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On Tuesday morning, Vice President Kamala Harris announced Governor Tim Walz, D-Minnesota, as her running mate ahead of the Democratic National Convention.
Walz’s name was among those being considered by the Harris team for a potential vice presidential pick, also up for consideration were Gov. Josh Shapiro, D-Pennsylvania, Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Gov. Andy Beshear, D-Kentucky.
Throughout these recent “veepstakes,” Walz has been widely considered the most progressive of the pack. Following this morning’s announcements, Alabama Republicans — including Senators Tommy Tuberville and Katie Britt — quickly jumped on the opportunity to paint the Harris-Walz ticket as the most “socialist” and “radically liberal” in American history.
Tuberville specifically criticized Walz’s response to the protests that occurred following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, saying that Walz “sat by while rioters burned down Minneapolis.” Walz’s critics have repeatedly pointed to his hesitance to deploy the Minnesota National Guard against protestors in 2020 as a failure which they claim exacerbated criminal activity and violence stemming from the protests.
However, it is important to note that in the wake of the Floyd murder Walz passed a bill that banned the use of chokeholds and “warrior-style” training by Minnesota police which activists link to greater incidents of excessive force like that which killed Floyd and sparked the protests in the first place.
Continuing to reference the Floyd protests, Tuberville also claimed that Vice President Harris helped “bail those same rioters out of jail.”
It is true that then-Senator Harris tweeted her support for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, an organization focused on eliminating inequities produced by cash bail. However, only 8 percent of those individuals arrested during the protests even needed to pay bail and nearly 30 percent were never even charged with a crime.
Ironically, other Republicans, such as former governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, have also opposed cash bail. During his time in office, Christie replaced New Jersey’s cash bail system with one based on points related to a judge’s discretion.
Republican Rep. Mike Rogers also called Walz a “radical” pick, specifically calling out Walz for providing “driver’s licenses and healthcare for illegals” and for doing “NOTHING while looters destroyed his state in 2020”.
Walz employed the National Guard to quell crime stemming from protests in 2020 in addition to his subsequent passage of legislation to reduce future incidents of excessive force employed by Minnesota police.
Walz did pass a law expanding access to driver’s licenses in 2023 regardless of immigration status. Walz endorsed the law, emphasizing that “ensuring drivers in our state are licensed and carry insurance makes the roads safer for all Minnesotans.”
It is also the case that Walz passed legislation expanding the state’s low-income healthcare program, MinnesotaCare, to undocumented Minnesotans.
Minnesota’s Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Department of Human Services, Julie Marquardt, argued in favor of the bill, “Right now, we are paying for the most expensive coverage, waiting for people to get far too sick when we could be providing much cheaper, more effective health care coverage to people much earlier on — accessing in the same way that every other Minnesotan does.”
Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Hoover, referred to the Harris-Walz ticket as “the most dangerously extreme ticket in US history.” These claims echo Democrats’ own criticisms of Former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance, R-OH, as being extreme.
In a 2022 debate, Vance expressed his support for a federal ban on abortion, saying, “some minimum national standard is totally fine with me” — a position that is arguably “extreme” given that only 36 percent of Americans say they support making abortion illegal in all or most cases.
DNC spokesperson Aida Ross said in July that “The Trump-Vance ticket is as off-putting as it is dangerous, and the American people won’t stand for any of it this November.”
As November’s election draws nearer, both parties appear to be insistent on painting their opponents as politically extreme. Alabama’s Republicans are following the rest of the GOP as they attempt to color Walz as yet another example of Harris’s extremism.
