Why every campaign needs a Tim Walz

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The US vice-president is, perhaps, the world’s longest-running diversity hire. A position designed to provide constitutional reassurance about continuity of government, it is almost invariably occupied by someone who was picked because they provide emotional reassurance to one important electoral bloc or another.

When Barack Obama became the most powerful member of what is still democracy’s most exclusive club — ethnic minority heads of government to have won a democratic election — he did so having picked as his vice-president Joe Biden, someone who was essentially everything he wasn’t: old, experienced and white. 

At 60, Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate, is not old for an American politician but he manages to look in good health while also seeming reassuringly venerable. If you put out a casting note asking for a dad from middle America, Walz is who would show up. He provides the same reassurance to Harris that Biden did to Obama.

Of course, that is no guarantee of success: in 2016 Donald Trump picked Mike Pence in order to reassure parts of the GOP base that, for all his divergences from traditional Republicanism, he would govern in the interests of conservative evangelicals. It worked, or at least, worked well enough for him to win a majority in the electoral college. John McCain tried something similar with Sarah Palin in 2008 and it was a disaster. 

One myth that political commentators are fond of is the idea that a defeated campaign is necessarily a stupid one. Many defeated campaigns — the UK Labour party’s in 2019, say, or Ensemble in this summer’s snap legislative elections in France — are stupid. But some make all the right choices given the circumstances they are in, and still lose. Most defeated opposition parties during an economic boom, for instance, are not running campaigns that are intellectually deficient, they are just unlucky.

Nonetheless, whether in victory or defeat, good campaigns tend to yield the same lessons. What the Harris campaign is doing is remembering the importance of reassurance if you are a minority candidate seeking the votes of a majority. It’s what Sadiq Khan, London’s elected mayor, has done successfully by talking about his pride in meeting the Queen. It’s what Mark Golding, the white leader of Jamaica’s opposition, is doing by saying he will renounce his British citizenship (which he holds by dint of his British-born father). It’s part of why Rishi Sunak skipping part of the D-Day commemorations was a mistake. And it’s part of why Gordon Brown, a Scot, tried to reassure English voters about a shared Britishness, and part of why his failure to do so was damaging to the Labour party’s prospects in the run-up to the 2010 election.

It’s not the only reason why South Africa’s Democratic Alliance has had to settle for the role of a junior partner in the country’s ruling coalition, but it partly explains why the DA has failed to break out of its core base of white South Africans and coloured voters.

When John Steenhuisen, the party’s current leader, was asked if South Africa was ready to elect a white leader, he responded by asking: “Was America ready for Barack Obama? Was the UK ready for Rishi Sunak? They both come from minority groupings in their country and I think both have performed admirably.” What he should have done is talked about how of course South Africa’s Black voters were ready to do so — and how honoured he would be to fill the role, rather than given an answer that essentially implied that South Africans would be lucky to have him. 

But that’s always been a big part of why the DA has done poorly in reaching out to majority voters. Much of the time, the party’s leaders have talked as if Black South Africans should be grateful for the DA due to its historic links to the constitutional opposition to apartheid, rather than seeking to reassure voters in the present day. 

There is a lesson here that goes beyond the electoral imperative for minority leaders to reassure majorities that they will govern in their interests. Key to convincingly offering reassurance is that you are demonstrating that you actually like the country you are trying to persuade to vote for you — that you share its interests and understand what makes it tick. It’s why Sir Keir Starmer wrapping himself in the British flag was central to him winning new voters in areas of the country where Labour had never won before.

Every successful leader needs a Walz because getting the country to love you is telling it that you love it, too. 

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