Tim Walz was the safe VP pick

In the end, Vice President Kamala Harris made the safe choice.

On Tuesday morning, the Democratic presidential nominee tapped Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate. The 60-year-old, white, male former teacher, Army National Guardsman and congressman isn't a history-making pick (although he is the first Democratic presidential or vice-presidential nominee since 1980 who didn't attend law school!), nor will he offer a critical swing-state boost. But unless there are unknown skeletons in his closet, he probably satisfies the first rule of the veepstakes: Do no harm.

Walz has a strong resume for a VP pick. He was a geography teacher at Mankato West High School, where he was the faculty adviser for the gay-straight alliance and led the high school football team to a state championship. In 2006, he defeated an incumbent Republican representative in Minnesota's 1st District and spent 12 years in the House cultivating a center-left voting record: According to VoteView, he was consistently more liberal than about 60 percent of his fellow House members. With the exception of his defense of gun rights (which were popular in his rural district), he was generally a reliable liberal vote.

Since being elected governor in 2018, though, Walz has embraced his inner progressive. Especially since Democrats gained full control of Minnesota state government in 2022, he has presided over a flurry of liberal lawmaking: The state has legalized recreational marijuana, protected abortion rights, committed to transition to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2040 and passed a sweeping law to expand voting access. He also tacked left on gun rights, signing bills to expand background checks and make it easier to take guns away from people who are deemed a threat.

In other words, Walz seems to offer something for everyone in the Democratic coalition and little to alienate key segments of the party's base. That wasn't necessarily the case with the other two reported finalists for Harris's running mate, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. Labor unions didn't seem thrilled with Kelly, who was one of the only Senate Democrats who didn't sponsor a major pro-labor bill. (He now says he supports it.) And Shapiro supports private school vouchers, a big no-go for many Democrats, and had come under scrutiny from progressives for his lack of support for the Palestinian cause.

That's not to say Walz doesn't have potential weaknesses. Republicans have already begun to criticize him for his handling of the 2020 protests over George Floyd's murder in Minnesota, when he did not deploy the National Guard until the day after local leaders asked him to. And there's a danger that such criticisms could stick: Nationally, Walz is virtually unknown, even more so than some of Harris's other rumored vice-presidential picks. Only four national polls had asked about his favorability before Tuesday's announcement, and on average only 23 percent of Americans knew enough about him to form an opinion.

That means both sides have an opportunity in the coming days and weeks to define Walz for a national audience.

But probably the biggest drawback to picking Walz is that he likely won't help Harris win the Electoral College as much as Shapiro or Kelly (who were both from major swing states) might have. Although Minnesota has been drifting toward "swing state" status, it is still bluer than states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. As a result, it's very unlikely to decide the election; any world in which Harris needs Walz to put her over the top in Minnesota is probably a world in which she has already lost all four of those states and, thus, the election.

But in hindsight, we shouldn't be too surprised that Harris didn't prioritize Shapiro or Kelly for their home-state advantage: It's actually fairly unusual for a vice-presidential nominee to hail from a swing state. Since 1996, only two vice-presidential picks have hailed from a state that was decided by fewer than 7 percentage points (the margin by which President Joe Biden won Minnesota in 2020) in either that presidential election or the one four years earlier.

The Harris campaign might be hoping that Walz can still help electorally in other Midwestern states, though. The congressional district he used to represent, Minnesota's 1st, is demographically similar to much of Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania in that it has a large population of white people without college degrees and voted strongly for former President Donald Trump. And Walz put up impressive numbers in this district; back when it was a swing seat, he won it by blowout margins, and in 2016, he was narrowly reelected despite Trump carrying the district by 15 points.

Walz also ran stronger than average during his two gubernatorial runs. All told, throughout his electoral career, Walz's winning margins have been 12 points better than a generic Democrat would have done in the same jurisdictions.*

However, unfortunately for Harris and Walz, this probably won't help much outside Minnesota. While 538 estimates that vice-presidential candidates are worth a 1.7-point boost in their home states, we haven't found evidence of similar boosts in neighboring states.

In other words, Walz wasn't the best pick if Harris's goal was to maximize her chances of winning the election. But historically, that's not what the veepstakes has been about. Instead, scholars of the vice presidency have found that a candidate's choice of running mate is usually about balancing the ticket (ideologically, geographically or, more recently, with regard to race and gender) or picking the best governing partner. The choice of Walz fits squarely into that tradition. So while it may not have had the most upside, it is a choice that has served many presidential candidates well in the past.

Mary Radcliffe and Cooper Burton contributed research.

Footnotes

*To calculate generic performance for a jurisdiction, we added the national House popular vote for the election year in question to the base partisanship of the jurisdiction Walz ran in (either statewide or his congressional district). "Base partisanship" is the weighted average margin difference between how the jurisdiction voted in the two most recent presidential elections and how the country voted overall, with the most recent presidential election receiving 75 percent of the weight and the second-most-recent presidential election receiving 25 percent of the weight.