general level of respect he is able to convey when speaking to and about Pennsylvanians of all political stripes) the argument that she is too radically left to win. By choosing a devout Jew, Harris would have given some reassurance to conservative Christians (who are closer in sensibility to religious Jews than they are to atheists).  

A Shapiro choice would also have given Harris a kind of Sister Souljah moment with the pro-Hamas left, saying, in effect, not only do I not agree with you (she probably doesn’t), but I’m willing to elevate as my governing partner someone who has called you out as bad as the Klan. She might have faced some disruption at the convention for a Shapiro choice, but that could have been overcome. By ensuring herself a smoother convention, Harris has signaled that anti-Zionist forces within the Democratic party (a quite small minority) might well have a kind of veto power over her important decisions. One could imagine that this could come back in unpredictable but potentially momentous ways. 

She chose, reportedly, on the basis of good vibes she felt with Walz.  Walz is clearly the most left of the six candidates who made it to the short list, the one endorsed by Bernie Sanders and most progressives in the Democratic party. Perhaps he will draw back some rural white voters to the Democrats, as the Harris press claque claims. More likely, he fits the mold of a progressive who can appeal to rural white voters, which is not the same thing. 

What the choice conveys most of all is Harris team’s confidence that no ideological compromises with the center are really needed; yes, she no longer favors a ban on fracking, but the Walz choice doubles down on any number of other divisive culture-war issues where she might have considered herself vulnerable and sought to mitigate.  Driver’s licenses for illegal aliens? Check.   Support for transgenderism in the schools—check.  Support for the George Floyd rioters—check! 

The Trump-Vance good day was followed by another at least decent day, in which Donald Trump gave a surprise press conference at Mar-a-Lago. The former president managed mercifully to avoid commenting on Harris’s mixed race background (though he did manage to bring up a helicopter flight he took with Willie Brown) but generally came across as confident and fluent. The cringey hostility between Trump and the media at his early White House press conferences seemed almost absent. He did contrast his availability to the press with Harris’s avoidance, adding that she is not smart enough to hold a press conference. (He had earlier made a gracious reference to Hillary Clinton’s  high intelligence—but “she was her own worst enemy.”) 

I expect Harris will eventually have to sit down for some interviews. But perhaps not. There are two great unknowns about the campaign as she surges in the polls. One is whether she is too far left to be elected, if voters were to find out her real views. The other is whether she is smart enough to be president—or is her current elevation our real life version of Being There?  Is the real Kamala Harris the lady one sees speaking confidently at campaign rallies? Or is she the ditz getting before a microphone and speaking like a fourth grader giving a bad book report?  And if the latter, will the press, despite its longstanding disdain for Trump, allow that reality to be seen? We are approaching an election in which Trump and Vance are very much the underdogs, but which is far from decided.