And the nomination for vice president goes to … Tim Walz?

The veepstakes reached its hotly anticipated conclusion when a winner was declared Tuesday morning. Joining newly minted presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket will be …

Tim Walz?

I shouldn’t be surprised. The progressive Minnesota governor had been on Harris’ shortlist from the start and had been actively campaigning for the newly minted presidential candidate ahead of the selection.

Nevertheless, I was expecting a stronger pick.

In this context, the strength of a vice-presidential pick can be qualified by how nervous it makes the opposition. And as a card-carrying member of the opposition, I’ll be frank: Kamala Harris could have done a lot worse than Tim Walz. But she could have also done a lot better.

Harris had been set to interview six potential running mates last weekend according to an Aug. 2 report from the Associated Press. Walz was one of four governors on the list, along with J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. Rounding out the group was Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Secretary of Transportation (and former presidential candidate) Pete Buttigieg.

Who had the most appeal? Let’s see.

Buttigieg, like Harris, was once a contender for the presidential nomination in 2020. Unlike Harris, he actually made it to the 2020 caucuses in Iowa, finishing second in the overall vote count and taking the largest number of pledged delegates.

(I don’t understand the delegate math, either. But in my defense, neither did most Iowa Democrats. It’s a moot point now.)

Buttigieg still is seen as a future star in the Democratic Party, but his time as Secretary of Transportation has not resulted in any particularly notable achievements. He also shoulders criticism of his and President Joe Biden’s handling of the disastrous train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which Buttigieg did not visit for almost three weeks after the incident, finally doing so only after Trump.

Kelly is a first-term senator in Arizona, a state Biden won in 2020 despite numerous attempts to overturn the results in court.

Polling in the critical 2024 swing state has narrowed since Biden dropped out of the race. A Harris/Kelly ticket in a previously reliable Republican state would have played well with moderates who have rejected Trump-backed candidates and elected Democrats to the governorship and both of Arizona’s seats in the U.S. Senate.

Kelly entered politics several years after his wife, former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, sustained a serious brain injury when a gunman opened fire on a meeting she was hosting at a grocery store. Importantly, he has gone against the grain of his party on issues like border security. Earlier this year, Gallup named immigration as the top issue that Americans named — without being prompted — as the most important problem in the country.

I could never quite understand why Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker was on the shortlist for Harris’ running mate. His appeal seems to end where it begins: With his connections to Democratic Party power players. And his cash.

The uber-wealthy Pritzker family are longtime Democratic mega donors and fundraisers. Pritzker’s sister has been closely linked to former President Barack Obama and his family since the 1990s and served on his cabinet as Secretary of Commerce during his second term.

But the billionaire Pritzker and his bloodline of Chicago political and corporate royalty don’t earn him much admiration outside the state of Illinois or the Democratic political machine.

Pritzker would have never been able to charm regular voters nationwide who are still undecided for the November election. On one end of the political spectrum, his failure so far to steer Illinois away from an increasingly grim economic future makes him unappealing to fiscally focused voters. On the other end, Pritzker’s status as a corporate fat cat (no pun intended,) disqualifies him in the eyes of any progressive for whom hating the wealthy is everything from a political fashion statement to a way of life.

In Kentucky, Beshear is political royalty in his own right. His father, Steve Beshear, served in state government for over two decades, including two terms as governor.

Unlike his counterpart in solidly blue Illinois, the younger Beshear does not have a decadeslong partisan majority on his side.

Kentucky hasn’t been solidly red for as long as many might think — it only shed its Democratic majority in the state’s House of Representatives in 2016, when Republicans flipped a 54-46 Democratic majority to 64-46 in the former’s favor, a jaw-dropping 18-seat swing. The Kentucky Senate has been red since 2001, when the general election that favored George W. Bush for president flipped four seats to give the Kentucky GOP a slim majority of 20 seats to Democrats’ 18.

Since then, partisan trends in Kentucky have rapidly accelerated toward the GOP. Today, there are four times as many Republicans in their state House as there are Democrats. In their Senate, Republicans outnumber Democrats 31-7.

It is therefore quite impressive that Beshear would be able to rally voters in such a deep red state in the Trump era — and win re-election in the same year that the state legislature overrode 15 of his vetoes. That indicates an appeal that reaches far beyond Democrats and even moderates.

Equally appealing in that regard is Shapiro, the popular governor of the battleground state of Pennsylvania who many believed was certain to be the VP choice.

Shapiro canceled several events last weekend, only days before Harris’ Aug. 7 deadline to announce a running mate. Adding to the speculation that Shapiro was the chosen candidate was the announcement rally set for Aug. 6 — in Pennsylvania.

But it wasn’t to be. Allies of Shapiro — and many Republicans — allege that he was passed over because he is Jewish, a vocal supporter of Israel and an outspoken critic of the anti-Israel protests that rocked college campuses in May. Shapiro also condemned protesters demonstrating outside Israeli-owned businesses in Philadelphia, referring to their actions as “blatantly antisemitic.”

It’s pointless to imply that the Vice President, who is married to a Jewish man, is an antisemite for picking someone other than the one Jewish guy on the list.

But Iowa GOP chairman Jeff Kaufmann said Tuesday evening that the choice of the vice presidential candidate, even if ultimately made by the nominee, is heavily influenced by party activists, leaders and insiders.

Due to growing hostility toward Israel among Democrats, Kaufmann told The Gazette after an event in Cedar Rapids, the decision to steer clear of Shapiro was clearly due to his Jewish faith and heritage. For that reason, Kaufmann said, Democrats have some “explaining to do” about the spreading antisemitic sentiment in their party.

That will be harder to deny than many Democrats will care to admit. In early July, a petition began circulating online by an anonymous group calling for Biden to drop out of the race and encouraging people to contact their legislators to request that they join the calls for him to exit. After Biden stepped away, the group changed its title and web URL to “No Genocide Josh,” encouraging supporters to “join a coalition of groups to publicly pressure” the campaign “to not select Josh Shapiro.”

So, Walz it is. It appears Democrats and the Harris campaign hope that the relatively unknown Minnesota governor will be seen as a mild-mannered moderate who appeals to the mild-mannered middle class voters of the rural Midwest, where Democrats have suffered big losses in the last decade.

A mild-mannered moderate, that is, who set up a phone hotline and an email during the pandemic for people to snitch on their neighbors for not following social distancing orders, which he said was “for their own good,” and who threatened violators of his stay-at-home order with $1,000 fines and 90 days in jail.

A mild-mannered moderate who falsely claimed to carry “weapons of war” during his military deployment to Italy, during which he was thousands of miles from a combat zone; who opined in 2017 that 10-year-olds should be able to choose their gender and use whatever bathroom they want; who signed a bill forbidding his state from enforcing another state’s court order to remove a child from a parent whose custody was revoked in that state for allowing the child receive to dangerous medical treatments for gender dysphoria — regardless of the actual circumstances.

If the Harris campaign were looking for a moderate to balance out a ticket topped by the “leftmost” member of the U.S. Senate in 2019, the not-so-moderate Walz wasn’t a gem of a pick. Especially if his progressive bona fides are not enough to satisfy the growing faction of anti-Israel Democrats.

Nevertheless, the stage is finally set. The race is just taking off. With this VP pick for Democrats, I don’t see doom for Republicans yet.

Don’t get me wrong — I think Harris and Walz promote some pretty dangerous policies. And with the replacement of Joe Biden on the ticket, Democrats have a desperately-needed shot in the arm that Republicans shouldn’t overlook. (By the way, did I not tell readers at the end of June that the man was wilting?)

But given the time ahead for undecided voters to examine where the candidates stand on certain issues, I’ll admit that as a conservative who was expecting a stronger running mate, the biggest danger I see in Tim Walz right now is that he might deceive Trump and Republicans into thinking they can relax a little.

Should that happen, it would, ironically, make him a terrifying candidate.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com

Note: An earlier version of this column erroneously described Minnesota bill HF 146 as allowing the state to revoke custody of a child whose parents object to gender-affirming medical treatment. The description has been corrected.